Framing the cuts: An analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda

Government framing: The Comprehensive Spending Review and the Spending Challenge

In 2010, the government’s Spending Challenge website was promoted as a forum to engage citizens in the democratic processes of policy formation. It was billed as a consultation, in which citizens, and particularly public sector workers, were encouraged to ‘share ideas to cut the deficit and eliminate waste’ (HM Treasury, 2010). David Cameron referred to it in these terms: ‘There’s enormous civic spirit in this country where people want to take control and do things in a different way’ (cited in Mulholland, 2010). Mark Zuckerburg, the Facebook founder, whose social networking site provided an additional forum for this initiative, agreed: ‘It’s really innovative to open up policy making and engage the public in this way to try and create more social change’ (in Mulholland, 2010).

The first ‘consultation’ with public sector workers had apparently resulted in 63,000 suggestions, of which 35,000 were described as ‘compliant’ (HM Treasury, 2010, our emphasis). A second ‘consultation’ with the wider public resulted in 48,000 suggestions – those that were ‘compliant’ were published and subjected to ranking by other users. This ‘consultative’ process was claimed to have contributed to the decision to ‘reform’ the Educational Maintenance Allowance (Mulholland, 2010), among other cuts. The CSR, then, was framed as a democratic exercise in which ‘reasonable’ (‘compliant’) members of the public sector workforce participated consensually, readily, and with tangible democratic effect.

However, civic participation in policy making was here possible only in exceptionally narrow terms; the possibility of influencing government decision-making was only realisable when it was ‘compliant’ – i.e. when it fitted with the pre-established narrative of the need for severe cuts, as in Habermas’s ‘pre-arranged rules of the game’. The public was invited to send in ideas to ‘help us get more for less’ (HM Treasury, 2010); other possibilities – such as gathering ideas to help the government get more tax from the rich – simply could not gain traction within this discursive framework, no matter how persuasive the proposal.

The government hailed the consultation period a success, stating that ‘this has been the most collaborative Spending Review ever with an extended period of engagement over the summer between Government, experts, the public sector and the general public’ (HM Treasury, 2010).

However, the Spending Challenge was something of a public relations disaster. The website had been inundated with racist and xenophobic comments, along with calls to reinstate capital punishment. The propagandistic nature of the Spending Challenge was clear. More problematic, we suggest, was the way in which the news media reproduced, reinforced and amplified this discourse of citizen ‘choice’ – that is, its framing was substantially similar to the government’s in important and problematic ways.

The BBC’s framing

Here we closely analyse the framing in three online feature articles that formed part of the BBC’s special ‘season’ on the CSR. They are considered in chronological order of their publication. The features were chosen for the ways in which they seek to engage and represent citizens: the first is an ‘interactive’ feature that invited its audience to make ‘decisions’ about the economy; the second provided contextual information about the CSR and sought to act as a ‘guide’ for the citizen, providing simple and ‘impartial’ information in order to make the jargon and economic complexity of the CSR comprehensible to ordinary people; and the third sought to represent a range of different citizen voices responding to the CSR, and so to capture public opinion.

Findings: Frames used in the coverage

To address the four functions of frames proposed by Entman, we suggest that the BBC’s CSR coverage:

We suggest, therefore, that news media are part of a communicative structure that steers people not only in terms of ‘what to think about’ and ‘what to think’, but also how to think (cf. Habermas, 1987; Marcuse, 1964). As such, the news media’s framing of ‘problems’ as being technical (rather than political) in nature seeks to mobilise a technically oriented response in the citizen-audience. The dominance of technocratic approaches to ‘problems’ radically limits the extent to which problems can be understood and tackled, as well as delimiting the proper role of citizens in decision-making.

Explaining relations: The BBC and the state

There have been numerous examples in the BBC’s history of high-profile challenges by successive governments against “controversial” editorial decisions. A dedicated BBC webpage entitled ‘The BBC and Government’ (BBC, 2011b) lists such incidences, with relevant archive footage provided: ‘From the General Strike in 1926 to the Hutton Inquiry in 2003–4, the history of the BBC is littered with rows over editorial policy and standards that made headline news.’ Links are provided to detailed descriptions of 14 such episodes. The feature seeks to frame the relationship between the BBC and the state as adversarial, thus emphasising the BBC’s journalistic integrity and independence.

Many journalists and writers – mostly in the right-wing press but also some elite BBC journalists – have claimed that the BBC is, or historically has been, structurally biased to the left and staffed overwhelmingly by leftist journalists (e.g. Marr, 2004; Sissons, 2011; Thompson cited in interview with Macintyre, 2010). On the other hand, Mehdi Hasan (2009), political editor at the New Statesman, argues that ‘from top to bottom, in structure and staffing, in history and ideology, [the BBC] is a conservative organisation, committed to upholding Establishment values and protecting them from challenge’. In terms of its reporting of economics, Daniel Dorling in his book Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, argues that ‘the BBC … is an example of an institution that, for all its “balance”, subtly promotes greed as good through the style of its economic coverage’ (2010: 210). Greg Dyke, the former Director-General of the BBC, has suggested that the BBC helps maintain an unequal political system by being part of a ‘Westminster conspiracy. They don’t want anything to change. It’s not in their interests’ (cited in Wheeler, 2009).

Following Billig (1995) and Salter and Weltman (2012), we argue that as an institution, the BBC is ingrained into the cultural fabric of the British state and is structured through the constitutional framework of liberal capitalism, and a class-based liberal nationalism upon which the former rests. During the General Strike of 1926, John Reith, the then Director-General of the BBC, announced: ‘Assuming the BBC is for the people, and that the government is for the people, then the BBC must be for the government in this crisis’ (in Williams, 1998: 100). Again, during the strikes of the 1970s, the BBC showed its understanding of the ‘national interest’:

No obligation of impartiality could absolve the broadcasting services from exercising their editorial judgement … within the context of the values and objectives of the society they are there to serve. The BBC have as trustees for the public to judge not only what is best in news terms, but what is in the national interest. (cited in Garnham, 1978: 19)

The implication in both cases is that the interests of different institutions, groups and classes are subsumed and aligned in the ‘national interest’. The discourse of “putting aside differences” and submitting to “universally” held ‘values and objectives’ in order to resolve a crisis assumes that an outcome is possible that serves the whole of society best. It is this discourse that connects with the government’s pronouncement in 2010 that ‘we are all in this together’ (cited by Conservative Party, 2010b). This obscures the radically divergent interests that different groups necessarily have in a country as materially unequal as the UK.

In turn, the BBC’s online coverage of the CSR reproduced in important ways the assumption of a “consensus” which was, in fact, predicated on the marginalisation of alternatives. These alternatives do have powerful and persuasive academic and activist voices to speak upon their behalf. However, because they exist outside of the “centre-ground” – which is not reflected by parliamentary politics and mainstream media but rather constructed by them – these voices are marked as ‘extremist’ or ‘hardline’ when they are permitted to speak within the official public sphere.

The BBC’s editorial guidelines state that:

There are some issues which may seem to be without controversy, appearing to be backed by a broad or even unanimous consensus of opinion. Nevertheless, they may present a significant risk to the BBC’s impartiality. In such cases, we should continue to report where the consensus lies and give it due weight. However, even if it may be neither necessary nor appropriate to seek out voices of opposition, our reporting should resist the temptation to use language and tone which appear to accept consensus or received wisdom as fact or self-evident. (BBC, 2011a)

We contend that in this instance, the ‘received wisdom’ of free market capitalism as inevitable was reproduced as ‘self-evident’. The ‘voices of opposition’ included in the BBC’s coverage did more to affirm the economic ‘consensus’ than to problematise it.

The editorial guidelines additionally read: ‘Due impartiality is often more than a simple matter of “balance” between opposing viewpoints. Equally, it does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles’ (BBC, 2011c). The ‘fundamental democratic principles’ are here assumed to be self-evident and non-negotiable – they are the “common sense” that is nowhere offered up for scrutiny. It is this assumption that a legitimate or inarguable “consensus” exists, or that certain principles are devoid of ideology, which we seek to problematise.

Specific instances of government pressure on the BBC in its coverage of the CSR were reported in the national press. In September 2010 The Guardian reported that Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC:

… was photographed carrying an internal email from Helen Boaden, the BBC News director, saying that she had had lunch with Andy Coulson, the coalition government’s director of communications, at which he had expressed concern ‘that we give context to our Spending Review Season’. (Deans, 2010)

Additionally, The Telegraph reported that, on finding out that the BBC were planning to use an image of a giant pair of scissors in its CSR coverage, the government pressured the corporation into dispensing with the idea – and the BBC capitulated (Blake, 2010). The decision to scrap the scissors logo, it was reported, was taken on the same day that Boaden had lunched with Coulson.

Clearly the BBC’s coverage of the CSR was not defined straightforwardly according to government diktat. Whilst there were clearly sustained government attempts to manipulate the nature of CSR coverage, the successes of these interventions were only made possible by the wider discursive context in which particular ideas about politics and the economy have become hegemonic. The broader cultural and political normalisation of neoliberalism makes this particular kind of coverage seem commonsensical; but the BBC also participates in this ongoing process of normalisation. In its coverage of the CSR and the crisis more generally, the BBC, we submit, did not fulfil its duty to act impartially between competing policy options, and to furnish citizens with a range of views, ideas, facts and policies that could form the basis of democratic will-formation in a public sphere.

The BBC’s intentions for its coverage

In a BBC editorial blog, Mark Byford (2010) set out the intention of the BBC Spending Review season:

During critical times such as now, for the United Kingdom, the BBC has an important role to play to clarify the issues for our audiences – to help them make sense of different ideas and points of view. The Spending Review is one of those times and our aim is to provide insightful, objective programmes and expert analysis to help people understand the context and the potential options. We’ll look at where and at what level the cuts may be made and why they are happening now, ask what the key issues are, how the Government is dealing with them and what the implications of the cuts are.

The BBC’s College of Journalism website – ‘a learning site for BBC journalists, by BBC journalists’ (BBC, 2011d) – provides some specific guidance for journalists reporting the CSR. Kevin Marsh (2010) posted a blog in November 2010 with an embedded video briefing on ‘Opinion and the Spending Review’. Introducing the video briefing, Marsh wrote that ‘the public’s view is that the deficit should come down’, but that ‘the electorate is split. Reduce the deficit slowly, or go for quick, deep cuts? Which areas should be exempt? And do people think the cuts will be fair?’

The video briefing – intended for BBC journalists – was presented by David Cowling (2010), the BBC’s editor of Political Research. In one clip entitled ‘Reporting Division’, Cowling repeats the idea that the public is unanimous in its desire to reduce the deficit, but that division exists on how best to do this:

There is the Government way, and, if you like, the Opposition way, and the country’s split down the middle. And I think we have the responsibility of reflecting the British public in both those aspects: they want the thing done, they’re not sure about how fast it should be done … a lot of them want services preserved. (emphasis added)

The ‘public’ are here understood to be a perfect mirror of parliamentary politics, finding expression of their political convictions in the ‘choice’ between the coalition government’s and the Labour party’s economic policies. Three problems should be flagged up here. First, the idea that the public is ‘split down the middle’ is not merely a simplification, but a distortion, of politics. It ignores the articulation of an active anti-cuts agenda; it legitimises only two positions and expels others from the official public sphere. ‘Politics’ is reduced to (what is an already reductive version of) ‘parliamentary politics’; the structural constraints of that particular system are naturalised and accepted as actually and unproblematically representative of the electorate. Second, the claim that this ‘split’ in public opinion constitutes a profound disagreement over policy is misleading, in the obvious sense that it marginalises those positions that take a more substantially different position. Cross-bench peer Robert Skidelsky (2011) points out that the:

… [former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the previous Labour government] Darling’s last budget, in March 2010, aimed to halve the structural deficit by 2013–2014 in a series of yearly steps. In practice, George Osborne’s commitment in his first budget to eliminate it entirely by 2014–2015 was not much different, except for the relish with which it was undertaken.

As such, the ‘official’ debate was constructed around two positions, both of which were predicated upon a shared neoliberal assumption: the point of difference became whether cuts to public services chimed gleefully with your existing political position or whether you saw them as painful but inevitable. Third, the maxim of ‘what the people think’ requires critical attention – on what basis did the people think this? If the media had collectively failed to provide a debate in which alternatives were properly included and addressed, then ‘what the public think’ is necessarily compromised, ill-informed and politically dubious. That being so, ‘public opinion’ should not be something to be treated reverentially as a democratic ‘voice of the people’, but rather as a manipulable construct requiring critical analysis.

Whilst the CSR coverage had its own dedicated section on the BBC website, many features were also published on the ‘Business’ section of the website, within which ‘Economy’ was a subsection. By offering news on the economy through the prism of ‘business’, the political dimensions of the economic sphere are displaced. Citizens’ power is thus not only reduced; within the discourse of business, citizen engagement is not even appropriate. As Croteau and Hoynes (2000: 169) argue: ‘By equating economic health with the fortunes of investors, news tips its ideological hand. Such definitions fail to recognise that different groups of people can have different economic interests.’ That is to say, the economic interests of most citizens as workers or recipients of welfare are precisely at odds with the interests of investors, whose interests equate to ‘Business’.

Framing citizens: How the ‘public’ was engaged

The extent to which audiences are engaged in, by and through news discourse has been of interest to many scholars within the study of journalism, public communication and media. Specific attention has been paid to whether news discourse positions people as ‘citizens’ or ‘consumers’, and the implications for democratic participation that these positionings necessarily entail. For example, Lewis (2006: 160) has argued that whilst ‘citizens’ are frequently referred to in news discourse, generally ‘they do not propose, initiate, debate or engage’ and as such the possibility of them exercising any actual power is severely constrained. We argue that these BBC features, whilst superficially ‘engaging’ with citizens, provided a model for political participation that was structured according to the logic of consumerism. The emphasis on ‘choice’ and ‘interactivity’ was fetishised at the same time as the possibility of more radical alternatives was hidden from view.

The particular configurations of the BBC’s ‘interactive’ services here constrained choices, admitting only those that, much like the categorisation of submissions to the government’s Spending Challenge, were ‘compliant’ or ‘non-compliant’. The public’s role here was necessarily reactive and after-the-fact; they responded to policy rather than helped formulate it. Their response was taken as evidence of democratic vigour, whereas really it was an obfuscation of its lack.

This constraint on thinking reflects Marcuse’s concerns for modern society expressed in One-Dimensional Man. For Marcuse (1964: 1–3):

Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function … Such a society may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions, and reduce the opposition to the discussion and promotion of alternative policies within the status quo.

This one-dimensionality is totalitarian as an ‘economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole.’ Ultimately, the ‘more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation’ (Marcuse, 1964: 6). At the same time, the greater the threat to this system, the more carefully and thoroughly that administration is undertaken.

At a moment when the systemic flaws of neoliberalism are exposed, its representation within the media and political mainstream as unassailable and inevitable seems increasingly assured. A reading of the BBC’s coverage in this respect perhaps suggests a deep anxiety about the potential collapse of neoliberal hegemony. It also hints at the power of counterpublics to influence debate, even if this influence is reflected negatively through their exclusion, and only identifiable through the redoubling of efforts to normalise neoliberalism against the backdrop of its crisis.

Whilst Feature 3 did contain individual instances of resistance to government cuts, this was only with regard to individual budget cuts, rather than to the broader principle of cutting back the welfare state. The effect was therefore to divide and individualise resistance. Moreover, it pitted groups against one another – pleading their case for the “scarce” resource of funding – whilst framing resistance as either self-interested or narrowly conceived.

Crucially, the discursive atomisation of individuals here also prevented the possibility of another process occurring. Deliberation within a properly functioning public sphere can lead to citizens changing their preferences and positions in the light of new evidence and arguments; but it can also lead to the raising of consciousness around shared interests. This possibility was conspicuously absent here.

Rather than an ‘impartial’ capturing of public opinion, this amounts to the construction of a fake public sphere, in which the ‘criteria of rationality are completely lacking in a consensus created by sophisticated opinion-moulding services under the aegis of a sham public interest’ (Habermas, 1989: 214–215).