The BBC: Myth of a Public Service

By Tom Mills

The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, from its Reithian origins to its coverage of the 2019 General Election: the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public. And yet in the current age of multi-platform news, this bias is increasingly exposed. Mills asks if the institution is fit for purpose? And can it even be reformed?

The BBC is an important and timely examination of a crucial public institution that may threaten the very thing it was meant to uphold: democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784784843

Tom Mills

Tom Mills is Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. He is the author of The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016) and the co-editor of What is Islamophobia? (Pluto, 2017).

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The BBC

The BBC

Myth of a Public Service

TOM MILLS

Paperback edition published by Verso 2020

First published by Verso 2016

© Tom Mills 2016, 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-486-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-485-0 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-484-3 (UK EBK)

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Contents

Introduction

1. Under the Shadow of Power

2. The BBC and the Secret Service

3. War and Peace

4. Politics, Power and Political Bias

5. The Making of a Neoliberal Bureaucracy

6. Public Service Broadcasting and Private Power

Conclusion: Democracy, the State and the Future of Public Media

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

The BBC is one of the most important political and cultural institutions in Britain, and is among the most influential and trusted media organisations in the world. Its global audience has been estimated at 308 million, while in the UK almost everyone uses its services in some form.¹ The great majority of the British public watch BBC television, most listen to BBC radio, and over half use the BBC’s online services.² We turn to the Corporation for music, sport, drama and documentaries. But it is also a vital and trusted news service; not just a cultural institution, but an indispensible source of information about the world and our place in it.

One in sixteen adults around the world are thought to use BBC news services and in the UK around four out of five do so: a reach far greater than any other provider.³ While most of us use a number of different news sources, half of the UK public consider it their most important source of news, and as many as one in five rely solely on the BBC. Moreover, it is not only the most popular provider of news, it is also regarded by viewers and listeners as the most accurate and trustworthy.⁴

But are we right to trust the BBC? Does it provide us with an impartial account of what is going on in the world, or does it serve particular political interests and agendas? This book argues that despite all the claims to the contrary, the BBC is neither independent nor impartial; that its structure and culture have been profoundly shaped by the interests of powerful groups in British society; and that this in turn has shaped what we see, hear and read on the BBC.

The Corporation is of course not without its critics. But debates over the politics of the BBC have been hopelessly misinformed. Although it is among the most important institutions in Britain, it is also one of the most misunderstood. It is maligned by commentators in the national press for its left-wing bias, but in fact its journalism has overwhelmingly reflected the ideas and interests of elite groups, and marginalised alternative and oppositional perspectives. It is lauded by liberal academics and journalists for its much-vaunted independence and its fostering of democratic public life, but in fact it is part of a cluster of powerful and largely unaccountable institutions which dominate British society – not just ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’ as Owen Jones suggests, but an integral part of it.⁵ It is celebrated by the left as a publicly funded bulwark against the power of the corporate media, but it has long been ‘infatuated with markets’⁶ and of all the national broadcasters it devotes by far the most time and resources to business.⁷

This book sets the record straight on the BBC. It corrects the myths and misunderstandings and the mendacious and muddled thinking that have clouded public understanding of an institution that not only lies at the heart of British cultural and political life, but is an international exemplar of the tradition of public service broadcasting it pioneered.

As we shall see, the reactionary press and the conservative movement in Britain have done much to confound public understanding of the BBC. But so too have many liberals and leftists, who have tended to overlook the reality of the BBC’s history, focusing instead on the ideal of public service broadcasting with which it is associated. This is a wider problem. To discuss the BBC is not just to debate the merits of a particular media institution. It inevitably invokes certain imperilled principles which the Corporation is seen to embody, most of all those fundamentals of liberal journalism: accuracy, independence and impartiality. Underpinning such principles is a deeper normative commitment to a certain kind of public life; an awareness that for a society to function democratically in any meaningful sense, citizens require accurate and impartial sources of information to inform their political judgements, or better still a public space to facilitate political deliberation, free from market forces and the state. While scandals in recent years have starkly revealed that the private media is utterly incapable of performing such a role, even the BBC’s most committed defenders acknowledge that in practice the Corporation has itself too often failed to live up to such principles. Accuracy has always been taken seriously, and this has for the most part at least prevented the BBC from propagating the egregious distortions and falsehoods so typical of the reactionary press. But, as will be extensively detailed here, impartiality has been routinely construed in a manner skewed towards the interests of powerful groups.

What lies behind this partial reporting? The journalist Roger Bolton, who was twice fired from the BBC over his coverage of Northern Ireland, has remarked that ‘either [the BBC] is independent, or it isn’t’,⁸ and put in such stark terms, the simple answer has to be that it is not. It has scarcely been independent of governments, let alone the state. Part of the problem, though, is that this question has tended to be framed in such stark and narrow terms. The BBC has never been ‘independent’ in the sense that its most enthusiastic supporters imagine. Senior executives on the Board of Governors, more recently the BBC Trust, are all political appointees, and its major source of funding, the licence fee, and its constitution – as laid out in its Royal Charter – are both routinely set by governments: a fact which inevitably influences its reporting. Neither, however, has the BBC always functioned like a straightforward instrument of Britain’s governing classes. Rather, it has always occupied a grey area – sometimes darker, sometimes lighter – between government and civil society.

The BBC started life as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd, a corporate consortium of the ‘Big Six’ radio manufacturers formed in October 1922 and granted an exclusive licence to broadcast by the Post Office in January 1923.⁹ These companies, the largest of which was Marconi, looked to establish a broadcasting service so as to create a market for the technology they had patented. The BBC emerged as a result of their protracted negotiations with government and was funded out of a levy on the sales of radio sets. Lobbying by the private media meant the new radio service was initially prevented from broadcasting much news, which was limited to bulletins after 7 p.m. based solely on agency reports. But over time, the BBC would become one of the most important and trusted sources of news for the British public. The initial restrictions on news bulletins were lifted in 1926 with the onset of the General Strike. As we shall see, the General Strike is a particularly ignominious episode in the BBC’s history, and it has rarely been quite so utterly subservient to power, or so overtly partisan. But the quasi-independence it was then afforded set a pattern that has endured to this day. In 1971, the then director general Charles Curran astutely observed that the BBC ‘is a creation of the Establishment, and it depends on the assent of the Establishment for its continuance in being’. But he also noted that ‘its activities are, by their very nature, which is to ask questions, constantly open to the accusation of being subversive’.¹⁰ Indeed, simply reporting accurately and offering even highly circumscribed political debate is sometimes capable of disrupting the agendas and strategies of the powerful. More than that though, the BBC has on occasion offered more critical perspectives. While its journalism rarely presents any fundamental challenges to the social order, the liberal and radical political culture of the 1960s created pockets of critical, independent reporting, especially within current affairs. The Corporation underwent something of a cultural shift that decade under the leadership of the liberal director general Hugh Greene, adopting a less austere style of broadcasting and producing socially conscious dramas and satirical programmes. The BBC, Greene himself claimed, was no longer a ‘pillar of the Establishment’, it was transformed by a ‘new and younger generation’.¹¹

The cultural changes that the BBC underwent in the 1960s, the political significance of which have tended to be exaggerated,¹² were partly attributable to the establishment of commercial television in 1955. Having lost its monopoly, the BBC was forced to innovate in order to restore its audience share and maintain its legitimacy. But they also reflected broader social changes that were under way. Relative prosperity, technological innovation, greater equality and full employment, combined with Britain’s decline as an imperial power, created a climate in which political, social and cultural norms were increasingly challenged – especially by the new generation of economically independent young adults. As Stuart Hood (controller of programmes, television) recalled, the BBC in this period for the first time attacked ‘some of the sacred cows of the establishment – the monarchy, the church, leading politicians and other previously taboo targets’.¹³

While this is certainly true, it is also important to recognise that the BBC was as much a target of this hostility as it was an antagonist. In 1977, the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting noted that the sixties had seen a growth of hostility ‘to authority as such; not merely authority as expressed in the traditional organs of State but towards those in any institution who were charged with governance’.¹⁴ The BBC, the paternalist institution par excellence, came increasingly to be seen as part of a bureaucratic and unaccountable Establishment, and like other powerful institutions found its hegemony over public life increasingly contested.¹⁵ Scholars influenced by sixties radicalism no longer took for granted social structures and the ideas which legitimated them, and sociologists powerfully undermined journalistic notions of impartiality and objectivity – professional norms that were not only strongly held by journalists, but justified the BBC’s privileged position in British society. In this period, the media, and the BBC in particular, came under considerable pressure from conservative moralists and a range of social forces on the left, including the broadcasting unions. Radical sections of the labour movement also agitated for structural reforms, inspired both by class-based critiques of media institutions and increasingly popular notions of worker self-management.

In understanding this period, it is important to recognise that these political struggles played out not just at the level of formal politics, nor just between social movements and the Establishment, but between and within a range of institutions including within the BBC itself. In 1979, during a discussion by senior BBC editors of Bad News, a highly influential sociological study of the reporting of industrial disputes, the documentary maker Tony Isaacs complained that ‘there was a whole generation now in journalism and politics who in their days at the London School of Economics in the 1960s had grown to believe that the BBC was fascist and everything else that was bad’.¹⁶

It is sometimes imagined that the ‘death of deference’ in the 1960s, and the impact this had on journalistic culture, led to the combative style of political interviewing exemplified at the BBC by figures like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys. While not entirely erroneous, this is something of a misreading. The social change of that era no doubt opened up space for this type of journalism; but the irreverent style stems less from the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and more from the bumptious posturing of the public school and Oxbridge debating societies, or the ‘moots’ at which would-be barristers pitch their wits against one another. Indeed, Sir Robin Day, the great pioneer of the adversarial interview, was a president of the Oxford Union and was later ‘called to the Bar’, the culture of which is hardly alien to the political elite.¹⁷ The real journalistic legacies of the liberal and radical upheavals of the 1960s were not the ‘tough’ interview, but the ambitious, innovative and popular current affairs programmes which subsequently emerged, such as Granada’s World in Action and to a lesser extent Panorama and other BBC programmes produced at Lime Grove, the BBC’s labyrinthine and remote studios where Paxman trained before fronting Newsnight.

The journalistic legacy of the democratic and egalitarian agitation which began in the 1960s lasted well into the 1980s. But it was then subject to a vigorous counterattack which reshaped the BBC as well as the broader political culture. In the 1970s, the New Right, which cohered around Margaret Thatcher, began its long march through the institutions, the BBC among them. From the mid-1980s, the Thatcher Government and its allies launched a series of public attacks on BBC political programming, and the increasingly bitter conflict with the government was only resolved when political appointees on the Board of Governors forced the resignation of Director General Alasdair Milne, a seasoned programme maker who personified the more independent stance the BBC had assumed in recent decades. With Milne’s departure, the institutional culture of the BBC was gradually transformed, first under his successor, the accountant Michael Checkland, but most of all under Checkland’s deputy and successor, the committed neoliberal John Birt. In his autobiography Birt would lament that when he arrived at the BBC in 1987, the Corporation ‘had not yet come to terms with Thatcherism’, its journalism being ‘still trapped in the old post-war Butskellite, Keynesian consensus’.¹⁸ Assisted by a small coterie of radical reformers, he worked tirelessly to put this to rights. In the purported interests of analytical journalism, he introduced ‘rigorous procedures for monitoring particularly sensitive programmes’.¹⁹ Systems of newsgathering and editorial authority were centralised and programme scripts were routinely vetted. Later, as director general, Birt imposed a neoliberal-inspired managerial restructuring on the BBC, instituting buyer–seller relationships and competitive pressures through an internal market system which integrated the BBC more fully into the private sector. Birt also shifted the BBC’s journalism in a more business-friendly direction, a trend which was accelerated significantly by his successor as director general, the amiable millionaire Greg Dyke, who was later famously forced from office by the Labour Government of Tony Blair. After Dyke’s departure, editorial controls were further extended, and the BBC drifted further to the right.

This book will outline the above history in much more detail, explaining how it was that the BBC was transformed from a pillar of the social democratic Establishment into a neoliberal, pro-business, right-wing organisation; and how it is that powerful interests have been able to shape the BBC, influence its output and stifle its potential for independent journalism.

The BBC is a large organisation, the origins of which go back almost a century, and so a relatively short book such as this could not hope to do justice to the breadth of its activities or the complexities of its history. The focus here is more or less exclusively on the BBC’s journalistic content, rather than its broader output, and while international issues will be covered, we will concentrate largely on the BBC’s domestic operations. The task is not to provide a comprehensive history of the BBC, nor a full account of its institutional life as a whole. Rather, the central theme is that of the BBC’s place in the history of British democracy and its relationship with the centres of power in British society, principally corporations and the state. Here the basic picture is clear enough, even if it is rarely acknowledged in official discussions. The BBC has never been independent of the state in any meaningful sense, while the relative autonomy it once enjoyed from corporations and the logic of the market has been steadily eroded since the 1980s.

It has already been argued that the laudable values with which the Corporation is associated should not obscure an adequate understanding of the BBC as it really is. Equally though, such values should not be casually dismissed. For such ideals have, to some extent at least, been embedded within the BBC’s organisational DNA and have had some impact on reporting, albeit usually in limited ways and at the margins. This book does not take the values of liberal journalism or public service broadcasting for granted. On the contrary, while offering an historically informed, clearsighted analysis that acknowledges the reality of the BBC’s often lamentable record, this book also recognises in the Corporation, and the public service ideals that have animated it, an unfulfilled promise of independent journalism and a more democratic and accountable news media.

CHAPTER 1

Under the Shadow of Power

On 12 May 1926, the BBC’s founding father John Reith was reading the lunchtime radio news bulletin when an important note was passed to him by a member of staff. For over a week, the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then called, had been on what Reith referred to as ‘a wartime sort of footing’.¹ The UK’s first and only General Strike had been called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in support of the mine workers, bringing everything – including the newspaper industry – to a halt. As a result, the young broadcasting company had become both a vital source of news for the public and a vital instrument of propaganda for a government determined to break the strike.

The note handed to Reith stated, unexpectedly, that the TUC had called off the strike after nine days. He asked his staff to get confirmation of the news, but not from the TUC; continuing with his broadcast, he scribbled on the note: ‘Ask No 10 for confirmation’. Shortly afterwards, the prime minister’s secretary confirmed that the news was indeed true. Unbeknown to striking workers, the members of the TUC General Council had earlier that day visited 10 Downing Street to inform the government that they were calling off the strike despite not having won a single concession for the miners. This was a resounding victory not only for the mine owners, but also for the government and the City of London, which were determined to drive down wages in an effort to restore the value of the pound and maintain the British Empire’s international standing.

In the 7 p.m. news bulletin, Reith read ‘a verbatim account, from No 10, of what had happened’.² Two hours later, he relayed on-air messages from the king and the prime minister, followed by what Reith described in his diary as ‘a little thing of our own’.³ ‘Our first feeling on hearing of the termination of the General Strike’, he announced, ‘must be one of profound thankfulness to Almighty God, Who has led us through this supreme trial with national health unimpaired.’ He continued:

You have heard the messages from the King and the Prime Minister. It remains only to add the conviction that the nation’s happy escape has been in large measure due to a personal trust in the Prime Minister. As for the BBC we hope your confidence in and goodwill to us have not suffered.⁴

Reith finished his ‘little thing’ by reading William Blake’s poem ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time’. Blake, ironically enough, had been a supporter of the French Revolution, but his poem had become popular during the Great War as Hubert Parry’s patriotic hymn ‘Jerusalem’. As Reith read out the words, an orchestra played Parry’s score in the background. Once Reith was finished, the BBC choir sung the hymn’s final verse, a rousing call to arms for the Christian peoples of England.

Recalling these events three decades later, Reith wrote that ‘if there had been broadcasting at the time of the French Revolution, there would have been no French Revolution’. Revolutions, he reasoned, are based on falsehoods and misinformation, and during the General Strike, the role of the British Broadcasting Company had been to ‘announce truth’. It was, he thought, quite proper that it had been ‘on the side of the government’ and had supported ‘law and order’.⁵

At the time of the General Strike, the BBC was still involved in negotiations over its reconstitution as a public corporation, which had been recommended by a committee only months earlier. The postmaster general, the minister to whom the BBC was directly accountable, was William Mitchell-Thomson, who as chief civil commissioner also directed the government’s semi-secret strike-breaking operations, coordinated by the innocuous-sounding Supply and Transport Committee. As postmaster general, Mitchell-Thomson could oblige the BBC to broadcast any messages the government decreed. And under the BBC’s Licence – the legal basis of its operations – the government had the power to commandeer the BBC ‘if and whenever in the opinion of the Postmaster-General an emergency shall have arisen’. This formal power was never exercised during the General Strike, but it did not need to be. The threat itself was a powerful inducement for compliance.

The BBC’s point of contact with the Cabinet during the strike was J. C. C. Davidson, who was responsible for the government’s public relations and was Mitchell-Thomson’s deputy at the Supply and Transport Committee. A reactionary and a propagandist, Davidson was anxious about what he called the ‘politically uneducated electorate’ and the threat it posed to ‘our strength in the country’.⁶ Throughout the strike, he exerted what he referred to in a private letter as ‘unofficial control’.⁷ What this meant was that the BBC was afforded a large degree of operational autonomy, remaining formally independent, but on the tacit understanding that it would broadly serve the political purposes of the government.

There were those in government who favoured a more robust approach. A minority of zealous reactionaries in the Cabinet, led by Chancellor Winston Churchill, ‘regarded the strikers as an enemy to be destroyed’,⁸ and they pushed for the use of all means at the government’s disposal to achieve that end. In discussing the status of the BBC, Churchill said ‘it was monstrous not to use such an instrument’.⁹ Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, however, took a different view. He thought Churchill a liability and confided to Davidson that he had been ‘terrified of what Winston is going to be like’.¹⁰ Baldwin and Davidson favoured a more subtle and, they believed, effective approach, as did the notoriously authoritarian home secretary William Joynson-Hicks, known as ‘Jix’, who chaired the Supply and Transport Committee. Davidson described the rationale behind their preferred strategy in a letter written shortly after the strike:

Winston was very strong in his insistence that the Government ought to assume complete possession [of the BBC]. I was equally strong and Jix shared my view, that it would be fatal to do so for the very simple reason that the people that you want to influence are those who would have at once ceased to listen had we announced that all news was dope, while on the other hand the diehard element who criticised us for our impartiality are on our side in any case.¹¹

The ‘moderates’ in the Cabinet used the threat posed by these ‘diehard element[s]’ to coerce the BBC. Baldwin, Davidson wrote, ‘played a very skilful game in postponing a decision by the Cabinet on the question repeatedly raised by Winston and F. E. [Smith] of taking over the BBC’. Indeed, it was not until 11 May 1926, a week into the strike, that the Cabinet finally decided that the BBC would not be brought under direct government control.¹²

The fact that the BBC escaped being commandeered has sometimes been seen as a victory for independent broadcasting. But the historical record suggests, fairly unambiguously, that the