In the last week I have posted 2 blogs on successive days :
#BBC Broadcaster failing in its duty of impartiality by allowing 'politically motivated campaigners' to present shows, say leading academics.
The BBC’s only response to charges of systemic bias? Suck it up
Two damning reports have found evidence of what Roger Scruton called 'oikophobia' at the BBC. Yet the Corporation continues to play dumb
The academics at History Reclaimed have performed an important public service by calling out the BBC for blatant bias in some of its recent history programmes. Whereas complaints by members of the general public or journalists can be loftily dismissed by the BBC as merely illustrating the complainants’ own ignorance and bias, the same tactic doesn’t work when applied to a group of professional historians distinguished by their seniority and glittering credentials. The History Reclaimed analysis looked at six programmes in all of which they found glaring examples of unbalanced historical judgements amounting to “the abuse of history”.
For instance in a news report about the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes – the magnificent 16th century artefacts from the African kingdom that is now Nigeria – there were glaring errors. The bronzes were said to be “looted” – whereas, as the report states, the objects were “seized in what was then a legal process in retaliation for an act of war”. And the report didn’t mention the fact that Benin itself was a slaver state and the bronzes were made by slaves for the rulers.
There were other misleading details and omissions. History Reclaimed says of this report: “The news report on the Benin bronzes sums up all that is wrong with the BBC’s recent treatment of British history: tendentious language, distorted interpretation, and deliberate omission of facts that do not suit the chosen slant. Listeners are not given objective facts to enable them to form a view. On the contrary, they are made the objects of one-sided propaganda.”
Other programmes examined unfairly blamed Winston Churchill for the Bengal Famine of 1943 and, similarly, blamed the Sir Robert Peel’s government for the great Irish famine of the 1840s – once again ignoring any balancing opinions. Overall History Reclaimed have compiled a serious charge sheet against the BBC’s history department detailing a litany of inaccuracies, omissions and tendentious opinions. You might expect then that the BBC would be obliged to respond in a reasoned way.
But did it? True to form a BBC spokesman issued the following arrogant bromide: “Cherry-picking a handful of examples or highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output on TV and radio does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content.” In other words, you lot might well be emeritus professors, experts in your fields, the authors of scores of books. But we at the BBC know better: overall our history output is fair and balanced. So there. Suck it up.
What that BBC PR man was doing was using a favourite Corporation formula when confronted with unwelcome criticism which is to cite the sheer quantity of its output the implicit challenge being that unless you can show bias in all the relevant output your complaint does not stand-up. This is a canny tactic because no small, voluntary group – like History Reclaimed – will ever have the time, money and manpower to review every bit of history programming.
The PR man’s brush-off doesn’t even attempt to answer the serious allegation which is being made which is that the six programmes chosen show a worrying tendency to exaggerate all the negative aspects of our history. By doing so the BBC, the ‘national broadcaster’ is spearheading a project of national defamation.
As History Reclaimed puts it: “Taken in isolation, each example might seem minor, but they all tend in one direction: the fostering of a negative view of British history, and especially of its relations with the non-European world from which British citizens of ethnic minority backgrounds and their ancestors originally came. We have found no examples in which recent BBC programmes might be accused of giving excessively favourable accounts of our history: of Britain’s struggle against slavery, its promotion of economic development, its provision of law and security in trouble-torn regions, or its fostering of democratic institutions for independent colonies.”
The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton coined a useful word which exactly describes the BBC: “oikophobia” – which he defined as “dislike of one’s own culture and compatriots”. Being the scholar he was, Scruton created this word from the ancient Greek word for home “oikos”; my long critical scrutiny of BBC output, as both an insider and outsider, convinces me that it is truly the mot juste. The BBC is living proof of George Orwell’s observation that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
The BBC is largely staffed by people who consider themselves intellectuals and they often act as if they hate the country they serve. They rarely celebrate the many episodes in British history where the country displayed bravery, fortitude and moral courage. The fact that this country, at the height of its power embarked on the onerous and hugely costly venture of suppressing the slave trade should be a source of great pride – but the BBC prefers to portray us as slavers.
It is very striking that one of the academics who put their name to this critique of the BBC is herself an immigrant. Marie Kawthar Daouda was raised Muslim in Morocco, moved to Paris to study French literature, converted to Catholicism and fetched-up teaching French at Oriel College in Oxford. In a long interview I recently did with her what most impressed me was her clear-sighted appreciation of Britain’s virtues, the glories of her history and the tolerant and inclusive nation she has become. Truly it sometimes takes an intelligent outsider to tell us that we’re not as bad as the BBC tells us we are.
But can the BBC ever be brought round to a position where it too can bring itself to celebrate the good things and tear itself away from its favoured narrative of Britain as an incurably racist country which, through the evil agency of her empire, inflicted a uniquely wicked rule across half the world? The trouble is that, as with so many things in life, the easy part is the diagnosis; the real difficulty lies in finding a remedy.
The academics at History Reclaimed think a few simple changes would help ensure the BBC’s history output is fair and accurate establish. They stress the need for diversity of opinion in history programmes and crucially they propose an advisory panel of properly qualified historians to oversee output and help correct group-think among programme makers. It’s a good idea which would bring some objective scrutiny and input into history programming. If acted upon, it would give some reassurance that the BBC was finally getting serious about the need for “reform”.
The Director General, Tim Davie, came into the role promising that restoring the BBC’s reputation for impartiality was his number one priority. So far there has been precious little hard evidence that anything much has changed; if Mr Davie was to take seriously the complaints of the historians it would provide some evidence of his sincerity and bona fides, otherwise his protestations remain just so much hot air.
But, if I was a betting man, I would not put money on the BBC acknowledging the oikophobia of its history department. The BBC is fiercely resistant to outside criticism and relies on its complaints procedure as a defensive shield to ward off its critics; the Corporation claims that its complaints department constitutes an effective remedy for anyone who is able to show that a BBC programme erred in either factual matters or biased presentation.
Nothing could be further from the truth; it is primarily a mechanism to limit reputational damage. It dismisses the vast majority of complaints, can be painfully slow (I have had a complaint before it for nearly three years with no resolution so far in sight) and almost never finds bias in BBC output.
In a careful piece of research carried out by the News-watch organisation, which monitors BBC output for bias, they analysed and tabulated the outcome of rulings made by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit since 2017. It showed that only around 125 complaints have been upheld or partly upheld by the ECU – and the majority of these rulings were on grounds of inaccuracy not impartiality. Given the chorus of complaints about BBC bias in recent years this suggests the ECU is remarkably lenient when examining alleged BBC bias – but then isn’t that the glory of marking your own homework? A vital step towards making the BBC more responsive to complaints would be to introduce some robust outside scrutiny into the process. The in-house mechanism is hopelessly compromised.
There is a further problem with the BBC’s complaints procedure, in that anyone alleging a systemic problem – as the historians at History Reclaimed do – would not be able to bring a complaint forward. The ECU will only consider specific complaints about specific programmes, so a generalised complaint alleging a pattern of bias – as in its history output – would not be eligible for consideration.
The bigger picture is that the bias that History Reclaimed highlights is a problem right across the BBC’s output. Today’s report from the Campaign for Common Sense, which has examined BBC drama output over the past year, finds a mirror image problem; storylines are infused with distorted and warped ‘woke’ values and Left-wing bias is thereby smuggled into popular drama series. By these subtle devices viewers are led to accept political narratives which arise exclusively on the Left with no counter-balancing viewpoints.
As professional historians, the members of History Reclaimed have naturally put the BBC’s history output in the spotlight. It occurs to me that “reclaiming history” is exactly what the pocket-intellectuals at the BBC have been doing over the past half century. They have “reclaimed“ the historical narrative that an older generation absorbed; this had it that, despite some blemishes, our country’s history was one we can be proud of. People understood that their country had been a force for good in the world for many centuries and continues to be so. The BBC, in league with Left-wing revisionist academics in the universities have replaced that narrative with one of their own designed to show Britain in the worst possible light; a rapacious, racist, imperialist country.
No one wants the BBC to give us a sanitised, hagiographic version of British history; what we demand is a fair version – warts and all – which is not what we’re currently being offered. Time to do battle.
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