Questions of Trust at the BBC
Faked Contests and Alleged Institutional Bias
We should be careful not to confuse criticisms of the BBC's editorial stance with the recent scandals over the apparent faking of contests.
“Trust” is a word being bandied about a lot in the media recently, but unusually not being aimed at politicians. After an internal report described the BBC’s general “left-wing bias”, the corporate self-flagellation had barely finished when a series of scandals broke over the apparent faking of call-in competitions. One was even on the BBC’s decades-old children’s show Blue Peter – it was like finding Heidi herding stolen goats.
Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, gave an interview in which he announced an inquiry, hinted that jobs might be lost over the scandal, and stated that BBC employees would be sent on integrity training courses. (This last announcement in particular failed to reassure anyone who already thought the BBC prone to indulging in namby-pamby lefty PC nonsense.) Meanwhile, as other television production companies were variously busted for faking call-ins and generally bringing the profession into disrepute, The Edinburgh Television Festival held a session called “Trust me, I’m in TV”, and Jeremy Paxman gave his opinions on the subject to an assembly of executives during the McTaggart Lecture. Tim Hinks, Creative Director of Endemol, the company which produced the Big Brother franchise, compared the gathering to a “family coming back home to discuss a crisis”
However, it’s important not to conflate the general issues with trust in TV at the moment, with the accusations that the BBC is institutionally biased towards a leftist agenda (or, if you listen to Jimmy McGovern, that it is “institutionally racist”.) There are disagreements over so-called “committed” journalism advocated by ex-BBC reporter Martin Bell, and criticised by the Corporation’s Head of World Affairs John Simpson. There are arguments to be had over which groups should be reported as “terrorist” and which as “rebels”.
But these are not equivalent with an inquiry into who sanctioned a producer’s relative pretending to be a phone-in quiz contestant. The first two concern the BBC’s potential to affect perceptions of a situation, the latter an attempt to leave the perceptions as they are, whilst the mechanics are faked. It may seem like a sliding scale, and one which can easily be bracketed under the term “trust”, but it blurs an important distinction.
In his McTaggart Lecture, one of the charges Jeremy Paxman levelled at the television industry was that too few people were asking what television was for, and too many asking how much money could be made from it. Those who accuse the BBC of institutional political bias do at least dignify it with having asked the right question.
