A Mission to Explain

Preparing for my SPERI/NEW Statesman lecture (now sold out I’m afraid), I had a closer look at something that had been in the back of my mind for some time. In the mid 1970s, Peter Jay and John Birt put forward a new philosophy for broadcast journalism. Their first article in the Times started

“There is a bias in television journalism. Not against any particular party or point of view – it is a bias against understanding.”

A lot of the points that I have made in this blog are in their writing: the need to get more economic expertise into reporting, how he said/she said reporting and panel discussion can reduce rather than increase understanding and knowledge.

What became of their initiative? Both had opportunities to put their ideas into practice, and Birt became Director General (DG) of the BBC in 1987 (in rather unfortunate circumstances, with Alasdair Milne being forced to resign because of conflicts with the Thatcher government, echos of which are perhaps still with us today). But Birt’s period as DG seems to have been associated with more centralisation of news and current affairs, and more ‘risk management’, which included pulling programmes that were controversial, and might have increased understanding!

It is tempting to draw the conclusion that the mission to explain fell foul of political interference, but that may be too easy on television journalism itself. It may simply be that the mission to explain worked against dominant journalistic values and culture. The need to generate scoops and headlines, for example, which comes from talking to or interviewing politicians rather than explaining economics. The entertainment value that comes from conflict and debate. The idea that it is more exciting television to have a correspondent embedded with troops in a war rather than calmly explaining the roots of the conflict from somewhere less ‘dramatic’.

But whatever the reasons for the demise of the ‘mission to explain’, it is not exactly the same as what I have discussed in the past. Failing to explain does not account for what I call the politicisation of truth: where something becomes true just because one lot of politicians keep saying it and the ‘other lot’ do not contest it. That comes from insularity, from an excessive focus on the Westminster bubble.

I will talk more about this in my lecture, and subsequently in this blog.       

The benefit cap: more media driving policy

Yesterday I talked about how the media, and the right wing tabloid press in particular, plays a major role in determining not only government policy on immigration and the EU, but also determining the policy of the Labour opposition (on austerity, immigration and the EU). Yesterday also saw the introduction of a reduced benefit cap in the UK, which is another issue where both government and opposition policy has its origins in the tabloid press.

The benefit cap imposes a maximum figure you can receive in benefits (where benefits include child benefit). The previous cap hit around 20,000 households, mainly those with large numbers of children or paying very high London rents. (This and subsequent figures come from here.) The new lower cap will hit nearly 90,000, and its impact will be felt throughout the country. Those already capped will lose a further £3,000 per year (in London) or £6,000 per year (elsewhere). The government expects those households newly affected by the cap to lose an average of £2,000 a year.

The origin of this cap come from countless stories like this in the tabloid newspapers. Such stories, which are hardly ever contextualised in terms of how typical they might be, understandably annoy many people. As a result, the policy of a benefit cap has proved very popular. The government formalised motivation for the original cap with the idea that no one on benefits should receive more than they could by working. But as Declan Gaffney explained in this superb post:

“people are not generally better off on benefits than working: that’s the effect of having a minimum wage to which levels of in-work support (tax credits and housing benefit) are calibrated. As long as someone is working 16 hours a week at the legal minimum hourly wage, they are better off in work. So the principle that the public approves – the one they are in fact approving when they give their support to the cap- is already built into the social security system. But as the public is not generally familiar with the workings of the system (why should they be?), they are not necessarily aware of this.”

However the cap was quantified by comparing all the income of those out of work with just some of the income of those in work.

“So child benefit, child tax credit and housing benefit are included on one side of the comparison (out of work) and excluded on the other (working). You can demonstrate anything if you’re prepared to rig the comparison in this way, and that is precisely what the government has been doing.”

It is difficult to imagine any other motivation beside garnering popularity or appeasing the press for why the government introduced the benefit cap. The original cap raised relatively small amounts, but had a large negative impact on already poor children. The evidence suggests that only a very small percentage of those hit by the cap were encouraged to find work or move. But such was the popularity of the cap, that both the LibDems and Labour accepted it ‘in principle’. Gaffney’s post contains this very revealing quote from the LibDem Lord Kirkwood

“I want to make it clear that I am implacably opposed to a household benefit cap in principle. People's eyes glaze over when I try to explain my main reasons. I tried it in Grand Committee and by the end people looked at me as though I was possessed..... What I should really like to do with Clause 94 is vote against the whole thing. However, my noble friend Lord German and one or two others took me into a dark room, sat me down and said, "That wouldn't be sensible because the great British public know the square root of next to nothing at all about the detail of the technicalities". He has persuaded me that I should mitigate Clause 94, and I am prepared to do that.”

The benefit cap is also an example of where an opposition tactic of ‘accepting in principle’ but tinkering at the edges just becomes failed appeasement. Gaffney ends by saying: “there are costs attached to this strategy, in terms of the quality of political debate and more generally in the endorsement it gives to a big untruth about the social security system and those who are relying on it.” His post was written about the initial cap in 2012, and yesterday’s intensification of the policy suggests he was absolutely right. (Contrast with the bedroom tax, which Labour did oppose.) [1]

In 1966, Ken Loach made the television play Cathy Come Home about homelessness. In a small way it shocked the nation, by making many people aware of something that was otherwise unreported. Today what we have on television is Benefit Street. Ken Loach recently made the film I, Daniel Blake about the victims of the government’s benefit system which has helped create the huge expansion of food banks. But if the film was shown on TV today, I doubt whether it would have the same impact as Cathy Come Home. The idea that most benefit claimants are in some sense fake remains embedded in the public consciousness, and the belief is supported by the same media that initially helped create it. It is another politicised truth: a falsehood that politicians and the political media pretend is true.

 [1] The danger of conceding the principle can also be illustrated by austerity. Once you accept that the deficit is a problem that requires an immediate solution, there are no limits on how much austerity you have, as public credit will always go to those to try and solve the deficit problem quickly.

Helping the broadcast media be informative on politicised issues

The broadcast media in the UK, and particularly the BBC, can do an excellent job at providing information in an accessible way. However, the moment a subject gets politicised, this ability seems to collapse. This is because the moment a subject becomes politicised, the non-partisan media puts ‘balance’ above all else, which in turn allows politics rather than reality to define what is understood as true. I’ve called this the politicisation of truth, and have identified four ways this happens:

1. Ignoring facts: ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ type reporting.
2. Ignoring expert pluralities: for uncertain outcomes, failing to mention that one side is a minority view. The economics of Brexit is an example.
3. Allowing politicians to create untruths. Labour profligacy caused austerity is an example.
4. Repeating politically generated untruths. For example 'the 364 economists were wrong'.

Here is an interesting discussion of the first two of these in the context of Brexit. From the discussion you can see that shifting existing practice will not be easy, so in this post I want to be positive rather than just complain.

Before doing so, however, I want to say why this is so important. If the broadcast media do not correct politicians when they lie, they provide an incentive for them to lie. That will quickly become apparent, so even if one side ‘starts it’, the other side will follow. This creates an incentive to tell even bigger lies and so on. In the short term the lies are believed and this distorts democracy, and in the longer term trust in politicians deteriorates even further.

We saw this with Brexit, and we have seen this with Donald Trump. Trump’s stream of well documented lies are ‘balanced’ against seemingly baseless or minor insinuations about Clinton. It is easy for people like those who read this blog to think everyone knows that Trump is a serial liar, but they do not. In fact:

“Trump has his largest edge of the campaign as the more honest and trustworthy of the two major candidates (50% say he is more honest and trustworthy vs. just 35% choosing Clinton)”

If you are reading this in the UK and thinking this could only happen in the US, who do you think was trusted during the Brexit campaign?

There is no one else who can inform the majority of people what the truth is. There are countless media organisations, think tanks and websites designed to present a partisan view. It takes both time and knowledge for people to find sources that can be trusted, and that is time most people will not spend. As Stephen Cushion and Justin Lewis note, people actively want the broadcast media to separate facts from spin, but this popular demand is being ignored because it is drowned out by politicos shouting about bias. As they also note, this information has to come in prime time viewing: doing it only in specialist programming watched by those who are already well informed completely misses the point.

The obvious way to avoid facts being distorted is to correct them. As Jeremy Shapiro says in his discussion above, this has to be done in real time. It is just no good saying we corrected that on our fact checking website a few days later, not only because of the delay involved but also because hardly anyone looks at that website. So, for example, in a debate between two sides, if one side says X and X is not true, the moderator should say so. If in an interview the interviewee says something untrue, the interviewer should say so, even if they want to get on to another point.

This of course immediately gets you into questions of how does the interviewer know what is true and where do you draw the line. Here I have some sympathy with journalists, who are sometimes expected to have everything at their fingertips. What academics in particular need to do is to ensure that this information is easily available from trusted sources, and protest when that information is ignored.

I think those in the physical sciences understand this. For example a few years ago there was a period in which climate change was only discussed by broadcast media in a politicised format, where typically a climate scientist would debate the issue with someone from denial organisations. But with almost all climate scientists agreeing about the fundamental facts, this ‘balance’ gave a completely distorted view of reality. As a result of concerted pressure from scientific bodies (and with help from MPs), the BBC finally recognised this and issued revised guidelines. (Here and here (pdf) is the BBC Trust review.) Their coverage of climate change may still not be perfect (or more seriously may have simply diminished), but at least the BBC recognised there were cases where evidence is more important than balance.

Academic economists as a collective are not so well organised, and we need to become more so. This is not about improving individual economist’s media skills, or getting certain people regularly invited on discussion programmes. It is about having a trusted source that can present what the balance of views of academic economists are, and what the key facts and arguments are, and make sure this appears in the inbox of all the media’s key journalists. It should make letters to newspapers signed by a long list of academic economists a thing of the past, because economists themselves would find out what the plurality of opinion was and make that widely known. If Brexit does not compel academic economists to organise in this way, nothing will. Only in this way will we stop politicians defining the public's perception of what is true and false in economics. 

More on Brexit and the politicisation of truth

I watched the BBC’s early evening news on Saturday: not something I would normally do but for the football. (Unfortunately I cannot find a recording of it.) The bulletin reported the IMF post-Brexit forecasts, and then (for balance) had Patrick Minford saying why the IMF had got it all wrong. The impression most non-economists viewers would have received is that the long run economic impact of Brexit could go either way.

I think we can talk about at least four types of politicisation of truth:

1. Ignoring facts: ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ type reporting.
2. Ignoring expert pluralities: for uncertain outcomes, failing to mention that one side is a minority view. The economics of Brexit is an example.
3. Allowing politicians to create untruths. Labour profligacy caused austerity is an example.
4. Repeating politically generated untruths. For example 'the 364 economists were wrong'.

The first is created by the overriding need for balance. The second and third may be, but they can also just reflect inadequate reporting, which is responsible for the fourth. They all are examples of political views overriding truth.

A clear Brexit example of ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ style of reporting is the £350 million a week figure. Furthermore it is a clever lie, because it focuses attention on a direct benefit of Brexit, and away from probable costs. (I’ve no idea if this is true, but I once heard that when Joseph McCarthy claimed there were many communists working in government, he would keep changing the number. As a result, the topic of conversation became how many there actually were, rather than whether there were any at all and whether it mattered.) It is not the only example from those campaigning for Brexit.

In practice I think more damage is done by the treatment of uncertain events with probable outcomes. The medium term cost of Brexit is of course uncertain. But a huge majority of economists think it is much more likely to be an economic cost rather than an economic benefit. So Minford was proposing something that only around 5% of UK economists believe. That is widely acknowledged on all sides, so when the BBC or any other media organisation fails to mention that, they distort the truth. Or, to put it another way, it is not balance at all but favours the Leave side. Another example from those campaigning for Brexit is the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. 

This is a generic problem which politicians and others exploit. There is a huge consensus among climate scientists, yet if the ‘balance’ model is applied to global warming - which it will be if the subject gets politicised - we get the media giving the impression of scientific division. That is why in the US over a third of people think that scientists do not generally agree about man made global warming. Perhaps it is also why so many people think Brexit will not be a medium term cost to them.