When Neutrality Becomes A Lie: The BBC’s Credibility Crisis
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(OPINION) “News as we have hitherto known it has died and been laid to rest.”
So wrote illustrious former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, ending his autobiography, “War and the Death of News.” He was not writing the BBC’s obituary, but he could have been. No, he was arguing that the BBC no longer knew the difference between fairness and neutrality. Fairness was the “bedrock of good journalism,” he argued.
But neutrality?
“Neutrality is a snare and a delusion. It makes no judgements. It stands aside at an equal distance between good and evil.”
The Trump “Panorama” scandal could also be a result of this delusion, possibly heralding at worst the end of the world’s first and finest broadcaster.
What happened in the editing suite at the BBC’s flagship current affairs program was the manufacture of pure propaganda, through the splicing of different bits of a long speech, to fit a pre-conceived narrative.
This was no “error of judgement” — as the BBC’s extraordinarily feeble Chairman Samir Shah said later — as if it were a blip.
On such a matter, “error” as to whether the democratically-elected leader of the free world incited a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol was always outside the bounds of judgement.
Judging is what you have to do as between two presentations of the same fact. You do not need to judge between truth and obvious untruth — and mangling footage that spoke of “peacefully” marching to make it look like incitement to violence was obviously untrue.
The ruling elite, from whom the BBC recruits, have lost a sense that truth exists and it matters. It is out there as something to be sought and found, something to inform the facts you select for broadcast or reportage.
For the culture at large, truth is now what the strongest say it is — and perhaps we have our leaders to blame for setting such a poor example. Truth has become merely a power struggle, and the media are awash with conspiracy theories. Not surprising when our neural pathways are being forged on the wild frontiers of social media.
Truth for both left and right has become “what I say it is,” often a shameless bluff that is the more abhorrent in a culture that grew out of empiricism. For the Calvinists, everything that happened could be trusted as some manifestation of the divine purpose.
Journalism grew on the back of the excitement of reading the signs of the times in creation events. As Calvin himself said: “Always bear in mind that there is no random power, or agency or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed.”
For cultures and worldviews that have no grasp of the connection between Providence and empirical truth, truth itself becomes negotiable.
I experienced something of this myself in the 1980s. A keen young reporter on a daily paper, I’d been given a brand new brief — reporting race relations in a small town in the home counties. The local Council for Racial Equality were happy with my successful campaigning for a community centre for the Afro-Caribbean population that had settled in this railway town from different West Indian islands. I certainly enjoying learning about their cultures, and most of my friends were black as a result.
Then a young Black boy was stabbed to death by a white skinhead, and suddenly race relations in this insignificant town warranted daily headlines. A race march was planned. It was a big running story, and I got a new angle, as they say: The elders of the community had decided to boycott the march, fearing more trouble.
Without informing me, the political left, who ran the CRE, called a public meeting in the old town hall, at which I was defamed and denounced and reported me to the Press Complaints Commission for racism. I was just 26.
I faced “cancellation” before the term had even been invented.
My shorthand notebooks had to be handed in, and it was nine months of uncertainty as I awaited the PCC “judgement” on whether I still had a career.
I was exonerated completely, and the CRE was forced to apologize. The paper carried the story and we celebrated with a party. My editor had backed me all along.
But it was only later that the leader of the CRE told me, smirking: “But Jenny, don’t you know that Blacks are the vanguard of the revolution?”
This infamous epithet was a quote of the Black Panthers, the African American revolutionaries who were bent on violent overthrow of capitalist America.
I was being used as a pawn in a political game whose rules I’d never been told. I’d got in the way of the revolution, and the story must be discredited. Whatever my own innocent motivation, this was far left politics: A case of “truth is what we say it is.”
And Shah should know. He took over as chairman of the Runnymede Trust in 1999, just two years after publication of its infamous “Islamophobia Report,” which set in writing the aspiration of those British Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood members of the Muslim Council of Britain and others to drive a wedge between mainstream integrating Muslims and the politically ambitious others. They would use anything to deny critics the right to address those aspects of Islam that are incompatible with Western culture, and which should indeed, make us afraid.
To understand this is religious literacy. Religious literacy accepts that all denominations and faiths have different trajectories and different outcomes. Christians must be innocent as doves and wise as serpents as we pick our way through this minefield in coming days, as Jesus himself did as he commended the Good Samaritan, and lambasted the hypocritical truth-deniers who were to crucify him.
We must laud the abundant good work of much of the Beeb, while being unafraid to keep swimming against the tide of cheap political wins by those bad actors who influence it, and who have done so much for so long to destroy our Christian heritage.
Dr. Jenny M .Taylor is a career journalist and Associate Fellow in Media, Communication and Journalism at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge. She founded Lapido Media after the 7/7 Tube bombings, to work with mainstream journalists on religious literacy. Her book Saving Journalism: The Rise, Demise and Survival of the News is published by Pippa Rann Books. You can read more about her here.