Abstract
During a cheapo weekend break on the eastern edge of England we recently dined in a hotel with high-minded friends who had just been incensed by the BBC1′s six o'clock news. Why? Because some of the migrant children rescued from the Calais migrant camp had been taken to a town in the West Country, where a hostile local had made his views known to the corporation's reporter. “Did they have to interview him?” our friends asked.
It's a matter of balance, I tried to explain. Immigration is a sensitive social and political issue these days. The Brexit referendum showed that many people want more effective restrictions on numbers. Fleet Street tabloids have been suggesting that not all these “children” are actually children. In desperate situations like this, experience shows they probably have a point. It's right that the BBC should balance its “let's make them welcome” clip with a less friendly one.
Our liberal friends (both health professionals but born abroad, I now remember) weren't much impressed. But next morning I reopened the conversation after catching up with the offending item on BBC1′s News at Ten. The hostile interviewee had been a braying member of the middle class, not a Ukip voter with a Farage tattoo on his forehead, so the Calais package may have been more subtle than our pals allowed.
Much more striking to my mind was a different package later in the bulletin. It highlighted an official report on the fast-rising cost to the NHS of type 2 diabetes, £10bn a year, much of it caused by avoidably bad lifestyle choices: indulgent diet, little exercise, too much weight. For me what leapt out of this item was that both sufferers interviewed by the Beeb looked or sounded like recently arrived immigrants, probably South Asian Muslims.
The older man, who was having his foot amputated and full of remorse, spoke with a foreign accent; the bubbly teenage girl, playing football with a pal (to demonstrate her new commitment to better exercise), sported a hijab. Impeccable age and gender balance there. Well done, team. But someone had clearly given no thought to the message the item might be sending to disaffected Brexit voters who suspect that immigrants, not oldies or cash constraints, are the main cause of the NHS's mounting supply problems.
“I didn't notice their ethnicity,” my high-minded pal loftily replied when I raised the point over toast and marmalade. No surprise there. He had been quick to spot someone who had offended his sensibility over Calais's refugee children, but was happy to dismiss a careless bit of unbalanced editing on type 2 diabetes sufferers because his principles are above that kind of thing. It hadn't occurred to him that other viewers might see things differently, especially those who don't have such good access to the NHS queue when sick as a health professional does.
I guess we call that confirmation bias. In a world awash with information we seek out and stream sources that confirm our own views and values, ignoring or deploring those that shuffle the facts deck a different way That's why I take the precaution of checking rival newspapers versions of tendentious issues — you too? — before I make my mind up. TV? No, I usually only watch TV news for the pictures, but was in a hotel on this occasion. Radio is much better, but I have even heard Radio 4′s World at One give both sides of the story, only to hear the liberal opinion being clipped for the 2pm bulletin.
Modern multi-channel TV technology and iPlayer has made it all worse. Each of us can live in our own streamed world without making much contact with rival versions of reality. On headsets we can even carry it around with us in the street and on the bus. Social media reinforces our private ghetto, our “safe space” as student autocrats call it on their campuses. Some websites, say sport or politics, are full of anger and disaffection; others, say the health tips or jam making variety, are models of niceness and cooperation, even under stress of pain or insufficient pectin. It's the difference between Game of Thrones and the Great British Bake Off.
Bake Off's success confirms my own bias that most of us are pretty decent most of the time. I'm tempted to say that Brexit's success shows the persistence of a deep streak of mistrustfulness in humankind, a resentment of any “otherness” that is deemed to threaten our way of life or interests. But to say that would be to make exactly the kind of mistake I'm complaining about here. Many Brexit voters are nice people, I've been meeting them at Ukip conferences for years, as Nigel Farage has been kind enough to point out in assorted memoirs, though he's not my type. Some of their grievances against the “metropolitan elite” are legitimate, though glib remedies offered by metropolitan elitists like Farage and Boris Johnson sell them short.
Our own cultural and political differences aren't as acute as those so evident in 2016′s dreadful US election campaign (do they say the same about Europe? Probably). Certainly deregulated US laws on broadcasting “fairness”, not to mention campaign finance, exacerbate their problem, as our partisan newspapers do. But at least you can buy the Mail or The Guardian, knowing what angle you're paying for. Fleet Street does not subscribe to US journalism's unself-aware cult of “objectivity” that makes its pomposity such an easy target for the hooligans of Fox News.
It all places UK broadcasters bound by legal fairness obligations, most obviously the BBC, under a lot of pressure to get it broadly right. But, as David Cameron's spin doctor, Craig Oliver, himself a TV journalist, complains in his Brexit memoir, Unleashing Demons (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), the requirement to be balanced and impartial often ends up with serious arguments from the Office for National Statistics or saintly Institute for Fiscal Studies being “balanced” by yet more incoherent nonsense from Iain Duncan Smith. Oliver also notes that the BBC suits worry themselves sick — not sick enough? — over accuracy and balance in their flagship programmes on TV and radio, but ignore both smaller outlets and big ones they don't enjoy themselves. What price Radio 2′s audience reach?
It doesn't help that, for a cheerful mixture of commercial and ideological reasons, the Mail, Express and Murdoch groups routinely slag off the Beeb, occasionally with justification but usually (the Mail had a recent wobble over a transgender documentary) because it's cheap and cynical copy. Imagine if the BBC got clever Steve Hewlett to do a weekly half hour called “It's the Sun Wot Made It Up”.
Oliver's own feebleness in the face of Brexit atrocities illustrates how hard it is to challenge the BBC's sloppiness when the Beeb is under pressure from tax-shy press oligarchs' metropolitan minions for being too metropolitan and liberal. If, as dinner party gossip suggests, the pro-EU Lord Rothermere and his bride bemoan Paul Dacre's illiberal savagery, but daren't make him retire (he's still pretty good at what he does), what hope is there for Oliver ? The Rothermeres own the Mail.
But just because politicians and proprietors are intimidated by the feral beasts, there's no reason for the rest of us not to try and chivvy BBC News to raise its game. I'll give you another regular wince-maker not seen in an Aldeburgh hotel. When trying to explain benefit caps — now being cut from £26,000 to £23,000 per family — TV reporters try not to be judgmental. But plenty of viewers (including soft -hearted me) want to know why that single mum ended up with four kids under 10 in her crowded semi? It was only when that nice Mark Easton referred to one recent interviewee as “a widow” that I felt sufficiently concerned to worry about how she'd make ends meet.
