Farage and the BBC

 

On Monday 22nd September I watched a party political broadcast on behalf of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. It was on the BBC, and it was entitled ‘News at Ten’. Unfortunately that news bulletin is no longer available on the BBC's website, so all I can do is give you a flavour of what it was like.

It starts 16 minutes into the bulletin, with Chris Mason, Political Editor of BBC News, interviewing the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Ed Davey. The Liberal Democrats are having their party conference, so this is a chance for its leader to make a relatively rare appearance (see below) on the news, and perhaps explain what the Liberal Democrat’s policies are, or what their political aims are. But Chris Mason had other ideas.

“Do you feel a moral duty to keep Nigel Farage out of power” is his second question. His third is “You say that Nigel Farage gets too much attention, but ...” He holds up a little figurine of Farage that he bought at the conference.”... You are obsessed with him, aren’t you? Frightened even.” And so it continues, with pretty well every question from Mason being about Reform. Finally he takes on Davey’s claim that the BBC is giving too much uncritical airtime to Farage, and accuses Davey of behaving like Donald Trump! Mason’s summing up at the end is about Nigel Farage. 

This segment was then followed by the man himself, with Farage announcing a new policy to remove settled status from immigrants who have been in the UK for a number of years. Despite apparently discussing the Farage policy, the BBC failed to say clearly that there was no basis to his claim that this would save public money.

Did I catch this BBC News Bulletin on a bad night. We do have data, thanks to a study from Cardiff University led by Professor Stephen Cushion and Dr Matt Walsh. This found that on both the BBC’s and ITV’s News at Ten, Reform featured far more often than the Liberal Democrats, despite the latter having far more MPs. It is clear that impartiality is being defined by broadcasters as reflecting the position of the two parties in recent polls, rather than in their relative number of MPs. There is nothing wrong about using this as a criteria, as long as it is applied consistently, and the study does not find any clear fault with this coverage. However Stephen Cushion did say

“While there are no rules on reporting party leaders, our study did find Nigel Farage was more prominently covered than the Liberal Democrats’ leader, Ed Davey – and often leading the news agenda. Broadcasters might want to consider the level of airtime granted to party leaders and the degree of scrutiny they receive.”

As the example above illustrates, interviewing Ed Davey and just asking him questions about Nigel Farage hardly corrects an imbalance in favour of Farage!

 

More worrying I believe is that the BBC is actively trying to alter story selection to regain the trust of Reform voters. It is certainly true that right wing voters, including those voting Reform, tend to say they have little trust in the BBC, in part because their politicians and their press are constantly telling them the BBC has a left wing bias. The BBC’s typical response to that criticism is to become defensive, and that response can often amount to appeasement. In contrast, as the Mason interview discussed above shows, when a party from the center or left makes similar criticisms the BBC’s response is much more aggressive. The BBC applies its impartiality rules in a biased way.

There are two simple reasons for the asymmetry. The first is that BBC News coverage is far too influenced by the UK press, and the UK press is heavily biased towards the populist right. The second is that the BBC is run by people who support the Conservative party. Its Director General, Tim Davie, is a former Conservative party county councillor. Robbie Gibb, former director of communications for Theresa May, is on the BBC Board and takes a keen interest in ensuring BBC impartiality. Is this why BBC coverage of the genocide in Gaza seems to be heavily influenced by a fear of being perceived as critical of the Israeli government?

The BBC Board is in part appointed by the government, and the Board appoints the Director General. So if Labour remains in power over a long period, if it wishes it can correct this right wing bias in the BBC’s management. But that looks at the moment like a very big if. Far better, in my view, would be a more immediate attempt to reorganise BBC governance so that the political party in power cannot so easily influence what the BBC broadcasts.

The particular BBC News at Ten that I watched illustrated two other problems that I think are more general. The first is the poor quality of much political journalism. Comparing Ed Davey’s complaints about BBC coverage to what Trump has been doing is just ridiculous. In one case we have a political party in opposition with no influence whatsoever, and in the other we have a fascist dictator with considerable power to influence what the media does. If a political journalist cannot see the difference then that is really worrying.

The second is that both the media and politicians have not really come to terms with how to deal with right wing populists like Farage or Trump. They keep treating them as normal politicians when they work by quite different rules. For example right wing populists lie far more often than other politicians, and if this isn’t called out then this favours those populists. When populists say reducing immigration or stopping immigrants becoming citizens will save the taxpayer money, they are lying in the same way that they lied about Brexit and the NHS. If the BBC fails to treat these claims in the same way as they treat Trump’s claims about health (as in the news bulletin above), then they are doing the populist’s job for them. Part of the problem is that when Trump tells lies about health, the BBC will typically get their health correspondent to comment, who knows their subject and talks to experts. If Farage did the same, this would typically be covered by a political correspondent without that knowledge or focus. 

As with Trump, we know that Farage habitually lies. There was a revealing question in that Davey interview. Mason asked wasn’t there a danger that established parties were making the same mistake with Reform as with Brexit, and millions of voters would again respond that established parties just don’t get it. (It is a question Farage would hav loved, because he wants to paint himself as the insurgent against the establishment.) Davey didn’t give the obvious answer, which is that we now know that Brexit has been a disaster, and the person leading Reform is the same person who lied to us about Brexit.

A great danger that faces both mainstream politicians and the media is to create double standards that favour right wing populists. When a mainstream politician is caught misleading the public, or makes some political gaffe, or there is a hint of financial misconduct, the media or opposing politicians will make a big deal of this. However because right wing populists like Trump or Farage do this all the time, it is considered normal and so goes unremarked. We suffered the disaster of Brexit because the constant lying of Leavers was not sufficiently exposed and called out. It would be tragic if this happened so soon again, because politicians and journalists were not prepared to ask Farage one simple question. You lied to us once before, and we are all suffering as a result, so why should we believe you again?