When everyone thinks the media is biased against them, journalists are getting it right

I agree with David Herman, writing here on the subject of bias in the British media, on one point. Jon Snow’s remarks on Channel Four News about never having seen so many “white people” during coverage of a pro-Brexit rally were a little odd. But to draw this out into an argument that Britain needs a Commons-led probe into media bias against Brexit—no. That strikes me as an appalling idea. To have politicians casting judgement on the work of journalists would be to get the whole thing back to front.

As for the underlying charge that “the media” is biased against Brexit, well, in a sense, Herman is quite correct. The media has cast its eye over our attempted departure from the EU and found it to be a disaster. That strikes me as a pretty uncontroversial conclusion. I am sure even the most convinced Brexiteer would accept that the process could have been handled a little better than this.

After all, what else could the media say about Brexit? The floundering Prime Minister, the parliamentary logjam, the divided, splitting parties, the extraordinary characters and the terrible downward spiral of failure and disgrace, all of this is meat and drink to the press. Brexit is precisely the sort of thing journalists got into it for. Give them a target as rich and varied as this and of course they’ll sink their teeth in.

But that’s not evidence of any kind of “bias”. It’s the essential role of political journalism. It was Jeremy Paxman who got to the nub of it when he revealed the question that tolled in his mind like a bell when he interviewed all those politicians: “Why is this bastard lying to me?”

It has to be that way, because if it were any other way, we would arrive at an absurdity. Should it be the job of the media to stand aside and wave through the most significant political project of our times? Is it the job of the journalist to cheerlead the government’s business? Both questions, for me, contain their own answer.

But to leave aside the question of bias, there’s another issue, related but subtly different, which is the extent to which the media represents Britain and is indicative of British values. Brexit is especially problematic on that point, as it is itself the manifestation of a national split in those values—is the media representative of that 48:52 split? Does it represent one side of the divide and not the other?

For David Herman, the answer is clear. The media elevates the Remain view, he says, and it is instructive that his argument leans so heavily on the BBC. Were he to take a look down Fleet Street, his argument might come under strain. The Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sunday Times and Sun are all pro-Brexit. Nigel Farage is now an international media luvvy. Jacob Rees Mogg even does radio phone-ins, for heaven’s sake.

That’s a very healthy array of pro-Brexit media artillery, which you will often find wheeled out by Remainers as evidence of British media bias towards Brexit.  When you see the face of Boris Johnson once again spread across the front page of the Telegraph on a Monday morning, the point does seem to gain some force.

That force is multiplied several times over by the residual pain many Remainers feel about not only losing the referendum, but also at having been so utterly trounced in the campaign media war. They fought and lost. Badly. And so the explanation of some deep, un-seen bias forms, as the only possible reason that they could have lost. Of course, it’s not true. Just as it’s not true that there is some deep unseen media bias that’s working against Brexit, and preventing its success.

We have a situation in which Remainers think the media is biased against them, and Leavers think the same. This suggests to me that we have found a happy medium. If both sides feel equally hard done-by, then an equilibrium has been achieved. That’s to be welcomed.

We have a whole host of problems in the UK media, but Brexit bias is not one of them. Certainly, there is bad journalism out there. But my overriding lesson from 20 years of doing this is that the reading public is less easily swayed than you might think. They can spot the rubbish from a mile off, just as they can hear a point of view with which they disagree without blubbing. So even if there were bias either this way or that, I’m not sure it would have much effect anyway. Could a newspaper column or episode of Question Time change your mind about Brexit?

There’s no media bias against Brexit. A flawed, ill-thought-out process has been scrutinised and shown to be a mess. But the scrutiny didn’t cause the mess. The mess was there to start with. If there is an enquiry to be had, it should focus on that.