BBC admits Brexit bias but fails to acknowledge its ideology

Briefings for Britain this week contains an article by D Keighley of  News-Watch (mentioned a couple of times in this blog) which has been monitoring BBC output for years and continually argued for the existence of evidence based on various simple measures of bias. They have also been continually dismissed, usually by the BBC loftily claiming that the professional judgement of its broadcasters outweighs any mere academic analysis by outsiders. They are nice people, how can they be biased?

This time it is different (nearly):

On 4 June, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) partially upheld a News-watch complaint about an item broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme on 15 November 2024.  This is the first time that the BBC has formally accepted that one of our complaints about the impartiality of its Brexit coverage was justified. 

BBC Europe correspondent Katya Adler reported that [The Governor of the Bank of England, A Bailey]  had claimed that Brexit was one of the main reasons why the British economy was not performing as well as it could. Two guests were then invited to discuss his allegation: Sir John Gieve, a former deputy governor of the Bank, and Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and chairman of the Business and Trade Select Committee.

Both men broadly accepted Bailey’s diagnosis. The discussion then moved towards the same policy conclusion: Britain should reduce friction with the EU and pursue closer alignment....No guest was present to argue that Britain’s economic difficulties might instead be addressed by using more energetically the freedoms gained through Brexit.

The ECU [Executive Complaints Unit] accepted part of the complaint.... the competing arguments — closer EU alignment or greater exploitation of opportunities outside the EU — were “so clearly a controversial matter” that Today should at least have acknowledged the alternative. Its failure to do so fell below the BBC’s standards of impartiality. 

However, the ECU then defended the BBC against the charge of systematic bias, using an old argument we have seen before, voiced famously by none other than Emily Maitlis:

that Bailey’s diagnosis was broadly correct. This, [the Head of ECU] argued, reflected the predominant view among economists, and he had found no significant [NB] body of opinion maintaining that Brexit’s economic effect so far had been beneficial or even neutral....a BBC spokesman insisted that the BBC itself had “no view” on Brexit’s impact and was merely explaining the economic consensus.

 In response, Keighley points out that:

The BBC says it has no view, while granting one side of a contested argument the status of an authoritative consensus which need not be seriously challenged. That is not neutrality. It is a highly biased  editorial judgement about which claims count as established and which may be treated as marginal.

Brexit is not a controlled experiment. Its economic consequences cannot be isolated with scientific precision from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy prices, inflation, interest rates, taxation, regulation, migration, political instability or the decisions of successive British governments. The headline estimates most frequently cited are produced by counterfactual models comparing actual performance with an imagined Britain that remained inside the EU.

Such models may be useful, but they are not observable facts. Their assumptions can be disputed, and they cannot determine how Britain might have performed had governments pursued different tax, energy, regulatory or trade policies after leaving.

Indeed, Sir John Gieve himself acknowledged during the Today discussion that measuring Brexit’s impact was “extremely difficult” and that economic models were not good at measuring large shocks. That caveat ought to have encouraged rigorous questioning. Instead, it was submerged beneath an editorial structure that moved smoothly from “Brexit has caused damage” to “closer alignment is the remedy”....

Keighley gets close to a general understanding of ideology as a whole structure of argument, often not conscious, but assumed as normal judgement: 

skewed framing: the premise chosen for discussion, the credentials accorded to particular sources, the selection of guests, the questions not asked and the range of policy solutions deemed respectable.

 Keighley points out that 'There is, of course,  a substantial alternative argument advanced by rafts of economists'. As I said, in my rebuke to Maitlis, the BBC need  only to have looked at W Keegan in the Guardian, fer Chrissake, let alone edition after edition of Briefings for Brexit as it then was.

There is another disturbing aspect of the case: unexplained delay. Normally, the rules of the BBC complaints process stipulate completion within months...The ECU identified the imbalance only at the point of remedy. It failed to recognise that the diagnosis had already been framed in a manner which disadvantaged the Brexit case.

 Again, a classic procedure -- masterly inaction, characteristic of the whole Professional Managerial Class,usually clearly combined with eventual admissions of personal incompetence, lapses of judgement, and subsequent apology but never recognition of systematic ideology. As Lukacs said, generations ago -- the bourgeoisie literally cannot think of alternatives to their worldviews.