MORE NEWSNIGHT BIAS: Newsnight continued their series EU Referendum Road on Friday night with a visit by reporter Katie Razzall to the Shetland Isles, the UK’s most northerly outpost.  The full transcript is below.  As with her previous report, it heavily favoured the ‘remain’ side – although not so obviously. The ‘in’ case was articulated by two figures: the managing director of a local green energy company, and a woman, who it was said had been passionately ‘out’ at the 1975 EU referendum – to the extent that she had been involved in noisy protests and arrested – but was now firmly ‘in’. Razzall buttressed their pro-EU remarks with an observation at the end that all 15 of the regulars of a local pub were in favour of staying in.  Ranged against that were two ‘out’ figures – one a former ‘Viking chief’ who now ran a local real ale brewery, and who looked to Norway as a model that the Shetlands might follow because the place was ‘absolutely pristine’; and a farmer who said the local economy needed to adopt a more global outlook. He claimed that ‘little Europe’ was ‘not for us’. On the face of it, therefore, there was a form of balance, two ‘ins’ against two definitely ‘outs’.

The bias stemmed from other factors., One was that Razzall said that in the 1975 EU referendum, the islands had been one of only two electoral areas of the UK that had voted ‘out’. She then set out to show that this had been based on that the economy back then had been primarily linked to fishing – and spoke immediately to the green energy manufacturer who said strongly that he supported ‘in’.  She asserted:

‘But how changeable are Shetlanders’ attitudes to the EU four decades on? New industries have grown up since the fishermen swung the vote, Shetland is pioneering tidal power, and Fred Gibson’s firm, which has received some EU funding, is making the fibreglass blades.

FRED GIBSON Shetland Composites The first one is up and running at the moment. As we speak it is actually producing electricity which is going on to the local grid.

KR:        So you will be voting to stay in?

FG:        Oh, absolutely. I think it is going to be very interesting, what’s going to happen here, this time. I can see exactly why they voted no last time. And that was purely down to the fishing industry.

KR:        That’s still important in Shetland, but it employs far fewer people these days.

FG:        When I was at school, there would be at least three or four other pupils in my class whose fathers were going out probably every day to go fishing. It’s funny because I asked that same question to my children quite recently, and they said that they didn’t actually know anyone, and then one of them said, oh, he thought that somebody’s father was a fisherman in his year group. So that has completely changed.’

Thus Razzall’s editing and selection of comment suggested that although the fishing industry remained ‘important’ it was at a far lesser level to the point that fishermen were rare. Checks on Google, however, soon reveal that, in fact, fishing, remains the islands’ main source of income, accounting for 28% of all economic activity. This is what the Shetland Economy website says:

‘The fishing industry – which includes the catching, farming and processing of fish and shellfish – is Shetland’s biggest sector by some way. It has always been at the absolute heart of Shetland’s economy and community. The seafood industry is worth £300m a year to the local economy.’

She deliberately projected a misleading impression to viewers. The reality is that more fish is landed annually in Lerwick than the whole of Wales, England and Northern Ireland combined; the only fishing port bigger than Lerwick in the entire UK is Peterhead; the value of the catch is £76m annually (plus there is a very substantial salmon farming industry); and very substantial numbers of local people are employed in fish processing and related activities.

In ignoring the fishermen, Razzall glossed over a vital strand of local opinion. The local fishermen’s association, as is revealed by their website, is clearly unhappy with the Common Fisheries Policy.

Further analysis: a brief but important ‘remain’ contribution was overlooked.  After the remarks supporting ‘remain’ by the green energy manufacturer Fred Gibson, Shetlands postmistress Valerie Johnson was asked if islanders would vote in the same way as 1975.  She responded that she could not see that happening, and when challenged by Razall why, she stated:

I think the unknown is if you are not in it, of what would happen.

KR:     It’s the unknown. Project Fear is working.

VJ:       Yeah, yeah.

This tipped the overall balance of contributions to three in favour of ‘remain’ against two for ‘exit’. At a very basic level, therefore – on top of the observations above –  Katie Razzall edited her feature so that it was against the ‘exit’ case.

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ROBINSON  ‘USES SAME EU PROPAGANDA AS OBAMA’: In this News-watch post about his television series Europe: Them or Us?, it was noted that former BBC political editor  Nick Robinson had chosen to call Winston Churchill ‘the father of a united Europe’ , and in so  doing, collaborated with – and amplified – the EU myth that the primary reason for the foundation of the EU was to create peace. His projection was that Churchill’s ideas were forged in the crucible of war to create lasting peace.

The Richard North and Christopher Booker book The Great Deception illustrates decisively that the primary goal of the founders (led primarily by the Frenchman Jean Monnet)   was Utopian and socialist. The driving ideology was to reduce sovereign states to municipalities, with the EU run by an unelected central bureaucracy (now the European Commission) whose only loyalty was to the idea of ‘Europe’ defined by the Commission itself.

In this context the ‘peace’ myth has been one carefully cultivated by the Commission (and its predecessor bodies), since its earliest days. How could anyone argue for the dismantling of a body with such an important core function?

It is that territory and that concept that US President Barack Obama has chosen for his full-frontal attack today in the Daily Telegraph on supporters of Brexit.

His central message is about the EU’s peace-keeping role. He talks of the special relationship between the US and the UK being forged ‘as we spilt blood together on the battlefield’, and then claims that the European Union came from the ‘ashes of war’, and says it was an institution that was set up to provide foundations for ‘democracy, open markets, the rule of law’.  It had since underwritten more than seven decades of relative peace and prosperity in Europe’.

Obama  concludes:

‘Together, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have turned centuries of war in Europe into decades of peace, and worked as one to make this world a safer, better place. What a remarkable legacy that is. And what a remarkable legacy we will leave when, together, we meet the challenges of this young century as well’.

He thus relies – as the central pillar of his attack on the ideas of those who wish to leave the EU – that the EU has been a major factor in the relative peace most of Europe has enjoyed since the fall of Nazi Germany, and more than that, has removed the reasons for war. Nick Robinson’s analysis in Europe Them or Us? was drawn from the same propaganda stream.  The timing of his message so close to Obama’s visit may have been coincidental, but it echoes and reinforces it, and, intentionally or otherwise, is calculated to undermine the Brexit case by scaring voters into believing that without the EU, there is a danger of future European wars on the horrendous scale of the past.

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BUCK-PASSING? Nick Robinson’s second programme in his series Europe: Them or Us? highlighted numerous deep-rooted issues of BBC bias.  In summary, he said he was presenting a history of the UK’s relationship with ‘Europe’ but in reality, he started from within a narrow area of the Westminster bubble and did not progress outside. He assembled a one dimensional progression from Macmillan to Wilson, from Callaghan to Thatcher, and from Major to Blair; nearly everything within his picture was simplistically binary: Heath taking the UK in against old-fashioned resistance from Labour  party diehards; Wilson combining with Thatcher to stay in; Thatcher fighting for money back – and ultimately Geoffrey Howe – after she realised too late that the Single European Act had been a trap towards integration; Major fighting his own party ‘bastards’, and Blair getting it wrong about the euro.

More of this later, but first (h/t Craig Byers) the second programme contained one huge distortion comparable to Robinson’s claim in the first, that Winston Churchill was the ‘father of European unity’. It was a jaw-dropping piece of buck passing. He asserted that it was the Blair government, not the EU itself (through the free movement directive) that was responsible, for the influx of nearly 2m EU citizens to the UK after 2004. Of course there was limited space in the programme and it covered nearly 70 years of EU-related developments.  But that does not excuse such inaccuracy.

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OSBORNE BIAS?  News-watch has already noted that the marathon BBC coverage of George Osborne’s remain ‘Exocet‘ on Monday led the senior political reporting team  to make claims that the ‘leave’ side did not have satisfactory documents to produce in response, and also that the weight of establishment opinion was strongly against exit. Political editor Laura Kuenssberg and her deputy Norman Smith thus entered the controversial domain of offering strong opinions about key matters relating to the EU referendum. No doubt BBC more senior news executives would defend their comments on the ground that such correspondents are entitled to exercise, and indeed are paid to do so, their professional opinions in the area of their specific expertise. However, that raises further important issues.  If the claims of one side of the referendum debate are to be subjected to such examination, is the same happening with the other? Relevant is that it was reported as part of the Osborne ‘Exocet’ that the Conservative high command is still insisting that they can talk with confidence about how Britain will perform in a ‘reformed EU’, and predict the economic future on that basis.  But are the EU ‘reforms’ secured by David Cameron actually binding? The BBC has said from the beginning that they are, but there are numerous claims that they are not, most recently from the Vice-President of the European Parliament. It seems that there is a tougher level of scrutiny from Kuenssberg for the ‘out’ camp and another for ‘remain’.  Another point here is that the ‘in’ side are being judged to be the more credible – there has been no obvious effort to look at what is likely to happen to the EU, if, after UK exit, there is a scramble by other countries also to leave.

LABOUR ‘HANDS OFF THE BBC’:  What is it about so-called social ‘progressives’ that they think that any change in the BBC – as the debate continues about Charter renewal – is going to result in a slide into deteriorating standards and even collapse? Angela Eagle, the Labour party’s shadow secretary for culture, has made a keynote speech in which she has laid out in detail for the first time the Corbyn regime’s thinking about media policy. Her principal message to the government, despite the huge changes and challenges facing media companies is ‘lay off the BBC – any intervention is bullying’.  Her core points were:

• Culture secretary John Whittingdale should not interfere at all in the BBC, especially over the EU referendum coverage or in matters of how programme budgets should be spent
• no changes in the licence fee
• no changes to the BBC’s commercial operations, including the possible sale of its stake in UKTV
• No ‘top slicing’ of the BBC licence so that other broadcasters could benefit from a ‘public service fund’.
• The BBC should remain at the heart of a complex state media patronage system in which it hands out cash to ‘independent’ producers
• Only minor changes in BBC regulation, and strong doubt about the ability of Ofcom to become future regulator (as was proposed by the Clementi report). Further, he government should not be involved in any way in the appointment process of a future regulatory body or management board.

This was a facile, lazy speech which suggests that Labour’s only concern is to maintain the BBC’s dominance and the media status quo, along with the continuation of its funding by the licence fee, despite it being least affordable by the poor. The suspicion must be that Eagle and her colleagues do not want change because they know that editorially, the Corporation favours Labour values, and has been for years favouring its agenda – pro-EU, human rights (with all that loaded phrase entail in left-wing politics), multiculturalism, climate alarmism…and so on. Eagle’s only real reservation about the BBC’s current state of health is that it is not diverse enough. And she reserved her loudest cheer for Channel 4 (which she also says must not change) for its ‘360 degree diversity charter’ – a document that could serve as The Bible of the diversity industry.

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BBC1 MAIN BULLETIN BIAS?: Gavin Hewitt, another former BBC ’Europe’ editor (he succeeded Mark Mardell in the role),  popped up on the BBC1 News at Ten this week to look at the trade deal recently struck by Canada with the EU. This, of course, has been used by the ‘remain’ side as a warning of the problems of ‘exit’ because of the length of time it took to negotiate. Hewitt pointed out as a main point in his commentary that the new arrangements would eventually lead to an estimated £6 billion a year in saved tariff charges and increased trade. But he also said that ‘it was not the same as full access to the single market’;   that ‘no one pretends that this trade deal will give Canada the same kind of access to the European single market as an EU member state has.’; and that, ‘…The deal has been seven years in the making and it has still not been ratified.’  He thus outlined that such deals could be reached, but stressed they were both very slow to achieve and then were not  (not his words but implied) as good as membership of the EU.  The issue here is this was an isolated item and it stressed therefore disproportionately the problems that Brexit would entail.

In fact, there’s been surprisingly little about the referendum on BBC1’s flagship bulletin.  In the four weeks from March 14,  there were only three feature-length  sequences specifically about the referendum – one (24/3)  hinged on a claim by Vote Leave group that more than 250  business leaders supported exit, linked with a warning from health secretary Jeremy Hunt that Brexit would seriously damage the NHS;  the second (30/3), featured former cabinet secretary  Lord O’Donnell, who said that leaving the EU would take much longer than the two years that treaty provisions   indicated, and would be fraught with further difficulties;  and the third (6/4), focused on the decision by the government to spend £9m on a mail-out to 27 million households putting the government’s (negative) perspective about the impact of Brexit and in favour of continued membership of the EU.   Other shorter coverage of EU referendum-related issues has included splits within the Conservative party over the poll (14/3, 15/3, 16/3, 18/3 and 19/3); and a warning by the Bank of England that the referendum posed a major threat to financial stability. The EU was also mentioned in relation to the troubles facing Tata’s steel-making operations in the UK, and in the aftermath of the Brussels airport terrorist attack. A major theme of this was calls by the EU for greater powers to deal with terrorism. News-watch has found in its continuing research that bias by omission is recurring problem in BBC EU coverage because audiences are not kept properly informed.  This low level of coverage has thus emerged as an important issue. In addition the item by Gavin Hewitt, combined with the main items noted above suggests that difficulties of exit are tending to attract more coverage, and there is a continued significant focus on Conservative party splits.

This is the transcript of the Gavin Hewitt feature:

Transcript of BBC1 ‘News at Ten’ 14th April 2016, Canada and the EU, 10.20pm

HUW EDWARDS:             One of the main claims made by members of the Leave campaign, including Boris Johnson, is that Britain could negotiate its own trade agreement with the EU if there was a vote to Leave. The example frequently mentioned is the deal struck by the Canadians, so our chief correspondent Gavin Hewitt has been to Canada to see how it’s worked out.

GAVIN HEWITT:              The fast flowing Saint Lawrence Seaway, one of Canada’s trading arteries with Northern Europe. Some have cited Canada as a model for how the UK could continue to do business with the EU if it left the European Union. At the port of Montreal, a container ship turns, destination Europe. Canada has just negotiated a trade deal with Europe. For the EU, this is the largest trade agreement with a single country. Both Canada and the EU make big claims for it.

SERGE AUCLAIR:              In our case, we are looking at around roughly a 4% increase in tonnage in the next five years.

GH:        The deal is expected to remove 98% of tariffs from everything, from cars to minerals to shrimp. But move to the capital, Ottawa, for a sense of how difficult this has been. The deal has been seven years in the making and it has still not been ratified. For the Canadian government, it will eventually be worth £6 billion per year. But it’s not the same as full access to the European single market.

CHRYSTIA FREELAND Canadian Minister for International Trade: This is a really big deal. It is a really deep deal. It is a really high quality, gold-plated trade deal. When I look at what Canada will have in terms of its ability to trade with Europe, compared to being a member of the EU, the really big difference is regulatory harmonisation. What it means for Canadian businesses is they have to, quite rightly, meet European regulatory standards without having a say in how those standards are written.

GH:        No one pretends that this trade deal will give Canada the same kind of access to the European single market as an EU member state has. Even so, this deal is hugely important to Canada. But after over seven years of negotiations, and a document running to 1400 pages, there are still issues about regulation that will have to be tackled in the future. Take the car market. Yes, more vehicles will be traded, and gradually trade will become duty-free. But significant issues remain over regulations and technical standards.

MARK NANTIS Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association When you consider all market access, we are talking about not just automobiles but all sectors of our respective economies, and that is a long, complicated process.

GH:        Take farming, like this small farm in Paris, Ontario. Yes, around 60,000 tonnes of beef will now be able to be exported to Europe, duty-free. But much has yet to be agreed, including meat inspection rules. When all is eventually signed, Canada won’t have to contribute to the EU budget or sign up to freedom of movement and will be able to do trade deals wherever it wants. Yes, Canada now has a big deal with Europe, with many barriers lifted but in some key areas, including financial services, restrictions remain. Gavin Hewitt, BBC News, Toronto.

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