My eyes were opened, as a novice feminist (or, at least, a clunky budding ally of feminists), by the introduction into online social commentary of a simple concept.
#everydaysexism
And once I understood it, I could no longer unsee the #everydaysexism all around us.
This post is about #everydaybias, a very similar phenomenon.
The thing with #everydaystuff is that it’s arguably more pernicious than blatant rule infractions. So it sinks, largely unnoticed, into consciousness. We can easily spot the idiot narratives of men’s rights activists who think women belong in historically defined roles. It’s even quite easy to miss the underlying misogyny when Andrew Neil describes a journalist as ‘mad cat woman’. After all, it’s just a dispute about Brexit stuff, right?
And I spent a lifetime just not even noticing quiet background white noise like
#everydaystuff flies under the radar. There’s rarely anything to really grab onto when one example is taken in isolation. You couldn’t complain about Serena Williams’s motherhood being mentioned in a discussion about tennis while Andy Murray’s fatherhood doesn’t figure. Well, you could, but you already know what the response would be. It would include the words ‘true’ and probably ‘harmless’.
I don’t follow tennis and I somehow already knew that Serena Williams is a mother. But I just had to Google to discover that Andy Murray is a father (two daughters, apparently).
The power of #everydaystuff is huge. The #everydaysexism in public conversation about these two professional sportspeople previously left me in no doubt that Serena Williams has a uterus, whereas until this morning I had no idea whether or not Andy Murray produces living sperm.
So it is with the BBC’s #everydaybias.
Occasionally BBC bias is blatant, as the current backlash over Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce’s amplification of a right wing attack talking point on a senior Labour figure demonstrates. Here, the BBC spawned dozens of far right YouTube uploads within 24 hours of its mockery of Diane Abbott, who was correcting a demonstrable lie from Isabel Oakeshott. Labour and Conservatives are level-pegging or slightly ahead, in all polls except one, at the time of the broadcast (and this writing).
‘Bias’ alone is an unhelpful word, though. It doesn’t help us to really understand the root of the problem. So while many on the left are rightly calling this incident out, they seem to be assuming that Fiona Bruce is a Tory on the side of Oakeshott. For what it’s worth, I suspect the reality may be more banal than a conspiracy involving Fiona Bruce intentionally undermining the shadow Home Secretary for political reasons.
Fiona Bruce is a professional presenter, more than a journalist or political analyst. She is clearly articulate, confident, smart and apparently uncowed by bullshitting politicians. Coming from the Antiques Roadshow and Crimewatch to a ‘flagship’ news and current affairs format means demonstrating your credibility — especially, sadly, as a woman (the first ever in that seat). She hit the ground running, gloriously eviscerating Conservative deputy chairman James Cleverly one week before her poor handling of the Oakeshott-Abbott showdown. Enjoy.
I hope the BBC is big enough not to close ranks, as it usually does, on this incident. It requires an apology, including an acknowledgement from Fiona Bruce herself that she was wrong to amplify the false claims of Oakeshott.
There is an entire essay to be written on everything that’s wrong with BBC Question Time, packed as it is with political activists and encouraging adversarial get-nowhere point-scoring, but this post isn’t it.
So there I’ll leave it, because there is a more serious problem with the BBC than spats like this.
The bigger problem of #everydaybias on the BBC
On January 18th 2019 (the morning after that now infamous BBCQT broadcast) I heard the following brief item on the Radio 4 Today programme.
Presenter intro: A senior govt figure has suggested the speaker of the Commons John B might be denied a peerage when he retires. A cabinet source says ministers are furious about what they see as his bias during last week’s debates on Brexit.
A spokeswoman for Mr B has declined to comment. Here’s XXX.
Correspondent: Tradition dictates that retiring Commons speakers are automatically offered a seat in the House of Lords. But a cabinet source told me ‘It’s a good job that peerage nominations are in our gift. I’m sure we’ll be thinking carefully about which individuals we would choose to elevate to the House of Lords’.
Last week many ministers were furious with Mr Bercow, accusing him of shredding procedural precedent to accommodate MPs hoping to thwart the government’s plans for Brexit. The speaker said he’d made an honest judgement.
A fairly innocuous few seconds of news, on the surface. But arguably more damaging than even that BBCQT moment. Here’s why.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re quite heavily engaged with the ins and outs of current affairs. Most people are not. They receive their news by a process of osmosis. Repetition of key phrases (take control, anyone?), subliminally absorbing the headlines on newspapers they pass by in the supermarket but never purchase, noticing things casually. They’re not like you. They’re forming impressions, not analysing or weighing evidence between contradictory propositions.
I make my living exploiting this fact. By getting brands mentioned in the media as many times as I can. It works. It’s how me and clients measure whether I’m worth the day fee. I’m OK at it, clients grow as more people know about them and no one gets misled or hurt. But this also means I can see how political PR works and I notice it in action almost every single day on the BBC more than from any other broadcast source.
To understand #everydaybias you have to step back and imagine you’re that casual news consumer. What impression you get from the telling of a story in one way, rather than another. That’s the news consumer who’s voting, largely on the basis of vague impressions. That’s why, on the BBC’s World At One Programme later the same day I heard a guy vox popped in Sunderland say “when we won Brexit I thought we’d be out two or three days later and I don’t know why it’s taking so long”.
There is nothing technically untrue or biased in the reporter in question’s telling of that story, in itself. It is no doubt true that members of the Tory Brexit Taliban want to punish the Speaker of the House of Commons for allowing MPs to express an opinion which was inconvenient to a minority government.
What’s biased about it is that it was broadcast at all, in that format. This was an anonymous briefing designed to promote a sense that John Bercow is trying to ‘thwart Brexit’. There is no counterbalancing of that impression at all. I was struck by the subtle difference even I, as a news junkie, perceived from the audio and the words that I eventually transcribed.
Somehow, on the page, they were far more innocuous than what I had just heard. And that’s how it works. Bias, ministers’ fury, thwarting and Brexit versus the defensive ‘made an honest judgement’. Which of those terms have the rhetorical force — especially when spoken?
Imagine if that short piece had been written this this way:
Last week Ministers tried to prevent MPs from across the House of Commons expressing an opinion on their approach to Brexit. Now some of them are threatening to punish the Speaker, by withholding a traditional public honour, because he allowed them to speak.
Exactly the same story. Completely different narrative. Both true. But only one version broadcast.
The BBC could say every word in that report is true and they would be right.
That’s why #everydaybias continues. Like #everydaysexism. If you don’t honestly reflect on your own part in it, nothing will change.
Last year the BBC allowed itself to be used by Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott to get ahead of the story that it had broken the law during the 2016 referendum.
Before the Electoral Commission had even published this finding, Elliott was in print and on air giving his side of the story. A side that was ultimately dismissed as untrue anyway. But the damage was done. The imminent headlines about Vote Leave’s law-breaking were successfully pre-empted by a story casting doubt on the integrity of the Electoral Commission itself. Get your retaliation in first by ‘hitting back’ at an announcement that hasn’t yet been made. A real PR coup, in partnership with the BBC.
Many of us suspect that the revolving door between Downing Street and the BBC, used by senior BBC figures, probably accounts for some of this. And never underestimate the role of money. There is a history of threatening the BBC license fee settlement, unless it toes the Conservative line. Others argue, cogently, that the BBC’s terrible record of ‘false balance’ or “neutrality” is in fact an automatic deference to power. The sense I have is that all these factors are in play.
But, sadly, I suspect most of this #everydaybias at the BBC is more about competence than corruption. I’m sure it’s true that most of the BBC’s staff are not enthusiastically pro-Brexit or even pro-Conservative. They appear to be grinding out this stuff thoughtlessly, as it seems the journalist in the example above did with that little off-the-record briefing, that probably earned him a pat on the back from a producer for having deep contacts. That’s how it often is, in journalism.
I’m also sure that some of it is just hubris. The BBC is, after all, the nation’s most trusted news provider for 57% of us, at the last measure. It remains a brilliant producer of current affairs, in many ways. When I’m in the UK I avidly watch Newsnight. Even that sometimes infuriates me — such as with the ludicrous ‘Russianisation’ of Corbyn’s image — last year, in a stupidly tabloid studio backdrop. Despite the clearly poor editorial judgement this showed, of course the BBC denied any of it.
I’ve worked in busy news operations, including regional and network BBC. I know the pressure to turn around content, keep it ‘accessible’, understandable to ‘ordinary people’. I’ve been part of #everydaybias through gross oversimplification. These days I do PR. I know how both sides of this uneasy symbiotic relationship works.
The reason #everydaybias happens so much with the BBC in particular is precisely because of its standing. Vote Leave were never going to brief Channel 4 News that they were about to be held to account for law-breaking. Laura Kuenssberg was never going to turn down an exclusive about it, either. Sometimes there are perverse incentives at play between journalists and their contacts and the result is too often that we are invited to form a false impression.
Three years from its centenary, the BBC may be the most trusted news source in Britain but it also appears to be becoming the most reviled.
Addressing #everydaybias would go a long way toward restoring the trust of those who have turned their backs on it. But why would they? It’s popular, trusted by the majority and appears unwilling to address the problem.
I’m sticking with the mostly good bits (mainly radio output — generally excluding the Today programme, except on big news days — and Newsnight). The rest, I’m sorry to say, is too contaminated by pro-government spin or banal thoughtlessness — resulting in #everydaybias — to bother with.
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