Election campaign reveals a media system that’s not fit for purpose
JVL Introduction
The Media Reform Coalition was set up in September 2011 to coordinate the most effective contribution by civil society groups, academics and media campaigners to debates over media regulation, ownership and democracy in the context of the phone hacking crisis and proposed communications legislation.
It works with partner groups and supporting individuals to produce research and to organise campaigning activities aimed at creating a media system that operates in the public interest.
The Media Reform Coalition is committed to supporting media pluralism; defending ethical journalism; and protecting investigative and local journalism.
This article was originally published by Media Reform Coalition on Mon 16 Dec 2019. Read the original here.
Election campaign reveals a media system that’s not fit for purpose
MRC asked some leading advocates of media reform for their reaction to the result of the general election.
Loading article text…
Excellent articles.
John Pilger claims uncritically that
“Labour lost because, unlike the election campaign in 2017, the party promoted a second referendum. Whatever this was dressed up as …..it meant that Labour was prepared to renege on a democratic vote in 2016 in which the majority of the British people voted to leave the EU.”
The simplistic confusion of the common assertion in the last sentence contrasts with the more thoughtful contributions above. Ironically the claim itself mirrors the rightwing populist propaganda which Pilger presumably decries. Since when do socialists regard the results of a single popular vote manipulated on a grand scale by a corrupt capitalist oligarchy as a sacred expression of the “will of the people”, unchallengeably valid for all time? How does it occur that the socialist Pilger deems a popular vote to be democratic when some 10% of the resident working population were arbitrarily excluded from the referendum on grounds of nationality, and when the majority of those so excluded were precisely those who stood to suffer most from the decision actually taken?
Pilger displays here an uncritical quasi-religious attitude to fake democracy which has always rightly been condemned by socialists of a marxist tradition. However in this case the implied insult to foreign workers in the UK is particularly unworthy, since it is all but certain that had those resident foreign workers been allowed to vote, the result of the referendum would have been different.
Of course Pilger is not alone in his blindness to this crucial fact: the Labour party as a whole, despite its occasional pious resolutions, has tragically betrayed some six million UK residents. When many who consider themselves on the left of the party talk nostalgically about the “real working class” of northern towns, they implicitly exclude non-national workers. This “polite” form of English nationalism has become quite acceptable and is not considered to contradict Labour values: only its victims for some reason can’t avoid noticing the xenophobia.
This long post offers much of relevance to this discussion. It appered on The Daily Politik, 14 December
The BBC’s Director General has expressed his concern with “conspiracy theories” about the broadcaster’s election news coverage.
Let’s recap public gripes with the BBC’s election coverage:
1. Johnson arrived for the remembrance service at the Ceontaph looking dishevelled & worse for wear. He set off at the wrong time to place his wreath, before finally placing it upside down. In it’s follow up coverage of the event, the BBC played footage from two years earlier, when the PM was Foreign Secretary, and he placed a wreath correctly and didn’t wander up before his cue.
2. The PM was laughed at during the BBC debate by the audience on a question of whether he was trustworthy. In its follow up coverage, the BBC cut out the two seconds of laughter after the audience question, and went straight to the PMs response, changing the context of the exchange.
3. During the BBC debate, the PM was asked why he had suppressed the release of the Russian report (about foreign interference in UK elections) until after the election. The PM said that there had been no timetable to release it and he had therefore chosen a date after the election. The audience member (not the BBC’s mediator) then pointed out that Dominic Grieve had said clearly that the report was supposed to be released on October 29th, and had been on his desk for approval on October 17th. When the BBC covered the exchange on Newsnight, they only showed the PMs response, which seemed to put paid to the issue. They did not show the audience members sourced rebuttal of his answer, which – again – changed the context of the exchange.
4. Research by Loughborough university showed that the BBC’s election coverage of the Labour Party had been statistically more negative than its coverage of the Conservative party (along with every single other tv broadcaster, tabloid and newspaper, with the exception of The Mirror and the Financial Times)
https://amp.theguardian.com/…/uk-news-push-alerts-negative-…
5. In previous elections, the BBC has conducted ‘hard hitting interviews’ with all Party leaders, to scrutinize their records and policies. Previously, the dates of the interviews are advertised together, so it is all transparent. This year, the BBC told all parties that all party leaders had agreed to do an interview with Andrew Neil. What it failed to make public, were the dates. The BBC went ahead with all the interviews, before announcing that it had been unable to procure and interview with the Prime Minister himself. The Editor of BBC’s political programmes, Rob Burley celebrated the impact that Jeremy Corbyn’s interview had on the election, crowing on Twitter about the amount of front page national newspaper coverage the interview had generated. He says explicitly that “Political interviews really matter and make a difference”.
The same scrutiny was not applied to the PM.
https://twitter.com/robburl/status/1199461520780021760?s=21
6. Throughout the election, the BBC’s Chief political editor Laura Kuenssberg’s coverage of events on her BBC twitter account was alarmingly one-sided. From her relentless tweets about Antisemitism and Corbyn – which, when counted, vastly outnumbered any coverage she gave numerous revelations about actual racist, Antisemitic, sexist, and islamaphobic comments uttered or written by the PM himself. To her soft, excuse-filled characterisation of “Boris the joker, Boris the clown, Boris the statesman” humanizing him by saying “we all know someone like that don’t we?” Compared to her descriptions of Corbyn as an “insurgent.”
She calls Johnson’s supporters, “Johnson’s supporters” or “conservative activist” whilst referring to Labour members as “Corbyn’s fan club” or “bussed in an audience of Corbyn loyalists”
7. Kuenssberg also reported information from a Conservative party source as fact, when she claimed a Labour activist (actually a Lecturer from UoL on his way home from work) had ‘punched’ Matt Hancock’s Parliamentary Aide. She then posted a video justifying her claim, which showed no such incident.
8. Kuenssberg also reported – the day before polling day – that the conservatives had told her they had seen the postal votes and the results the results were “pretty grim” for Labour. According to the Electoral Commission, reporting this is against the law.
9. The day before polling day BBC Political Correspondent Alex Forsyth reported that the Conservative party had “done a relentless focus on Boris Johnsons promise to take the UK out of the European Union, if he wins the majority that he so deserves”. That is partisan reporting, whichever way you slice it.
10. Final Draft produced research proving that 88% of the conservative party’s Facebook advertisements contained lies or were false or misleading, compared to 0% of Labour’s Facebook adverts. The BBC headlined the story: ”General election 2019: Ads are ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful.”
The BBC buried the crux of the story in the article, and the story itself in the Technology section of their website.
This was a much bigger story than the BBC allowed it to be, especially in the context of the tories’ already misleading campaign, which included the PM repeating clear falsehoods about his own policies and repeated questions around his trustworthiness from the public.
These incidents are not “conspiracy theories”. This was the election coverage of the public broadcaster. There were no “mistakes” which happened to favour Labour or Jeremy Corbyn.
Within the article below, the guardian has conducted anonymous interviews with BBC staff. The BBC’s own staff said
“I’m proud of the programmes we’ve put together, but I feel like we’ve been undermined at every turn by constant gaffes on the part of senior presenters and editors. I detect an unhealthy us-versus-them mentality, an unwillingness to say sorry when the BBC gets it wrong and a genuine terror of upsetting the government in particular.”
👆 this last sentence is significant
There was repeated concern from BBC staff that the BBC’s model of neutral reporting was not suited to an age where politicians are more willing to try to manipulate the media, with Johnson and his aide Dominic Cummings were repeatedly singled out for taking advantage of that.
👆 staffs awareness of this influence is significant
Younger staff repeatedly and persistently raised concerns about the loosely phrased tweets of senior BBC journalists, which often reach millions of people without passing through editors. “They should be subject to the same rigour as any other online material,” one journalist said.
In the article, the BBC’s Director General Tony Hall, explains all the points we make above as “human errors”. He also suggests social media platforms should find ways to reduce the level of public criticism aimed at journalists, such as BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.
This is the head of the public broadcaster suggesting public criticism of its reporters should be prevented on social media platforms.