The BBC after Gary Lineker and the Right-Wing Lie Machine
There has been only one UK story these past few days, to the near exclusion of everything else namely Gary Lineker and the BBC.
The Lineker case is not an isolated controversy. On the very same day that Lineker went on gardening leave, it was reported Sir David Attenborough had a BBC programme on the environmental crisis pulled because it might offend right-wing opinion; it turned out according to the BBC not to be true. At the same time, the BBC issued a torturous statement after BBC Question Time included a discussion on Stanley Johnson (Boris Johnson’s father) and domestic violence, where presenter Fiona Bruce seemingly diminished it as a ‘one-off’. And on the day that Lineker returned to the BBC, Bruce announced she was leaving her role as chair of the women’s support organisation, Refuge.
All of this raises big issues about the BBC which are not going to go away. One is how the BBC manages the big talent names it employs. Many – Gary Lineker, Alan Sugar, Chris Packham and others – quoted in dispatches, are employed by the BBC as freelancers. They are not BBC staff, have work and public profiles beyond and independent of the BBC, and hence make public comments on various subjects not BBC-related.
Are BBC senior management and right-wing critics of the BBC really suggesting that the corporation should control public pronouncements of people with a BBC contract when they are not speaking for the BBC? So much for the right’s defence of ‘free speech’ and saying it opposed ‘cancel culture’. One dimension of the right-wing campaign against the BBC is that it wants a future corporation cut down in size, bereft of big names and celebrities, shoehorned into news and current affairs with a much smaller pool of talent.
There is also the issue of BBC guidelines and how they pertain to freelancers. The current guidelines were signed off in October 2020 by current BBC head Tim Davie (who was then one month in to post) say: ‘There are also others who are not journalists or involved in factual programming who nevertheless have an additional responsibility to the BBC because of their profile on the BBC.’ This became known at the time as ‘the Lineker clause’.
A narrow interpretation of this has been BBC former senior staff saying that the Lineker case was caused by ‘confusion’ over ‘the guidelines’ – punted by former BBC Director General Mark Thompson. A view which makes the entire affair about internal BBC processes, management and the handling of talent a traditional BBC view that ignores external factors.
Another factor is BBC ‘impartiality’. Tim Davie at the weekend announced that he had ‘a passion for impartiality’ and when appointed BBC Director General declared this his number one issue. BBC guidelines on impartiality declare that it means ‘reflecting all sides of arguments and not favouring any side.’
The wording of the concept of ‘impartiality’ becomes controversial when it comes into contact with the real world. How does one maintain ‘impartiality’ on a subject such as climate change when there is inarguable evidence that human intervention has caused huge damage to the planet? Sometimes the BBC answer this by going for spurious ‘balance’ when there is none by offering equivalent space to climate change deniers. And that is only the most obvious example of a whole number of cases: the global assault on LGBT equality; the war on women and reproductive rights; the undermining of democracy and democratic legitimacy by the authoritarian right.
The ideological space the BBC inhabits
This brings us to the core of what the BBC is, its purpose and mission. The BBC in public profess that they stand ideologically neutral, impartial and for ‘balance’ but this is spurious and has never been true throughout the BBC’s history.
The BBC occupies a clear ideological space that stands for liberal democracy, rights and values. The issue is that these values used to not be contested in the days of Lord Reith allowing the BBC to tell us what their interpretation of these values were. Slowly in the post-war era, these became more debated and contested, and even in places democratised in the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently since the 1980s these notions have become increasingly disputed and argued over and even in recent times – the very notion of liberal democracy itself – attacked.
The BBC has found itself at the centre of such controversies. BBC senior management find themselves genetically programmed to be unable to say explicitly these are the liberal democratic values we stand for and unequivocally stand against the critiques of right-wing authoritarianism and their take of the world (which always comes in the UK with an assault on the notion of the BBC).
Pivotal to this is the relationship between the BBC and the right-wing media in the UK and the increasingly hysterical, hyper-partisan and ideological driven commentary of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph, along with GB News. This has in effect become an orchestrated right-wing lie machine – a bitter, miserablist view of the world with enemies and threats everywhere which include ‘billions’ of asylum seekers and refugees coming to the UK (Suella Braverman), ‘woke’ lawyers, the BBC, liberal civil service (‘the blob’ in right-wing discourse) and the thought police of universities.
The right-wing lie machine is out to get the BBC. It finds its liberal values offensive and because of this takes exception to the funding model of the BBC regarding its licence fee as a form of compulsory taxation. This assault on the BBC creates huge problems for the BBC’s senior management and has done for years. Their innate instinct is to seek to bend, twist and appease this ongoing war– continually retreating, apologising and in so doing undermining the case for the corporation to the dismay of many BBC journalists and staff.
This dynamic happens all the time on small and large issues: Andrew Marr at the BBC being reprimanded for commenting on the ‘smirk’ on Priti Patel’s face; or Emily Maitlis at Newsnight given a dressing down for her comments on the evasions of Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle. All of which comes at a cumulative cost to the BBC, how it does news and current affairs particularly in the UK, and how it expresses its independence from government.
The way BBC senior management and most of their own coverage addresses the right-wing onslaught is to deal with it in as non-ideological way as possible. A recent example was provided by the BBC Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday which had a total of four people talking about Gary Lineker, former BBCers Mark Thomson and Peter Salmon, alongside a Labour and Tory MP. Not one of these four mentioned even briefly the assault on the BBC by the Mail, Express and Telegraph, and that they have been going after Lineker for years, and were in an incendiary mode after his tweet the previous week.
The BBC has over years been browbeaten by the right-wing media onslaught. It has produced a craven BBC senior management who have time and again backed down and reprimanded BBC staff or apologised for content. They have in public dealt with these controversies in a managerial, unideological manner, not wanted to comprehend that they are whether they like it or not in an ideological war. Former BBC manager Roger Mosey grasped this after the decision to put Lineker on gardening leave: ‘By removing Lineker from MOTD, it looks as if the BBC has given in to one side of the culture war.’
What future for the BBC and Public Service Broadcasting?
Where does this end post-Lineker? As things stand it is unlikely to end well. We are unlikely to see any change from a BBC senior management which continually appeases its right-wing critics. Even a change of UK government is unlikely to alter this long-term dynamic.
This will contribute to further undermining the reputation of the BBC which is exactly what the right-wing lie machine want, aided by the cowardice and confusion of BBC senior management. They do not grasp that the BBC sits in that ideological space – one which is under attack globally from the same siren right-wing forces who are out to destroy the BBC.
There are serious questions about whether the BBC can survive in its present form in an age of disruption. How can the BBC be truly independent of government given the top two posts in it – Tim Davie and Richard Sharp – are Tory sympathisers and Sharp was appointed by Tory PM Boris Johnson after assisting him in a £800,000 loan? This question of ‘independence’ goes beyond Davie and Sharp to the core issue of how the BBC is constituted and funded and how the latter is controlled by government.
A second major strand is how public service broadcasting as a principle is expressed which is something bigger than the BBC. In an age of multi-media platforms and consumption a debate is needed which goes beyond defending the status quo or calling for the privatisation of the BBC.
The BBC is an important part of the UK media landscape. That is why it matters so much to its critics as well as defenders. But in a fast-changing media world there has to be a debate which goes beyond the simplicities of rushing to defend the BBC as it is, demolish the BBC as the uber-right-wing want, or diminish it and put it in its place as more cautious right-wingers want (perhaps as a precursor to demolishing).
Rather than those three Ds a fourth should be explored: democratising – getting the BBC to reflect more fully the diversity of life and society in the UK including the nations and regions of the UK. Exploring that option could allow the BBC and with it a public Scottish Broadcasting Corporation to adapt and survive in a more varied, diverse media world; without such dramatic change it faces a much more perilous future where it is more likely it will wither and decline.
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It seems to me that another factor is the knowledge base of the presenters and producers involved.
BBC presenters who are immersed (immiserated?) in Westminster politics have no excuse for lack
of balance in discussing issues pertaining to Westminster. However time and again they are caught out
when discussing issues outwith that bubble.
Scottish politics is a prime example. Interviews are often predicated on facile
assumptions and inane questions and the result is a discussion made biased by the presenter’s own background. Not deliberately
necessarily, just inevitably. One recent example of this was a Today programme interview about the GRA where every assumption made by the presenter (Carney?) was vigorously refuted and corrected by the interviewee who was a spokesperson a women’s group consulted during the process. The presenter seemed at a loss when the interviewee didn’t condemn the GRA out of hand.
Some of us have, for some long time, advocated a public service broadcaster that meets the needs and interests of the people of Scotland, recognising whatever distinct culture exists, and with a clear remit on fair and unbiased output, being publicly funded and publicly accountable.
We wonder why this doesn’t appear to be on the agenda for the current Scottish Government or being considered by the Scottish Parliament.
Is independence required before it can be planned and put in place?
@Sandy Watson I imagine it would be simple enough to replace a British Royal Charter with a Scottish Public Charter after Independence mandating a duty on a publicly-funded broadcaster to investigate, interrogate, criticise and hold to account public officials and representatives, the governments of the day, past and incoming, and so forth. It is basic checks-and-balances stuff. Staff who failed to do so, or were found to be in cahoots with government or other interests would be subject to the kinds of sanctions that Crown employees are now, from disciplinary/retraining through petty treason (against the people). Of course, in a biocracy, the duty of a public broadcaster would extend much further, to the non-human living planet.
Gerry – just to second your point, I and my colleagues were filmed for the nature programme, and the Guardian report to my knowledge is not true. The film makers made clear at the time that we were being filmed for a separate programme, linked to but not part of the Wild Isles series. It was commissioned by wildlife charities not by the BBC, and would probably be available only on streaming services.
“The BBC occupies a clear ideological space that stands for liberal democracy, rights and values” – how true is this assertion in the present era and to what extent has it been true during the 100 years of the BBC? In addition, the author raises the issue of , “…the relationship between the BBC and the right-wing media in the UK…”
In the present era, it appears to many of us that the BBC is part of the right-wing media in the UK. We must not make a false distinction between the BBC as an organisation and the people within it; it is the people within the BBC who determine what the ideology of the BBC is or will be: particularly, those who are in positions of power and leadership within the organisation. In the absence of a transparent, legal, constitutional framework which sets out checks and balances and procedures, then those in positions of power determine the ideology and impose it on the others within the organisation. If there is dissent about the ideology or aspects of it and, instead of discourse there is coercion – sidelining, transfer within the organisation, dismissal, psychological pressure to comply – then the actions of the organisation will implement the wishes of those in positions of power. Those in positions of power are also in charge of recruitment and as vacancies are created – either by dismissal, resignations, redundancy, retirement – they are filled by people whose views and attitudes are in tune with the ideology of the senior management and so the actions of the organisation as performed by the people within it advance the ideology of the leadership.
In political parties, this is sometimes achieved by ‘entryism’, but, given the power of the UK Government due to its ‘crown-in-parliament= absolute sovereignty, it appoints the senior management and, if it has an absolute majority – as the present government does – and if it has a right wing ideology – as the current one does – then, it appoints on an ideologically partisan basis. And, by such a method, the BBC is part of the right-wing media and a propaganda arm of the UK Government.
It always was a propaganda arm of the UK state and government. The myth of John Reith’s stubborn principledness in achieving a degree of independence from government and state for the BBC is the ‘ideological space’ to which Mr Hassan refers. Like all myths, especially foundational ones, this one has a measure of truth as can be seen in the history of the BBC in its archives and in programmes presented as part of the centenary celebrations. But, as was seen within three years of its establishment, it was quickly brought into line, when it adopted a hostile attitude towards the General Strike. Reith’s opposition to Churchill at the time might, indeed, have some truth in it, but it was to some extent a battle of the vanities of small differences, which created a perception that the BBC occupied the ideological space Mr Hassan describes.
The attitude of BBC Scotland, in particular, in the period since the Scottish Parliament was re-established in 1997 up to the present has been increasingly hostile, not only to independence for Scotland but also to devolution. A number of people such as the estimable Professor John Robertson, have documented its bias. Seen from a Scottish perspective, the ideology as described, is risible.
As always, Mr Hassan reports analytically and clearly and has set out his ‘four Ds’ of options. As he suggests, the fourth, ‘democratisation’ is probably the way forward for those of us who think there ought to be a public service broadcaster. However, given that democratisation of the UK is unlikely to happen under a Starmer Government, other than in cosmetic ways’ and given the views of people in power within the BBC and of a large section of its employees, then the BBC does not have the capacity or will to change itself in other than a bit of ‘rebranding’.
As someone who has had to bring about organisational change (albeit of a much smaller scale) I know we have to be careful that we do not destroy the good. And, ending the BBC would lead to a number of good things being lost. Nevertheless, I think that it would be better to end it and, as part of the preparation for ‘a better nation’ to undertake serious work on the creation of a democratic Scottish Broadcasting Organisation.
What exactly do you mean by ‘democratic broadcasting’. Do we get to vote on which programmes are broadcast and just as importantly which are not?
Some flesh on the bones of your concept would be appreciated.
@John Learmonth, why is it “just as important” for viewers to choose what is *not* broadcast? Just what does the BBC have on you? Do you have any lesson plans for the citizen-censorship courses you maybe plan to run? I’ve heard of “everyone’s a critic” but “everyone’s a censor”?! I just doubt that the public at large shares your intense hatred of freedom of expression.
Yeah but it isn’t a bad question – what is a ‘democratic’ broadcasting corporation? I don’t know what that means – it sounds good but where exactly does the ‘democracy’ lie? Alasdair’s comment is all very well but it comes from a deeply ideological and political viewpoint so not remotely objective or impartial, and far less so than the BBC, so how does that help?
@Niemand, indeed, I’ve suggested before that the BBC should pilot some democratic input into their commissioning process, with regularly-issued blocks of digital votes (monthly issued?) for each licence-fee payer to distribute as they wish, after some method of proposing programmes that integrates similar suggestions and removes duplicates with existing and planned programming. Perhaps weighted for ring-fenced funding (costume dramas are presumably more expensive than bakery shows). The thought that viewers and listeners might want to use their blocks of votes to suppress programmes had not occurred to me. But hey, vox populi, vox Dei, as Elon Musk says. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_populi#Vox_populi,_vox_Dei
Or there’s the Steve Jobs view that people don’t know what they want unless they are shown it first. Fan fiction is notoriously poorer quality (as a rule of thumb) than its inspiration. Some happy medium between these extremes.
One problem is that the public will not generally know what programming it *needs* if there is stuff they don’t know about. I have been reading Simon Akam’s book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 (2021), where one of the themes is how the British Army has reacted to new media. Scottish units are front and centre, though I didn’t know that until I started reading. Institutions like the Ministry of Defence and the active branches of the armed forces are deeply invested in secrecy, deception, public relations and mythology. We are unlikely to get the real deal from the (royalist) BBC. Yet our armed forces are our de facto ambassadors abroad, and shape how the rest of the world sees us, so we really need to know what they’re up to. However, a lot of them (I believe) won’t be individual licence fee payers, and would be disenfranchised by such a suggested voting system.
SD
I have no problem with freedom of expression, in fact I’m fully in favour of it.
However I do have concerns when freedom of expression has to be ‘democratically decided’ upon.
It might be more constructive to consider the principles and criteria rather than deliberately trivialising things by framing the process with a vote on programmes.
When broadcasting technology was cumbersome, prohibitively expensive and took a long time to learn how to use effectively, it made sense for a state-mandated licence fee to train cohorts of people in its use, and support non-commercial research and development that should have wide benefit. Now digital technology has lowered the bar to entry so that someone with a mobile phone can make programmes, is there still a skills justification for the BBC? Maybe there is.
The great problem is integration: with all our sources of information, propaganda, trickery, attribution problems, competing interests across the globe, ranges of bias, unequal power relations, accelerating technological change, ancient superstition, magical thinking, floundering lawmakers, political corruption, paid cacophonists and so forth, the need is for professionals who can help the public pull all this into a coherent worldview in a transparent and accessible way. The trouble is, you wouldn’t want to start with a royalist mouthpiece packed with establishment elite, out of touch with the media it is supposed to be proficient in and the public it supposedly served, apparently incapable of detecting its own biases and as easily captured by corporate lobbies, the military-securocrat complex and Stonewall as it is by the Conservative Party.
There was just a very interesting debate on this on R4. The weird thing about the BBC is that it is actually pretty good at reporting on itself in a quite a critical way. They have not shied away from the Lineker thing at all.
I am a BBC supporter for the simple reason that despite the obvious problems they still put out some fantastic product and I would miss so many things very badly if it folded. But Gerry is right, the status quo cannot hold. I don’t know the answer but having the Tories in power makes any progress very difficult since what most people clearly want is for the BBC not to be cuckolded by them but they hold the purse strings so it is blackmail basically. But they could be bolder and stand up to them more since arguably they may not have much to lose and with the strong possibility of a Labour government in the offing, who are far more supportive, it makes it somewhat less risky.
@Niemand, I just don’t think the evidence supports your view of the BBC being open and transparent. I found The BBC: Myth of a Public Service
by Tom Mills to be a quite useful summary. The BBC complaints department is notoriously resistant to the thought that the Corporation can do wrong or make mistakes. Academic research has found systematic bias again and again in BBC coverage, which the BBC is in near-perpetual denial of. I am not aware that the BBC responded to allegations raised in programmes like Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files; Peter Oborne wrote:
“Shocking allegations in the documentary series have been largely ignored by the mainstream UK media”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-labour-files-al-jazeera-revelations-blown-hole-media-corbyn-narrative
The standard BBC view of politics is that it concentrates on the Westminster circus and court politics, UK newspapers, USAmerican Presidential politics, and everything else is comparatively fringe. Its worldview is still essentially imperial but it studiously avoids mentioning the remaining Empire (or explores its role as a subordinate of the USAmerican Empire) unless necessary. It is *increasingly* packed with the elite (see the Sutton Trust reports) skewed to certain demographics, and it still cannot find it within itself to treat women equally.
I find the assertion that the BBC is effectively self-critical to be… an alternative fact. If only.
The reporting by the BBC on the Lineker affair did seem pretty fair to me, that is all I can say.
But I agree about your point about their institutional resistance to criticism. The Feedback programme on R4 showed that again and again and it can be infuriating. But then that programme was on the BBC.
And yes the news agenda does have significant imperial overtones in what it simply decides to look at. It is very good point.
I don’t have answers. My viewpoint is based on the fact that the news coverage on the BBC is not the main thing that I consume or am interested in. But also I am struggling to think of another another outlet that is genuinely more impartial in a profound and broad sense. It begs the question what would a truly impartial broadcaster really look like? Do we even want that?
Is Scotland a nation or a region of the UK?
Gerry Hassan paints a simplistic picture of the virtuous BBC being assailed by the ‘right wing lie machine’ and its management being too craven to defend it. At the heart of this dispute there is a well known sports journalist comparing the UK to Nazi Germany and the Tory Party to the Nazi Party. This has been a common trope of the ultra left for years. If the mainstream left goes down that road, it will not end well for them.
As events in Scotland in recent weeks have shown, there is a chasm – both in Scotland and the rest of the UK – between different groups with different values.
At Holyrood, those who assumed they were on side of virtue, representing all but one of the political parties, discovered that they were seriously at odds with public opinion and beat a hasty, humiliated retreat.
Those who make similar assumptions across the rest of the UK are likely to face an identical outcome.