"In Beeb we Trust"

The BBC is apparently so worried that a report on it's coverage of the Middle East conflict will be made public, that it has reportedly spent between ₤200,000 and ₤300,000 on legal fees to prevent it's release! The Balen Report, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2004 and written by a senior BBC editorial advisor (!) allegedly demonstrates that the BBC's coverage in recent years has been anti-Israeli.

BBC bosses have faced repeated claims that is coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been skewed by a pro-Palestinian bias.

The corporation famously came under fire after middle-east correspondent Barbara Plett revealed that she had cried at the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

If the BBC were not publicly funded and did not claim to be unbiased and independent, then it would not matter, but the fact remains that the BBC claims that it is impartial and therefore it's impact is greater than it would be otherwise. As the Beeb's own website states: "Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest".

While I find it interesting (and slightly Orwellian) that a news agency would value "trust" above "truth", this is consistent with Gramsci's brilliant analysis of how groups dominate in society without the need to resort to the threat of force. He called this "hegemony" and argued that it, "describes the process whereby ideas, structures, and actions come to be seen by the majority of people as wholly natural, preordained, and working for their own good, when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves those interests." Basically, it "controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society." [My Italics]

A prerequisite for hegemony to have an impact on society is trust. Without trust, people reject what they are being told, seek other sources of information and threaten the status quo. While Gramsci's critique was directed against the Italian Fascists that had imprisoned him, he would have had a field day with the BBC, a "quasi-autonomous public corporation" owned by the British government, run by a board appointed by the Queen (on the advice of the government) and paid for by taxes (license fees) collected from the public.

To understand how hegemony works in practice, one need only compare the BBC to such documentary films as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. Most people are media savvy enough to realise that even though they are watching a documentary, it is being edited to present a particular viewpoint. This does not mean to suggest that Moore fabricated any of the footage in these films, rather that both the juxtaposition of images and what he chose NOT to present is as important as what he does present to the viewer. Most people realize this because they know they are watching a "movie" and not witnessing real life.

In the case of the BBC, people are much more likely to suspend their disbelief, because news footage is often so raw. If you add in the element of trust, then people begin to confuse what they are seeing on their TVs as "reality". If the only footage of Africa that people see is one of famine, poverty and war and the only Middle East coverage always centers on Israel and never about the serious social problems of the other states of the region, then it is not surprising if one's attitude towards Africa is one of pity and dismay while Israel is perceived as the biggest threat to peace in the world. That the media could have such a profound effect was succinctly explained by Marshall McLuhan as the phenomenon commonly known as "The medium is the message." As McLuhan pointed out, crime reporting does not necessarily change the amount of crime, but it does change our attitude toward crime and even contribute to a culture of fear (a point well made in Bowling for Columbine.)

I think that there is another reason why the BBC pundits chose "trust" over "truth". It reflects a post-modern sensibility that eschews "simplistic" notions such as "truth" for the supposed "nuance" of relativism. The problem with this is that it is really a disarming technique that causes the reader to "trust" the reportage. What this supposedly nuanced approach accomplished is the illusion of balance. After all, how can the BBC be accused of "taking sides" if it does not believe that there really are "sides"?

Interestingly, in all my years of writing complaints to the BBC about their skewed and partial coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I have only received one e-mail in response. When I complained that an IRA "militant" was termed a "terrorist" and a PLO "terrorist" a "militant", I was told that this was not accidental. In fact, I was informed that the official BBC policy was that only members of the IRA were considered terrorists while everyone else were "just" militants! While this exchange pre-dated September 11, it certainly does not appear that the events of that tragic day have changed much at the Beeb. It also shows that there are more sides to the BBC than appear at first glance.