The day before Caroline Hawley’s report (see post immediately below) the Guardian carried a piece by Peter A. Hall, Krupp Foundation professor of European studies at Harvard University, about the BBC. Hall expressed a worry that the independence of ‘a British institution that is the envy of the world’ – its independence from government pressure and influence – might now be under threat. Writing as ‘an outside observer’, he suggested that:
A foreign perspective has some value. Although the US press is widely said to have been docile in the face of the Iraq invasion, it has been full of sceptical reporting about the claims of the Bush administration.
I write as someone who (a) highly values the BBC when taken all in all; and (b) has until recently only ever had one major gripe about it, and this was over its coverage of the Miners’ Strike 20 years ago. So I don’t start out with some fixed prejudice or hostility towards it. But I wish that just one of these recurrent dnoc pieces in defence of the BBC’s independence, as well as making the routine points about its having, quite rightly and properly, to pose challenging questions to spokespersons of the government and so forth, would at least register some of the key points on the other side of the issue and try to meet them.
1. The BBC was – is – widely perceived as not being even-handed as between pro- and anti-war opinion over the Iraq war. The issue is not about its questioning of government policy; it’s about its taking a partisan stance on a matter which has divided the nation and the world; about its not posing similarly tough questions to the anti-war camp, not being sufficiently independent of that.
2. This worry is made more serious by the fact of the licence fee. For if the worry is well-grounded, then many of us paid to support a supposedly impartial public organization aligning itself with a campaign that would have left a genocidal tyrant in power had it been successful. Naturally, that is not a use of the licence fee we find welcome.
Bobbie, at Politx has a long, informative and, to my eye, judicious piece (A very long post about ‘media bias’) about the political complexion of the British media. On the subject of the Beeb, he writes:
In the last year especially, the BBC has come in for huge criticism from many quarters – particularly over perceived bias in its coverage of the Iraq conflict.
But Bobbie offers no judgement on the merits or otherwise of this criticism.