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Ofcom appointment ‘threatens fair coverage of EU referendum debate’

Ofcom appointment ‘threatens fair coverage of EU referendum debate’

Opinion polls at the weekend gave the EU ‘out’ camp the edge. But it has now emerged that supporters of Brexit will be fighting the battle to win hearts and minds as the EU referendum approaches with their arms tied behind their backs.

That’s because new developments at the BBC and the independent sector regulatory body Ofcom mean that complaints about unfair coverage of the EU debate on television – still the most crucial medium in influencing public opinion – don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of succeeding.

It paves the way for a constant barrage of pro-EU propaganda with the opposition neutered and unable to get a fair hearing for their concerns.

The most astonishing development came last Thursday when the Department of Culture, Media and Sport announced that an EU fanatic with little professional experience of broadcasting is to chair the content board of Ofcom, the body ultimately responsible for ensuring impartiality in news coverage across ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News.

Unbelievably, the press release announcing his appointment claimed that he had not been involved in any political activities for the past five years, and therefore (by implication) could be trusted with this crucial role.

But a moment’s investigation on the web reveals that this is utter nonsense. As his self-trumpeting website shows, Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is fighting an all-out political war on several fronts towards his revered dreams of slaying nationalism, allowing the free movement of peoples and of greater EU integration.

At the core of his campaign is a slickly-produced TV programme called The Great EU Disaster Movie, which his production company Springshot made last year in association with the BBC and Franco-German television channel Arte. It posits the collapse of the world as we know it if, God forbid, nasty nationalist factions such as UKIP have their way and the EU weakens its iron grip on the body politic. Predictably, the programme had its first network airing on the BBC. It has since been established that, disgracefully, the Corporation stealthily took substantial funding from the EU to ensure that it was translated into other languages.

Emmott’s so-called charity, Wake Up Europe – a trustee of which is Richard Sambrook, a former Director of BBC News – is in the midst of a major pro-EU propaganda drive at British Universities with the film at its heart. If that isn’t ‘political activity’, the definition needs changing.

The show’s joint producer has claimed in The Guardian that the programme is a neutral examination of the potential problems that would be caused by the UK’s exit. Her stance cuts to the heart of the entire problem of the Brexit debate in that those who want to remain simply cannot see or even begin to accept that they are biased.

What makes Emmott’s appointment so utterly damaging is that the rest of the Ofcom content board – in step with Quango Land generally – are like minds drawn apparently from the liberal left. The full list of 10 is here. What leaps out from their CVs is that all but two have worked for significant parts of their careers at the BBC. They write papers about how wonderful and important the BBC is. Many are closely linked to a BBC-favoured propaganda organisation called the (Reuters)Oxford Institute of the Media – which last November held a seminar about ensuring ‘fair’ coverage of the EU. Guess who chaired it? Bill Emmott!

One of the two content board members who has not worked at the BBC is Dr Zahera Harb, who began her career in journalism in the Lebanon, and is now a board member of the worthy-sounding Ethical Journalism Network. Don’t be deceived by such Orwellian double-speak. Its main concerns include attacking the ‘hate speech’ of Donald Trump and ensuring that Palestinian Authority – along with immigration generally – gets better coverage in the media.

The second important media development was on Friday: the closing date for submissions to a so-called ‘public consultation’ by the BBC Trustees’ in connection with their draft editorial guidelines covering the EU referendum campaign.

Those who favour Brexit should be afraid, very afraid. For all the 16 years that News-watch has monitored the BBC’s EU output, the Corporation has been massively biased against the withdrawal case. It has crudely but pervasively cast EU opponents as racist far-right xenophobes, Conservative eurosceptics as hopelessly ‘split’, and at the same has totally underplayed or ignored the solid, consistent support for withdrawal from Labour figures such as veteran MPs Kate Hoey and Kelvin Hopkins.

The Trustees’ proposals for ensuring impartiality, and no doubt will adopt – because such exercises are only fig leaves to accountability – are a farce. The main problem is that as usual, the guidelines put the BBC in the driving seat in terms of what is fair, under their definition of ‘due’ impartiality. That gives them massive leeway, and the proof is that the BBC Trustees have not upheld a single complaint about EU coverage in all their existence.

Even more disturbing, the final judgment on what constitutes bias in the run-up to the referendum will, in effect, be left to the only two Trustees who have any substantial journalistic experience. Both – surprise, surprise – are ex-BBC career journalists.

Step forward Mark Damazer, former Controller of Radio 4, under whose tutelage it was confirmed as the national channel of right-on causes; and Richard Ayre, a former controller of editorial standards who is an ex-chairman of an organisation called Article 19 which is similar to the Ethical Journalism Network mentioned above, with the addition that another of their obsessions is climate alarmism.

The News-watch submission to the BBC – for what it’s worth, because there is no chance that it will be heeded – is in full here.

A remaining question is who sanctioned the Bill Emmott appointment? Eurosceptic John Whittingdale is ostensibly in charge at DCMS. It seems scarcely credible that Emmott would have been his choice. Did David Cameron or George Osborne force the appointment through as part of their frantic drive to stack the cards as highly as possible against an exit vote? They both know that the BBC is firmly already on their side. Now Ofcom is sewn up, too.

After the publication of this post, an Ofcom spokesperson has contacted Newswatch with the following statement: “Any conflicts of interest involving non-executive Board members are managed appropriately and Bill Emmott would not be involved in discussions or decisions related to the EU referendum.”

Photo by UK in Italy

UK voting system means that anti-EU voters are denied representation

UK voting system means that anti-EU voters are denied representation

One of the early and most enthusiastic supporters of the Electoral Reform Society was the Rev Charles Dodgson, aka author Lewis Carroll.

The ERS has been arguing for proportional representation since 1884, and for all that time they have been viewed as little more than well-meaning cranks.

The Liberal Democrats, of course forced a vote on the issue during the last Parliament, but by then they had shown how nastily Machiavellian, unprincipled and two-faced they were when in power. As a result, many people voted against them rather than the issue at stake. The baby was well and truly thrown out with the bathwater.

Yet what we now seem to be entering as a result of our rigid allegiance to the first-past-the post-system is an Alice Through the Looking Glass world in which 1.5m SNP-voting Scots (out of a registered UK electorate of 46m) could well force us into another kind of nightmare: a reversion to 1930s-style Marxism.

So has as the time come to think of abandoning our current voting system? This is not going to change Thursday’s poll, of course, but the issue could assume crucial importance in the horse-trading that ensues.

One factor in the political landscape that has changed massively over the past five years and is obviously centre stage in this ballot is the huge surge in support for SNP.

This means that the 51% of Scots who now seem likely to vote for the party in the 59 Scottish Westminster seats are likely to hold massive, disproportionate clout. Because SNP support is concentrated in relatively few seats, the first-past-the-post system means they will win. Put another way, around 4% of the electorate could – and would, as Nicola Sturgeon has boasted about – hold the UK to ransom.

This will be – despite Ed Miliband’s protests to the contrary – either as a coalition partner or as a large street-fighting, self-focused, independent faction whose primary purpose is to smash asunder the United Kingdom. The meaning of the Glasgow Kiss will take on a whole new dimension.

They could paralyse a governmental process that has primarily grown round a gentlemanly two-party system and has never encountered such a set of circumstances before.

The other major change is an equivalent rise in support for UKIP. Largely because of the massive negativity towards the party by the media, and especially the BBC, their support now seems to be softening from the 15% that persisted throughout the campaign. But even if it falls back to 10%, it is likely that between 2m and 3m voters will support Farage and his rag-tag army.

The contrast with SNP here could not be sharper. Because of the first-past-the-post system, and because support for UKIP is attenuated across England, even if UKIP achieves double the vote of the Tartan Army, it will win on latest forecasts only a maximum of five or so seats.

In turn that will mean that the issues that it supports – the return of grammar schools, withdrawal from the EU, and end to the insane climate change alarmism and stricter immigration controls – will be totally ignored by the other parties. And put the other way round – three million votes will have very little influence, to the point almost of being disenfranchised.

The problems with our current voting system go much deeper. Voter apathy was so extensive in 2010 that 35% of the electorate did not vote(compared with 22% in 1992). So David Cameron attracted 36% of the votes cast but the support of only around a quarter of the total electorate.

If this pattern continues next Thursday, it could mean that Labour and Conservative combined win the support of less than half of electors.

Sooner or later, that’s a democratic deficit that will cause friction. Just how is, of course, impossible to predict. Almost certainly, however, the English in the South-east, will be increasingly resentful of the Jacuzzis of public cash that already go north of the border. At the same time, the legions of voters who are concerned about the pressures of immigration and have no means of expressing their views other than via Ukip are going to become increasingly discontent.

The unfairness of our voting system means that those that rule us are increasingly out of step with the wishes of the electorate. All the lessons of history –from the Boston Tea Party onwards – suggest that this is a recipe for serious civil unrest.

As Walter Bagehot first noted when he wrote his masterful book on the British Constitution in the 1860s, our system of government worked because it was not written down in formulaic fashion. It continually adapted to changing circumstances.

His analysis of the constitution was of course long before there was the juggernaut of the EU at its heart lucking away the power and disenfranchising voters in a different way. But the threat posed by the SNP is another massive challenge and unless the Constitution now evolves to cope with this massive imbalance, we could be entering very dangerous waters indeed.

Voting reform may seem a very left-field response, but in this Carollian2015, Looking Glass world, it may be the recipe needed. Both major parties adhere to first-past-the-post because it has given them leverage to create majority governments. Even in Tony Blair’s ‘landslide’ of 1997, he attracted only 43.2% of the vote (compared to 30% for the Conservatives). In the pre-UKIP and SNP world, this did not matter as much. It does now.

Photo by David Holt London

Immigration: Anything but the truth.

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson has announced that the BBC was once – at an unspecified period in the past – biased in its reporting of immigration issues.
He is reported as saying (in connection with pre-publicity for a programme he has made) that the corporation made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting the public’s concerns about the numbers and issues involved.
Mr Robinson’s mea culpa resonates closely with a similar confession by former director general Mark Thompson. In July 2011, he conceded that ‘taboo’ subjects such as immigration were avoided by the BBC for fear of its appearing too right wing. He said:
“I think there were some years when the BBC, like the rest of the UK media, was very reticent about talking about immigration. There was an anxiety whether or not you might be playing into a political agenda about immigration.”
What’s striking about these BBC admissions about bias in the reporting of immigration issues, however, is they are almost laughably predictable in substance and form.
It’s a routine BBC reaction to criticism that the corporation admits to problems in the past, but then says with total self-conviction (but no objective evidence) that those errors have
now been totally righted.
Then they hire someone from a BBC background and with close connections with the BBC Trustees – such as Stuart Prebble with his recent report into coverage of immigration, the EU and religion – to agree with them.
The evidence of past bias in the coverage of immigration is abundant. In 2004, for example, Newswatch compiled a report based on three months’ output from seven flagship news programmes for Sir Andrew Green’s group Migration Watch that revealed devastating shortcomings, especially with regard to the failure to reflect public concern and in the relentless thrust to portray those who opposed Labour’s immigration policies as xenophobicand racist.
More recently, the think thank The New Culture Forum produced an equally comprehensive report on the topic that revealed in both the past and the present, the corporation was not reflecting properly public concern. Among its conclusions are:
“It would be no exaggeration to say that a foreigner who subscribed only to the BBC might visit this country and be blissfully unaware of many of the social problems associated with immigration. These have never appeared in the national conversation and are instead whispered of in the shadows. This cannot be healthy.”
Nick Robinson says that these failings have been rectified. They have not. Evidence is easy to find. On November 5, the Today programme gave acres of space in bulletins and the main body of the programme to a report by two academics from University College London, in their survey claimed that EU immigrants had made ‘a particularly positive contribution to the public purse’. The editorial goal in giving the item such prominence was clearly to undermine those who are worried about the more negative effects of immigration.
Danny Shaw, the BBC’s home affairs editor, declared:
“I’ve looked back to see what other similar pieces of research have been done, and this does appear to be the most thorough analysis of its kind.”
On that basis, the report’s authors were interviewed and Justin Webb said in the intro:
“People who come to live in Britain make a substantial contribution to the public finances – they make us richer than we would otherwise be. So says the Centre for Research and
Analysis of Migration at University College London. They’ve been studying the figures in some considerable detail.”
Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch was included in the sequence – ostensibly to give balance – but the set-up and the questioning was undoubtedly designed to allow the
authors to amplify their claim that fears about immigration were unfounded. The effects, despite what public opinion believed, were positive.
What Danny Shore omitted to say – and the BBC has subsequently failed to report – is that even the most cursory analysis of the UCL survey shows that – to put it mildly – the statistical evidence in question was totally unreliable. Who says so? The Civitas think-tank commissioned emeritus professor of statistics at UCL Mervyn Stone to examine the findings. His conclusion?
“Most of the underlying crude assumptions that the all-embracing approach has been obliged to make have not been subject to sensitivity tests that have might been made if the
study had not been so obviously driven to make the case it claims to have made.”
Ouch! In other words, the BBC as recently as November shouted from the rooftops the findings of a report about the positive effects of immigration that the most rudimentary of checks would have shown to be highly suspect.
Danny Shore, the home affairs editor who is paid vast amounts to ensure that what gets to air is accurate, endorsed a report ‘ as the most thorough analysis of its kind’ when it was anything but.
 If, as Nick Robinson maintains, the BBC is no longer biased in their quest to hide and manipulate the truth about immigration – how could this be the case?