Radio 4′s Media Show took on the issue of how the BNP should be reported, with debate between Mehdi Hassan of the New Statesman and Ric Bailey, chief adviser on politics for the BBC. (Listen again link on this page, starts around 7:50, the listener’s email came from me, and that’s not how you say my name…)
The conversation was sharply focussed, and Hassan effectively undermined Bailey’s defence of the Newsbeat broadcast: the point about “Joey and Mark” being senior BNP activists (rather than just ”young supporters” as Newsbeat identified them as) was well made, and so was the explanation of NUJ guidelines on covering the BNP.
What disappointed, though, was how impervious Bailey appeared to be to criticism. When Hassan points out that the interviewees claimed Ashley Cole wasn’t born here, Bailey retorts:
I don’t think he did say that
– which is true in the very narrow sense that neither interviewee used that exact phrase, and otherwise completely false. In the transcript, Smith says,
If he [Ashley Cole] wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that’s fine
clearly (and wrongly) implying that Ashley Cole was born outside the UK.
Bailey stuck grimly to the ideas that “the listeners can make up their own minds” and “the BBC cannot make judgements about the BNP in a way that is inconsistent with the way it treat other parties”. Neither of which in any way diminishes the corporations’s responsibility to challenge misleading statements, or excuses the broadcast of hate-feeding listener comments in response to the interview.
Ultimately, Bailey largely repeated what was fallacious in Rod McKenzie’s answer: he defended the need to report on the BNP, without acknowledging the ways in which a specific instance of that reporting can be flawed. Like Hassan, I’m not an advocate of “no platform”. The BNP, their policies and their member’s activities should all be challenged and debated in public. But the default assumption in much of the media seems to be that any platform can be acceptable journalism – even one as feeble and cosseting as the Newsbeat item.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
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