BBC News Biased? Why You Should Care

BBC News is the news arm of the British Broadcasting Company, the most established and watched television channel in Britain. They also maintain radio stations and a very extensive news site on the internet, which I often use as a reference for this weblog. Unlike news organizations in America, the BBC was established by the British government and is funded by their taxpayers through a license fee.

Like every other news outlet, they are frequently accused of bias in their reporting. Unlike other news outlets, however, every so often they conduct regular charter reviews to determine bias, and the results are very interesting (see below). This is because their charter states the service must be: "free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners". Of course, if you are an American or some other nationality besides British, you might be thinking "why should I care?". But no matter where you live, chances are that bias at the BBC profoundly affects you life. Even if you don't realize it.

First, I'll explain why. Simply put, more people worldwide get their news from the BBC than any other single news organization, often trusting it more than the local state-controlled media. Worldwide, many people's views on terrorism, Islam, and the United States are a direct result of BBC reporting.

They are active on television, radio, and internet through BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, BBC World, BBCi, Ceefax, and BBC News Online. They also create content for PDAs, cell phones, and downloadable podcasts. On shortwave radio, they broadcast in 150 capital cities worldwide, in 33 different languages, with a weekly audience of about 163 million listeners, including a great many across the Middle East. On the day of the London bombings, their web site hit a peak of over one billion web site hits... once again, that's billion, not million, and might be a world record. They list a comprehensive view of their readership here.

Now, having read the above, certainly you would agree that it would be a good thing if they made an attempt at objective reporting. But after years of complaints, they still haven't. I realize bias is often in the eye of the beholder, but when the corporation itself even admits it, then, most likely, there is a problem:

THE BBC is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion.
...
“There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone,” says the report.

It goes on to highlight a “Roneo mentality” where staff ape each other’s common liberal values.

And later:

The document, jointly commissioned by BBC managers and the board of governors, now replaced by the BBC Trust, includes details of a staff impartiality seminar at which senior figures criticised the corporation for being antiAmerican and pandering to Islam.

Criticisms highlighted from the seminar include: A senior BBC reporter attacking the corporation for giving “no moral weight” to America. Executives admitting they would broadcast images of a Bible being thrown away – but not the Koran for fear of offending Muslims. The BBC deliberately championing multiculturalism and ethnic minorities, while betraying an anticountryside bias.

(Tip from Deansmay)

Of course, this isn't the first time they have been accused of this. A charter review in 2004 was particularly damning over their Middle East coverage, particularly conflicts in Israel:

"We detected considerable inaccuracy and detected a trend of antipathy towards Israel....

Our findings are that, over the period of 38 months the BBC has devoted a significantly disproportionate amount of space to the Israeli/Palestinian problem, to the almost total exclusion of a number of other issues where major humanitarian and political problems exist. On one analysis we calculate that Israel gets 80 times as much attention as other comparable humanitarian and political stories.

Where the Middle East has featured the documentaries have been overwhelming negative in their depiction of Israel, with a considerable amount of time and space being given to programme makers with views known to be antithetical to Israel. Of 16 documentaries, two were categorised as unknown, because we could not obtain a transcript. Of the remaining 14, 1 was biased in favour of Israel, 1 balanced and 12 biased against Israel. For the reasons set out below we suspect that the 2 unknowns are likely to be negative towards Israel.

Given the huge influence of the BBC we consider that this trend of partiality and imbalance over such an extended period amounts to a campaign to vilify Israel...

We do not accuse the BBC of deliberately deciding to vilify Israel in this way. We do not know whether the campaign is deliberate. However the fact that it has occurred and that the imbalance has been allowed to continue unchecked for so long does point to systemic weaknesses in BBC editorial and management control.

In this respect, at least, we consider that our findings are entirely consistent with the findings of systemic failure within the BBC which were highlighted by the Hutton report published earlier this year."

The Hutton Report referred to above was published in 2004. It was the result of the Hutton Inquiry, which investigated a scandal involving BBC reporting. BBC News reported that a source in the government claimed that Tony Blair deliberately falsified a public document in order to back up his case of going to war in Iraq. But this "information" was completely fabricated, and instead of apologizing, BBC leadership dug in their heels and stood by the report. The Hutton inquiry found that the BBC reporter had deliberately lied and in the end, public backlash from the scandal caused the reporter and the two top BBC executives to resign. It's actually a rather long story, and if you want to dive into it, you can start here and here.

Later in 2005, in another move that may have been bias or simply political correctness run amok (or both), in the wake of the London Subway bombings BBC execs decided to avoid the "terrorist" label because:

"the word 'terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than aid to understanding".
...
Within hours of the explosions, a memo was sent to senior editors on the main BBC news programmes from Helen Boaden, head of news. While she was aware "we are dancing on the head of a pin", the BBC was very worried about offending its World Service audience, she said.

BBC output was not to describe the killers of more than 50 in London as "terrorists" although - nonsensically - they could refer to the bombings as "terror attacks". And while the guidelines generously concede that non-BBC should be allowed to use the "t" word, BBC online was not even content with that and excised it from its report of Tony Blair's statement to the Commons.

Former employees have also sounded off about the BBC's inner culture. Gerard Baker, who worked there for six years wrote:

If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.

Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man's highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on.

Robin Aiken, who worked at the BBC as a reporter and an executive for 25 years, wrote a book about the subject: "Can we trust the BBC?". He gives one anecdote in which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher narrowly missed an attack by an IRA bomb. He overheard a reporter remark: "Pity they missed the Bitch". He also said:

"Dislike of Republicans [in the USA] is close to being a BBC article of faith...I remember being in the Washington office during the Lewinsky affair and saying that I rather sympathised with the Republicans. I think it would have gone down better if I’d confessed to being a paedophile.”"

If you really want to dive into this issue, there is actually an entire blog devoted to it. Biased-BBC runs regular critiques of their reporting. Sometimes their accusations could be explained away, but sometimes not. For example, here are a couple of examples on their main page today: a mere rumor that Israel instigated the the hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe in 1976, is given very serious weight; and a story about an "honor killing" (the murder of Muslim women to save the family "honor") that never mentions religion in any form at all. In a more recent example, I referred to a similar glaring omission in one of their reports about the JFK plotters here.

One my wonder then, why I refer to the BBC so often if it is biased? Well there are three reasons for this: 1) BBC News has more international coverage and runs their site in more languages than any other web site I have found anywhere; 2) I am aware of their biases and keep them in mind when reading it - I also cross check stories elsewhere; and 3) they don't pander to celebrities nearly as much as other news outlets do.

Finally, just indulge me one more example. The below passage is from the 2004 charter review I linked to above. The program described below was one of several that upset Israeli officials so much that they refused to cooperate or give interviews to the BBC until they appointed a special panel to monitor their Middle East coverage. You can read it and decide for yourself.

Programme BBC2
Title Behind the Fence
Date 25.05.2003
Classification Negative towards Israel

Behind the Fence deals with the issue of Israel’s construction of a security fence as a preventative measure against Palestinian terrorism. The primary focus of the documentary is a young Palestinian mother whose life has been disrupted by the fence’s construction. She tells viewers that “all the countries have opened their borders. Berlin, for instance, destroyed its wall so I wonder why they are building this fence. I don’t know why the whole world is silent, why they let the Israelis build this fence between themselves and Palestine when in the rest of the world the borders are opening up.” There is scant mention of the extended campaign of terrorism which has motivated the building of the fence. The building of a similar security barrier to keep Muslim terrorists out of India, or the similar barrier in Cyprus are not mentioned at all since they would immediately demonstrate the glaring inaccuracy in the above quotation.

Israel is depicted as an expansionist aggressor –“In another war in 1967 Israel seized land from Egypt, Jordan and Syria” with no attempt made to explain the circumstances in which the war occurred or the attempts Israel made to return the land in return for peace – which it did in relation to Egypt. In an Israel in which all Jews live in fear of the next terrorist attack in a campaign which has touched almost everyone in the country, a bizarre picture of domestic harmony between Arabs and Jews is painted: “We are one family. For me there is no difference between an Arab and a Jew. All that matters is that we live together. We don’t need a fence or anything else to come between us”. Unless it is suggested that this is the dominant view amongst Arabs and Jews in Israel and the territories, it’s inclusion almost uncontradicted creates a less than balanced assessment.

In an effort to personalise the effect of the fence details of the birth of a Palestinian baby in an Israeli hospital are supplied. This forms the springboard for a piece of vitriolic anti-Israel invective with which the film is peppered: “Now she's born to witness the bombing and Sharon's tanks and his F-16s and F-15s. She's born to see what Sharon is doing, Sharon the great democrat.”

[Conclusion:]We do not feel that this film made any serious effort to address its subject matter in a balanced way. It was at times inaccurate, at times provided a distorted history, at times was simply absurd and throughout was on a mission to vilify Israel.

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