Dear Director General, Who Wants Today's Papers?
Julian Petley writes an open letter to the incoming Director-General of the BBC warning him that the right-wing press wish him nothing but ill
Dear Director-General,
I wonder if, before you decided to take your new job, you’d thought about how the BBC’s sworn enemies in the right-wing press had treated your predecessors – and how they might treat you? And, if so, whether you’ve formulated any plans to deal with them? Obviously you can’t do anything about the truly dire state of this section of the national press – indeed, even Lord Justice Leveson was blocked and thwarted in this respect – but there’s actually a good deal you could do when it comes to relations between these papers and the BBC.
Let me give you some advice.
The first thing to do is to is to acquaint yourself with the long history of these papers’ bleak hostility to the very existence of the BBC. Good places to start would include Michael Leapman’s The Last Days of the Beeb (1987), Tom O’Mally’s Closedown? (1994) and the BBC’s own official historian Jean Seaton’s Pinkoes and Traitors (2017).
This should be enough to convince you that what these papers, and the forces that they represent, want, is nothing short of the destruction of the BBC. This is partly for commercial reasons – the BBC stands in the way of their commercial ambitions – and partly because it’s a public institution, and, as such, an affront to their ‘free market’ dogma. Worse still, it’s perceived to be an institution steeped in liberal values, and this puts it utterly beyond the ideological pale as far as they’re concerned. In this respect, the fact that you were until very recently a non-executive director of Guardian Media Group and have been director of strategy and digital at Trinity Mirror has already put a target on your back. Anyway, there’s no point whatsoever in trying to mollify them.
One of the main reasons why most of these papers increasingly support Reform UK is that they are savouring, with lip-smacking relish, the prospect of an incoming Reform Government, inspired by Trump’s ‘executive actions’, utilising the wealth of discretionary powers available to it to abolish the BBC at the stroke of a pen.
That there are, apparently, those within the BBC who regard the prospect of such a Government with equanimity simply beggars belief.
So, what can you actually do about the way in which the BBC deals with its enemies in the right-wing press? The first and most obvious thing is to stop giving them hours of airtime on both television and radio. I’m referring, of course, to news programmes in which headlines from national newspapers are read out. I deliberately didn’t use the term ‘news headlines’ as, in many cases, these aren’t news stories at all, but front-page opinion pieces in what are, to all intents and purposes, ‘viewspapers’. Of course, this doesn’t apply to every national title, since papers such as the Financial Times, Guardian, Independent and The i Paper are scrupulous about separating news and views, facts and opinions.
However, the BBC makes not the slightest attempt to balance out newspapers and viewspapers on these programmes, and on the days on which the right-wing press pack is in full cry – over, for example, Angela Rayner’s tax affairs or Keir Starmer and ‘beergate’ – one is treated to what is simply an endless barrage of right-wing propaganda and misinformation.
Worse still, the BBC news agenda itself increasingly follows that of the right-wing press; not so much in the way that it covers stories but in the stories that it chooses to cover.
Is the BBC actually incapable of understanding that many of these stories are published only because they fuel those papers’ political and ideological agendas? That, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Baldwin, these are ‘not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term’? Certainly, they do absolutely nothing to serve the public interest, which, according to Fourth Estate principles, is the proper function of journalism, and indeed of public service broadcasting.
In this respect, you might also like to familiarise yourself with the extraordinarily low levels of trust in the papers to which the BBC gives so much airtime. Highly reputable surveys by organisations such as Eurobarometer and the European Broadcasting Union have repeatedly shown that Britons trust their national press far less than the citizens of other European countries trust theirs, and in the most recent World Values Survey carried out by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, the UK press came next to last in terms of trustworthiness on a geographically far wider scale.
However, such studies, though significant, tell us little about degrees of trust in individual newspapers in the UK. For this you should turn to research carried out the Reuters Institute and, in particular, a detailed YouGov survey in which the right-wing press (with the exception of The Times) has extremely low net scores on trust (that is, the number of people who trust a media organisation minus the number of people who don’t). Thus: The Sun (-53), the Daily Mail (-37), The Express (-31) and the Daily Telegraph 0, the lowest score among the papers in its ‘broadsheet’ market segment. Top scorers are the Financial Times (+30), The Independent (+16) and The Guardian (+15). Incidentally, the BBC scores +22.
Now, one answer would be to broadcast the headlines of news stories only from trusted papers, but that would involve the BBC in normative judgements which it most certainly would not want to make, and which would cause an even greater furore on the part of the culprits than my suggestion – namely, to stop broadcasting press headlines altogether.
Instead let’s have a weekly programme, modelled on Granada’s What the Papers Say or Channel 4’s Hard News, in which the week’s news is discussed critically by reputable journalists such as Ray Snoddy, media analysts such as Claire Enders and journalism academics who specialise in analysing the written press, such as those working at Cardiff and Loughborough Universities. And perhaps the BBC’s excellent Media Show could also have a regular slot for critical discussion of press stories.
This brings me on to the presence of right-wing newspaper journalists on BBC programmes, and in particular on current affairs panels. This is not, of course, to argue that such people should be excluded, but simply to make the point that (a) they shouldn’t be over-represented, as they currently are; and (b) that serious journalists should be preferred over mere pundits, opinion-mongers and professional controversialists.
On over-representation, have a look at Cardiff University’s excellent analysis of the most frequent appearances of panellists on Question Time 2014-2023 which demonstrates the remarkable predominance of right-wing press journalists, with Isabel Oakeshott and Julia Hartley-Brewer (both 13), Tim Stanley (12) and Camilla Tominey (10). These all fall into the pundit category and, furthermore, are not balanced by one single journalist from a left-leaning newspaper.
And this brings me on to a related issue, namely the BBC’s inexplicable indulgence of those who wish it nothing but ill. I’m thinking particularly here of Times columnist Melanie Phillips, who is a regular panellist on The Moral Maze and Question Time and who has openly called for the BBC to be defunded on the grounds that it ‘embodies a hermetically-sealed thought system’ and ‘has betrayed its core Charter principles of truth and fairness and is a disgrace to journalism’.
Then there’s Baron Moore of Etchingham, former editor of both Daily and Sunday Telegraphs and The Spectator and still a regular columnist for all three, being invited to edit an edition of Today in 2019, even though he had at one time dedicated a Telegraph column, ‘Beebwatch’, purely to attacking the BBC and was once fined for not paying the licence fee. One could also add to the list not only Nigel Farage (now paid £4,000 a month by the Telegraph for his columns), with his nearly 40 appearances on Question Time, but the steady stream of Reform MPs and apparatchiks cropping up on BBC panels even though Reform is determined to abolish the BBC. There’s only one word for the BBC indulging its sworn enemies in this fashion: masochism.
Survey after survey shows that the BBC is still a highly trusted news source, and in the current media environment trustworthiness is a crucial and intensely valuable quality. Exemplary services such as BBC Verify play a vital role in piercing the fog of mis- and dis-information (which is, of course, why they’re regularly attacked by the right-wing press, and particularly the Telegraph). That’s why it’s so regrettable that the BBC pollutes its own channels with the kind of non- and even anti-journalism that I’ve discussed in this letter.
So my advice is: don’t worry what the right-wing press says about the BBC, as they won’t rest until it’s abolished. Clear out the BBC’s newsrooms of the right-wing rags that I see piled up everywhere when I visit. Spend generously on building up your own journalistic workforce. And train it to adhere to the journalistic values proper to the Fourth Estate, of which public service broadcasting is a key expression.
I wish you every luck in your new job. You’re certainly going to need it, and we certainly need you to protect the BBC from its enemies, and not simply in sections of the press.
Yours sincerely,
Julian Petley
Julian Petley is Honorary and Emeritus Professor of Journalism in the Department of Social and Political Science at Brunel University, London.
Letters to Matt Brittin: The New Director-General of the BBC will be published by Bite-Sized Books at the end of April
Very well said. But there's another subtle point in the way the BBC presents news. Regardless of whether it's actually parroting print media headlines, it still allows that media to set the news agenda; it doesn't seem to make it's own choices of what topics to cover, what priority to give them, and how to frame them. It's actually in a strong enough position to develop its own news agenda, and if it did there's a good chance the rest of the media might start to follow its lead. It needs the confidence of its convictions.
Needed said. The BBC may have brought us Brexit and Vladimir Putin as string puller in chief.