The BBC: Myth of a Public Service
Tom Mills, Verso 2016. £15
The BBC is the largest news broad caster in the world, with an unparalleled reach to the public. It portrays itself as ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’, yet in reality operates as a weapon of soft imperialist power. Whether cheerleading for anti-China student protesters in Hong Kong, deliberately masking the brutality meted out by the right-wing coup government in Bolivia or parroting US propaganda on Venezuela, its role is to slant the news to suit the interests of the ruling class. Tom Mills’ nuanced history of the BBC gets behind its mask of impartiality. The picture he reveals is not as simple as direct collaboration between the government and the BBC, but ‘a much more complex, and perhaps more disconcerting, picture of the patterns of power’. Mills concludes that: ‘the BBC’s fabled impartiality was only ever an elite consensus’.
The BBC was born out of the need of markets to expand and parliament to control working class dissent. It began as a limited company set up in 1922 by the six largest radio manufacturers to create a market for their new patents. In these early years, lobbying by private media limited what news content could be broadcast. This changed in 1926 when, under the BBC’s future Director General John Reith, it acted as a propaganda service for the government to undermine the General Strike. It performed its role so successfully that in January 1927 it became the British Broadcasting Corporation under Royal Charter. Since then it has continued to successfully project the interests of the capitalist class as the interests of all people.
Selection and presentation
The BBC draws on ‘a tradition of propaganda not based on dissemination of falsehoods, but a strategic “selection and presentation” of information’. Most recently we’ve seen this bias in the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela, Palestine, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Mills shows that the BBC was never in any doubt about its role as a propaganda unit for the Brit ish government. Already in 1940, the board of directors considered the BBC ‘a vital war weapon – the most important after the armed forces’ (p81). In 1946, Ian Jacob – a former military officer, part of Winston Churchill’s inner circle during the Second World War and a future Director General of the BBC – as working with the BBC’s European Service. Jacob sought help from the Foreign Office on how to report on the Soviet Union. The Foreign Office included him in the Independent Research Department (IRD) which, in close collaboration with the BBC, would work to produce and distribute anti-communist propaganda internationally and spread anti-Soviet sentiment amongst the British left. Labour politician Christopher Mayhew was instrumental in setting up the IRD. Mills shows how the BBC World Service took over this role, collaborating with MI6 and GCHQ to broadcast imperialist propaganda internationally. The BBC currently reaches 308 million people worldwide. In 2015, the government invested £85m in the World Service, specifically directed at setting up new services broadcasting into North Korea, the Middle East and Russia. Current BBC Director General Tony Hall described the World Service as ‘one of our best sources of global influence’.
Stick to the script
Mills shows how the ethos of representing the interests of the ruling class has permeated every aspect of BBC culture, so that it is internalised by journalists who believe themselves to be ‘independent’.
To start with, the BBC had a secret policy of vetting influential staff with the aid of the intelligence agencies. This process, known as ‘formalities’, went undiscovered for decades. Staff deemed suspicious were rated A, B or C depending on the severity of their ‘subversion. Categories A and B were excluded from employment, while Cs were subjected to close monitoring and editorial controls. In the 1970s, during a period of greater leftist activity and deep capitalist crisis, 24% of staff were subject to these ‘formalities’. Government money was diverted from counter-terrorism to counter-subversion in the BBC. In 1985 the practice was officially discontinued, but the BBC still vets staff involved in wartime broadcasting and foreign nationals working in the World Service.
What exists now is a more subtle form of control. At the top of the BBC is a board made up of senior BBC managers, government appointees and other establishment figures. ‘Beneath them is a highly paid group of executives, disproportionately drawn from private schools and Oxbridge, who know that the BBC depends on governments for funding… Then there are the BBC’s senior political journalists, whose work defines the tone of its output. Fiona Bruce, Evan Davis, Mishal Husain, Laura Kuenssberg, Emily Maitlis and Nick Robinson are all paid upwards of £250,000 a year and, with the exception of Kuenssberg, all attended Oxbridge colleges. All this shapes the BBC’s collective sense of how political stories should be reported. . .and how competing claims of bias should be negotiated’.
In 1933 the BBC’s Colonel Alan Dawney met with MI5’s Brigadier Oswald Harker, and assured him that the BBC would promote the idea that ‘any political views which look upon the ballot box as the proper solution to their problems are reasonable’ and that anything else ‘is considered to be subversive if not seditious’. Mills describes the under-reporting of popular movements – such as CND in the 1980s, the miners’ strike in 1984/85, anti-war protesters in 2003 and any serious critics of austerity since 2008. Instead the news is dominated by talking heads from Westminster and analysed accordingly. This is particularly true, Mills argued, since the Thatcher years, marked by ideological hostility to the BBC, cowing it into an ever more right-wing and business friendly model with the appointment of John Birt in 1987.
Mills’ conclusions are weak – mainly expressed in the hope that online journalism can counter the undue influence of a BBC he has shown to be ‘neoliberal, pro-business and right-wing’. He cannot provide a broader analysis of the role played by the media in an imperialist state like Britain. But he has done a valuable job in exposing the pernicious role it plays as a propagandist for that state. It is our job to fight against these distortions and truly reflect the working class struggles going on in the world today.
Joe Smith
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 273 December 2019/January 2020
