It is time for a parliamentary enquiry into bias in the British media
Well, who’d have thought it? The answer is anyone who has followed Jon Snow’s career at Channel 4 News.
More than 2,000 people have complained after Snow said of a pro-Brexit rally outside owning Street that he had ‘never seen so many white people’. ‘It’s been the most extraordinary day,’ he said, signing off from last Friday’s programme. ‘I have never seen so many white people in one place, it’s an extraordinary story.’
What was he thinking? A spokeswoman for Channel 4 News said: ‘This was an unscripted observation at the very end of a long week of fast-moving Brexit developments’. This was a totally inadequate response. The implication of Snow’s remarks was that pro-Brexit demonstrators are disproportionately white and that this is worthy of comment. Why? Anyone who saw footage of the latest (and much larger) pro-Referendum rally will have noticed that this was just as disproportionately white as the much smaller pro-Brexit demonstration, but Snow would never have dreamt of commenting about that. Social media on that day was full of jokey references comparing pro-Remain marchers to people who shop at Waitrose. There is a general assumption that Remainers are more liberal, more at ease in a diverse society and better off, while Brexiteers are supposedly more right-wing, white and less well-off. Rather than investigating these assumptions, Snow was happy to repeat them uncritically. Could the spokeswoman’s reference to Snow’s ‘unscripted observation’ imply that he is a loose cannon when off auto-cue? Now in his 70s, Snow is one of the most experienced TV news presenters. If anyone could be trusted to report responsibly on a live event it should be Snow. Apparently not.
Not surprisingly, the latest accusations of liberal bias against Snow have arisen as temperatures rise over Brexit. The country is bitterly divided and accusations are flying all over the place. Only recently, on Radio 4’s Today programme, Jim Naughtie made an extraordinary comparison between the ERG in the Conservative Party and the French Front National and the AfD in Germany, both racist, extreme right-wing parties.
At the Labour Party conference in October 2017 it was claimed that the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, had to have a bodyguard after sexist trolling on social media from pro-Corbyn leftists. James Kirkup wrote an article for Spectator Coffee House on ‘What the threat to Laura Kuenssberg says about the country we live in’.
More generally, though, the BBC has been accused of anti-Brexit bias since the Referendum. In October 2017 The Sun wrote, ‘The BBC hates Brexit so much it has four times more pro-EU guests on its flagship politics shows than those who voted Leave’. Last year, The Daily Express ran a piece called ‘BBC Brexit BIAS row: Fury over two THIRDS of guests on flagship shows being anti-Leave’, referring to ‘a new damning report’ by the Institute of Economic Affairs ‘which shows that two thirds of guests on BBC Question Time and Any Questions over the last two years have been anti-Brexit.’ That same month The Sun printed a report by another think-tank, Civitas, which claimed that ‘of 4,275 guests on Today between 2005 and 2015 who talked about the EU, only 132 were Brexiteers’.
This isn’t just about the BBC’s Brexit coverage. I have repeatedly asked BBC News programmes to be more transparent about which guests feature most often, why programmes like Newsnight and Politics Live so often feature speakers from the Far Left and how often do they give proper air-time to right-wing journalists or organisations? Thanks to Wikipedia, it is possible to find out this kind of information for Question Time, but BBC News and Current Affairs is like the Kremlin when it comes to trying to uncover basic information about guests on their flagship programmes.
I stopped watching Question Time when I saw Emily Thornberry allowed to make her points uninterrupted, but when James Cleverly spoke he was interrupted constantly by Fiona Bruce. The Daily Express ran a piece two days later which claimed that she ‘annoyed Brexiteers when she interrupted deputy chairman of the Conservative Party James Cleverly 20 times during Thursday evening’s debate show, while butting in on Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry only 11 times’.
The 54-year-old allowed Ms Thornberry 10 minutes and 22 seconds to put her points across while Mr Cleverly was given six minutes and 32 seconds. Viewers also noticed the difference between the amount of time given to anti-Brexit audience members as opposed to those in favour of the UK leaving the EU.
Naughtie on the Today programme, Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, Fiona Bruce on Question Time, guests from Novara Media on daily news programmes… There seems to be a pattern here and the BBC and Channel 4 News seem reluctant to provide clear information which might refute these allegations of different kinds of bias. It is time for a parliamentary enquiry into these questions. Our news broadcasters must be seen to be completely impartial, especially at a time when the country is so fiercely divided over Brexit.
