Does Owen Jones really think the BBC leans to the Right?

Owen Jones, now writing for ‘The Guardian’, has made a daft claim about the BBC. He writes here http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/bbc-leftwing-bias-non-existent-myth that the belief that the BBC is biased to the left is a fairy tale which apparently allows ‘the right’ to police the corporation.

 

Well, first, let me go through a number of horse’s-mouth sources which directly contradict him:

 

 

Mark Thompson  (Then BBC director general) wrote in 2010 in the New Statesman that the BBC had suffered a ‘massive bias to the left’ (though this had only been in the past, he added).  I’d been having a number of impromptu conversations with him about that time, as we often shared the same train, in one of which he found it hard to answer my point that the BBC lacked presenters who would be prepared to give a really hard time to Clive Stafford Smith, the noted campaigner against the death penalty.

 

Roger Mosey, another senior BBC executive, wrote later in The Times that he broadly agreed with Mr Thompson.

 

Andrew Marr (who when I first met him was a left-wing columnist on the then ‘Daily Express’, who once devoted most of his column to attacking my opposition to Euro membership) famously described the Corporation  (at one of its own seminars) as ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large’. All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

 

John Humphrys  wrote recently in the Radio Times ‘The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons…The sort of people we’ve recruited – the best and brightest – tended to come from universities and backgrounds where they’re more likely to hold broadly liberal views than conservative.’

 

I’d add these enjoyable vignettes. The reporter Jonathan Charles reminisced (on the BBC) on the launch of the Euro ‘Even now I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era .  .  . for a few brief days I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and all got caught up in that euphoria.’ And environmental analyst Roger Harrabin once conceded (hilariously)   ‘I’ve never considered myself a climate-change sceptic.’   There’s much more on the subject in Robin Aitken’s interesting book ‘Can we trust the BBC’. Robin (who now runs the Oxford food bank) was a distinguished reporter on the BBC, and describes its innate, semi-conscious bias from the inside.

 

Owen Jones, I might add, suffers from a problem common in the BBC, He mistakes party-political bias for cultural and moral bias. These are quite distinct, and have been for many years, they are even more distinct since the Tory Party was almost entirely purged of moral and social conservatives – it’s now impossible to imagine such figures as the late Baroness (Janet) Young being Tory cabinet ministers. Making this mistake is like taking Michael Howard at his propaganda valuation, as a sinister right-winger – when in fact on most issues he’s way to the left. Mr Jones needs to learn this important distinction.

 

Take this passage from his article: ‘The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne's special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC's flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC's economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian's Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.’

 

Lord Patten was, it is true, a member of the Conservative Party. But I do not think anyone who has studied his speeches and actions in his long years in politics would view him as a conservative on moral and social matters, the EU, immigration or any of the other touchstone issues. Does Mr Jones really not know that? If he doesn’t know it, he needs to learn. If he does know it, he’s not arguing seriously or responsibly. Nick Robinson’s student Toryism  was, I strongly suspect, of the liberal kind. This used to be reasonably common once upon a time. A recent chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, John Scarlett ( Alastair Campbell’s ‘mate’ ) was also an undergraduate Tory, as we know because at the time he wrote a letter to ‘The Times’, describing himself as a ‘a Conservative’ and criticising police treatment of demonstrators on an anti-Vietnam War protest in Grosvenor Square in March 1968.  I suspect one could work for years for Francis Maude and for George Osborne without hearing or harbouring, let alone displaying, a single socially or morally conservative opinion. It is perfectly possible these days that J.P.Morgan might be a left-wing hotbed. It has been many years since anyone has imagined that wealth or banking were any bar to holding radical opinions. Hasn’t Mr Jones ever met a leftist businessman or banker? Hasn’t he heard of neo-conservatives, liberal on economics and social matters, in favour of mass immigration and often keen on liberal wars? It would appear not. If he gets in touch, I will tell him all about them.

 

Oh, and while it’s true I’m not generally described as a ‘firebrand’, alas, it is unusual for me to be introduced on panel programmes (though I am these things) as an author, or as a widely-travelled foreign correspondent, or even as an anti-war protestor, as I seem to be so often nowadays. It’s unusual for me *not* to be described wearisomely as a former Trotskyist (very former – a Trotskyist is something I haven’t been now for 39 of my 62 years on earth) . On briefer appearances I’m usually identified by reference to my newspaper (at my request, as it swiftly explains who and what I am to most viewers or listeners).  One thing for certain, my occasional appearance on the BBC does not cancel out its vast general bias. Glad as I am that some BBC staff try to uphold the Corporation’s charter duties, an occasional presenter’s slot on Radio 4, or an outnumbered panel appearance surrounded by liberals, doesn’t in any way alter the truth of my contention.