On Impartiality, Nepotism and State Broadcasting
This is a great piece by Alan Rusbridger (former editor of the Guardian) here in which he explains ‘How the government captured the BBC’ why the BBC’s coverage of Israel is so biased, and how efforts to fix the appointment of Ofcom and to pack the important Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee all emanate from the same handful of people. All of this information is in the public domain.
Rusbriger lays out how two members of the four-strong Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (which oversees questions of impartiality) have little or no grounding in journalism, while another, Robbie Gibb is the owner of the Jewish Chronicle, one of the most implacable critics of the … wait for it BBC.
(Sir) Robbie Gibb’s impartiality might be a small issue – you’d think – given he was the official Downing Street spokesman for Theresa May’s government. But in this murky world of patronage and old boys clubs, such matters are disregarded. Gibb has been the sole owner and director of the Jewish Chronicle since 2020 – the very same magazine that has long campaigned for a “parliamentary inquiry” into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel (and succeeded).
The effort to put in place the ‘right’ people into the top echelon’s of the BBC, and crucially Ofcom, which is supposed to oversee broadcasting impartially was down to a fixer, and friend of Gibb’s (the level of nepotism is off the scale). Rusbridger writes:
“In or around Number 10 – it is unclear where he physically operates—the person charged with shoehorning the “right” candidates into key positions in public life is a mysterious Tory party fixer named Dougie Smith, a close ally of Dominic Cummings, Oliver Dowden and Sir Robbie.
Gibb and Smith’s friendship dated back to their prominent roles in the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, eventually closed down by Norman Tebbit in 1986 after it became a rowdy and factional melting pot of wacky libertarian schemes and japes. Smith had enjoyed an unusual period from the late 1990s as one of the founders of Fever, a sex party business that hosted lavish orgies at plush central London homes for carefully selected under-40 couples and single women. But this did not hinder his seemingly invisible rise to power.”
“A Sunday Times profile described Smith and his wife, Munira Mirza, then the director of the Number 10 Policy Unit and one of Johnson’s closest aides since his days as London mayor, as “the power couple behind the war on woke.”
One thing Rusbridger missed out is that Dougie Smith is married to Munira Mirza. While Dougie had been a senior figure in the far-right Federation of Conservative Students, Mirza was part of the LM network and is widely thought to have arranged Claire Fox’s ascent to the House of Lords.
This is out of date but still useful:
It’s certainly an incestuous pit, and god you can see why they would never want broadcasting to be devolved. But what is behind this obsession with the BBC? How would it possibly be that you would think – as former Daily Mail Editor and Boris Johnson’s dream-pick to head Ofcom Paul Dacre one put it the BBC: “exercises a kind of ‘cultural Marxism’ in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads.”
This is the worldview of the people involved, in this imaginary the BBC is some bastion of woke left-leaning journalistic culture.
What’s actually happening here, according to Rusbridger, is that these powerful media owners and editors – who control the majority right-wing press in Britain – are incensed that they can’t control the broadcast media and the BBC in the same way they do the print media. So they set out to do just that.
And they’ve succeeded. You’re not deluded. This isn’t tinfoil stuff.
As I wrote in 2021 (‘Bangers and Mash: Brexit and the Sausage Wars‘):
Matthew D’Ancona has described them over at Tortoise:
“Munira Mirza began her political journey on the far Left, in the milieu of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Douglas Smith started as a firebrand of the hard libertarian Right in the now defunct Federation of Conservative Students. Yet Brexit and the patronage of Boris Johnson have brought them together to Number Ten and positions of great authority. And their shared interests in culture wars – the battles over identity, heritage and who runs culture-defining institutions – means that they are set to be even more influential in the PM’s plans for political strategy after the pandemic. It’s a case study in the morphing landscape of networked, digitised, populist politics, and the speed with which, in the 2020s, individuals who would previously have been seen as intriguing outliers or fringe figures can end up at the very heart of power.”
Dougie Smith had been a senior figure in the far-right Federation of Conservative Students – a member of its libertarian Right faction and is described as “deeply devoted to the Orangemen of Northern Ireland and the Unionist cause”. He worked previously for David Hart, the property tycoon who had, years before advised Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, helping to recruit and fund a gang of scabs to break the Miners’ Strike. This is all background.
It is background but it’s coming to the foreground.
The broadcast media has dissipated as a controlling force but it still influences older viewers and acts as a mythological source of objectivity, which is the reason its such a prized goal. Surfacing some of these networks and bring them into the light is, I hope, useful?
Yes, useful indeed, though this is not very surprising. The BBC has made itself a laughing stock with its reporting and its so-called ‘fact checking’. Especially over Israel; but the BBC has actually been strongly and blatantly pro-Israel for decades. I can remember trying to take up issues – including the BBC’s refusal to broadcast an appeal for humanitarian help for Gaza – many years ago with Charles Kennedy, my then MP. (Incidentally Charles would never respond to enquiries on Israel, and he later turned out to be a ‘Friend of Israel’ himself, like almost all party leaders have been for decades). In 2014 the BBC’s coverage of the Scottish referendum was so biased it didn’t even attempt to present itself as impartial: it remained a member if the CBI, a major supporter of Unionism, throughout. The outrageous behaviour of the BBC at that time caused me to cancel my TV Licence altogether, and I haven’t watched live TV since.
It was then I lost my faith in the BBC and realised it has always been the UK State Broadcaster, with all that implies. It is there to project ‘soft power’ – the government’s official line – at home and abroad. In the Second World War it was the propaganda department and it’s claimed that during his time there George Orwell learned a great deal that found its way into his writing. The reputation for balance and objectivity has always been a carefully crafted myth. ( It has had a close association with the secret services: see: https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/august/mi5-vetting ). The BBC is still very involved in trying to combat what it calls ‘misinformation’, or ‘disinformation’. These terms really just describe hostile propaganda and dissenting views: there is no attempt at objectivity in the language the BBC uses in its so-called fact checking. . The BBC itself can be seen as a major purveyor of misinformation now its output can be compared directly with other sources.
The BBC is at the very heart of the British establishment and it reflects its values across party lines. But that’s a pretty narrow ( and rightward-moving) ‘Overton window. The general expectation once was that it would reflect the views of the government of the day, while permitting limited (controlled) dissent. In the 1950s and early 1960s when there was a broad political consensus on the ‘mixed economy’ and still a strong ‘British’ imperial / post imperial identity, the BBC’s biases tended to reflect a broad cross section of at least the Home Counties based middle class, but it did produce many good programmes, bread and circuses for the masses. That changed with the rise and rise of neoliberalism, and of growing American dominance of the UK. Now the BBC. like the government itself is run for private profit at public expense, and the idea of anything at all being run by the state itself is portrayed as ‘socialist’. Even the licence fee is collected by Capita, and paid not to the BBC but the Treasury. Those with vast amounts of money expect to get their own way, by any means. And they do.
The BBC now receives a significant amount of commercial funding. It has its own commercial subsidiaries and it carries advertising outside the UK. I put in an FoI request a couple of years ago to ask what mechanism the BBC had to uphold its charter and prevent commercial influence on programming. The BBC admitted they had none. They could not tell me anything about private investment or its sources because, apparently it was commercial in confidence! Like the government itself the BBC appears to be bought and sold for corporate gold.
British government policy has been strongly Zionist since before 1948. These days, as we see, this is even more so, because London dances entirely to an American tune. If America says ‘jump’, London, irrespective of which party is in power, now says, ‘How high?’
John,
There is more sense and accuracy in your 29 lines than I have read in a long time.
Thank you, for articulating the situation so damn well.
Some of the words that strike home most are ….…….”The BBC like the Government itself is run for private profit at public expense”, and later….”Like the Government itself, the BBC appears to be bought and sold for corporate gold”.
Summed up perfectly.
Thanks for that, much appreciated.
I didn’t manage to find ‘cultural Marxism’ in the BBC’s Royal Charter and supplementaries, but then neither was MI5’s vetting of applicants to the BBC to weed out communists.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-43754737
I confess I have struggled to detect any positive coverage of communism in BBC output over the years, but perhaps that’s what the mysterious Red Button reveals?
Unless that recent documentary about fungi was really propaganda about the underground communist network of mycorrhizal associations?
VERY useful. Thanks Mike. One of the few sane unbiased and articulate voices around at a time of such extreme division everywhere it seems.
I have long stopped watching and listening to the BBC News, or indeed most news on tv and radio. Managed news, always.
The only one that gets close to being reasonably impartial is Channel 4 News.
Before reading this I could give 100 reasons why Independence is the only real answer to most issues, and now I have 101.
I know, I know, Independence isn’t a panacea etc, but how I dream of my grandchildren living in a country far more akin to the likes of Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden Norway and so on. Rather than the UK, USA, and the like.
It’s coming yet.
Thanks George.
I hope you’re right.
They are quite a poke of fruit-loops! I have some entertaining stories about the antics of Brian Monteith when he was a leading light in the Federation of Conservative Students at Heriot-Watt University, which I am happy to regale folk with over a cup or two of mulled wine.
Is it printable?
Brian got very twitchy when I reminded him about the nature of the chants he had led at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the student council on the Riccarton campus on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
Clare Daly on Gaza and Israel is very much worth watching and tells it like it is, unlike almost the entire Western media, inlcuding the Beeb obviously…
thanks Douglas
She is brilliant, a truly brilliant speech in the European Parliament and faithfully reflects what most Europeans feel I am sure…