More Whingeing about the BBC (or maybe it's a Serious Complaint)

When I first began reading ‘Private Eye’, in the summer of 1965, it was not respectable. W.H.Smith would not stock it. Most other newsagents had never heard of it or thought it was magazine for detectives. School headmasters confiscated it on sight and those caught reading it were considered to be troublemakers and watched closely for signs of revolt. I still recall the small shop on Trumpington Street in Cambridge to which I would hurry on publication day (I seem to remember it cost two shillings then), often to be disappointed because it hadn’t turned up.

 

By the time I made it to what Private Eye had started calling ‘The Street of Shame’, things were a bit different. Private Eye’s style, its willingness to gossip openly about things which had until then been kept off the pages of the big papers, had caught on elsewhere. It wasn’t  as rebellious or as revelatory as it had once been, but continued to sell because people thought it was, because form time to time it really did contain enjoyable gossip,  and because its funny pages often were actually funny, many of its cartoonists are very good indeed and it was prepared to blow raspberries while everyone else was being pious.

 

And so it is now a slightly racy (thouigh not as racy as it thinks it is) part of the establishment, displayed and sold by W.H.Smith, of no interest to what are nowadays called head teachers, with its own books pages, a section on  the misdeeds of local government, an excellent column on architectural and planning outrages,  and given to worthy and sometimes highly creditable investigations of such things as the Private Finance Initiative . It was also one of the most active sceptics on the subject of the MMR injection, something a lot of people now forget.

 

I think this is because Private Eye is nowadays generally supposed to be more or less liberal leftist, associated through its editor, Ian Hislop, with the modish establishment comedy show ‘Have I Got News for You’,  and there has been a recent tendency to try to make out that doubts about the MMR were confined to ‘right-wing’ persons.

It wasn’t so, but as this fact is inconvenient to the world-views of many, it is simply ignored, or treated as if it never happened. 

Well, there it is. For some reason I don’t fully understand, the magazine has never especially liked me, and I usually appear in it in a more or less bad light. The current issue contains an account of my current scuffle with the BBC which appears to be based on the idea that misrepresentation of someone else’s writings is OK if you a) do it early enough in the morning and b) it doesn’t take too long. Oh, and they also seem to think that people who get up early are ’insomniacs’. Nope. They are people who get up early. I don’t suppose there are many of them at ‘Private Eye’ though.

 

It also accepts the pro-BBC version of my squabble a couple of years ago with ‘What the Papers Say’, when an amazingly brief extract from my actual words (far briefer than the extracts taken from those who, unlike me, had a favourable opinion on the Olympics)  was altered before being transmitted, in a way that changed its meaning; and my voice was caricatured in a way which (for instance) would never have been applied by the BBC to my late brother, whose voice was remarkably similar to mine, but who, thanks his views on God, sex, drugs and rock n’ roll,  is a hero of BBC types.  

 

I’ve many times asked both the BBC,  and those who have wrongly claimed that I was ‘hurt’ by this portrayal, the same question: ’Can you imagine the BBC ever caricaturing my brother’s voice as they caricatured mine?’ None has ever even answered the question, because the answer would have to be ‘no’.  You’d only ever do that to someone you actively disliked.

 

The caricature was disproportionate, and selectively hostile. I know that WTPS uses actors to ‘do’ the voices of those it quotes.  And I know that they try to mimic or at least give a rough idea of the person’s real voice. This wasn’t that. But I only mentioned it because it was done at the same time as the alteration of my words, and suggested to me that this was evidence of an institutional bias against people such as me. I still do. Idiots have said since (and will say now) that I was ‘whingeing’ about being mocked. Honestly if I minded being mocked, I’d have retired long ago. It’s the selectiveness, and the disproportion that I'm interested in. They are of course wrong, and shouldn't hapen. But my interest is purely in the way they lead on to the deeper truth about the BBC's institutional inability to be fair to certyain views and the people who hold them.

 

For me, its almost mathematical. Just as I ask ( and get no answer) if anyone else has been subject to as many 'errors' on the part of the BBC as have happened to me, I ask 'Has anyone  else's voice been caricatured on WTPS as mine was'.  In each case, I ask only for examples. If there are none, then it seems to me to be evidence of soemting.

 

I do hope that's clear now, but I doubt it. 

 

I only take these matters up because it is in these small but objectively measurable slips that the BBC reveals an institutional bias which is otherwise nebulous and hard to pin down, and which you catch on the edge of a remark, in the timing and weight of a question, in the cock of an eyebrow or in the tone of a voice, in who gets the last word in a discussion. A big matter is often revealed in small things. It is in their minor slip-ups that major wrongdoers are often caught.  I would much rather fight on a broader front, but broader means vaguer, more subjective, and I know that this runs away into the sand. What I want is to show by small-scale, indisputable facts the larger truth that the BBC is not impartial. Those facts may in themselves be very small. But they are objectively demonstrable, and so cannot be brushed off.

 

Anyway, I’ve written to Private Eye in response to their little jibe. But here’s another thing. A reader has contacted me to pass on a reply he received from the BBC to his complaint about the way in which my UKIP article was treated by the BBC on 18th May.

 

Readers will be familiar with the apology made to me by the BBC, by e-mail and on air on 25th May, and some may have seen the statement on the BBC’’s own ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ website page http://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarifications/index.html

 which reads:

 

‘An on-air apology was made during News Briefing earlier today, in relation to the programme broadcast on Sunday 18 May 2014: “In last week's paper review we used a quote from a Peter Hitchens article in the Mail on Sunday, criticising UKIP. We took this out of context by omitting his praise for the party. We are sorry for this and happy to make it clear.”’

 

But a reader of this weblog has contacted me to say that , after he complained about the ‘News Briefing’ version of my article, he received an e-mail from BBC complaints, attempting to justify the misrepresentation, on 27th May, *two days after the BBC had broadcast an apology for it*

 

Here is the e-mail from the BBC:

 

‘Date: 27 May 2014 11:49

Subject: BBC Complaints - Case number (removed)

To: Name removed

Dear Mr  *****

Reference CAS *************

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘News Briefing’ on BBC Radio 4.

We note you found we misrepresented Peter Hitchen’s 18 May ‘Mail on Sunday’ piece by quoting what he’d written about what he thought of UKIP.

We appreciate your concerns. As we’d just read out what some of the other Sunday papers had said about UKIP, it was natural to follow with Peter Hitchen’s description, which is right at the start of his piece. Listeners were, of course, free to seek out and read the whole of all of the articles we briefly referred to – we believe it’s clear this part of the programme provides snapshots of what’s in the papers – it doesn’t provide full commentary. Our later programme, ‘Broadcasting House’ takes a more in depth look at the Sunday papers, as does ‘The Andrew Marr Show’ on BBC One.

We’d nonetheless assure you your concerns have been registered on our audience log, which is a daily report of audience feedback that’s made available to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for taking the trouble to contact us.

Kind Regards

(Name removed)

BBC Complaints’