Dispatches filmaker criticises Newsbeat

13 October, 200913 October, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum

The director of the Young, Nazi And Proud documentary has commented on BBC Newsbeat’s handling of the BNP. David Modell met Mark Collett in 2002 and recorded him expressing admiration for Hitler and the Nazis, hatred of black people, and “twisted homicidal fantasies”. Modell is severely critical of the level of preparation and standard of questioning shown by the BBC’s journalists:

“Mark and Joey” would have loved the broadcast interview. Their roles in the party were never explained to the listener, so they were able to appear simply as representative party members. Collett’s confession of Nazi sympathies was never even referred to.

The interview was typical of the sometimes flawed reporting of the BNP when the BBC engages its representatives in mainstream broadcasts. The BNPs heritage of neo-nazism and position in the “white supremacist” movement is often not understood by poorly briefed reporters, who conduct interviews in a format designed for credible politicians.

In the case of the Newsbeat interview the lack of depth is even more inexcusable as this was clearly prerecorded and edited, so there should have been time for proper research and scrutiny.

I would never argue that we should not allow the BNP airtime. But reporting the organisation has to be done with great care because of the distress and damage it has the potential (and the will) to cause. Failure to do so risks collaborating in the dissemination of a destructive hatred.

Channel 4 News, “D ispatches: Young, Nazi and Proud”

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

More pressure on the BBC over Newsbeat BNP feature

12 October, 200912 October, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 1 Comment

Newsbeat BNP grab Newsbeat’s dereliction of editorial responsibility in reporting the BNP has become a story in its own right. Both Welsh secretary Peter Hain and shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt have criticised the BBC, and the Mail On Sunday made it their front page yesterday. (Roy Greenslade gives more background on the development of the story on his blog.)

So far, the BBC has failed totally to offer an acceptable response to this lapse. Both the editor of Newsbeat and the BBC’s chief politics adviser have defended a piece of journalism so weak it amounted to little more than handing the airwaves to senior BNP members for them to expound fallacious and hateful opinions. Clearly, this is inadequate journalism, and it demonstrates a serious flaw in the way BBC News has interpreted its commitment to truth and accuracy.

The BBC Trust has just opened a public consultation on the corporation’s editorial guidelines. That means the Trust is waiting to hear from viewers and listeners about issues like Newsbeat’s lousy interviewing – if you fill out the questionnaire, I’d recommend paying special attention to section one on “Accuracy and Impartiality”. If you love the Beeb like Charlie Brooker and would do “anything to keep it running”, this is probably better than mass murder as a way of addressing one of those “dumb things” the corporation sometimes does.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

The Media Show on reporting the BNP

7 October, 20097 October, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 4 Comments

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

Unsatisfaction: Newsbeat and the BNP

6 October, 20096 October, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 5 Comments

The first formal response in any complaints procedure is the “disappointing brush-off”. My brush-off from Newsbeat arrived yesterday. Understandably, it’s a form email designed to cover all the objections received to the BNP interviews. Less understandably, the reply only refers to the radio version of the story: my complaint was specifically addressed to the online transcript.

On the 853 blog, Daryl points out that this shows a failure to understand the difference between radio and internet journalism:

what Rod McKenzie and his team at Newsbeat need to realise that while radio is a wonderful, intimate medium, it is transient. That lovingly-crafted audio piece will be forgotten next week. But that lazily slapped-up Q&A with the two “young BNP members” will still be there next week. And the week after. And next year. And it carries the BBC logo, so people around the world will think this is quality journalism – slurring the many excellent reporters I worked with in my decade there.

853, “BBC’s website cosies up to bigots”

Furthermore, my complaint was about two specific instances in which the BNP’s false and bigoted reasoning was allowed to stand as fact: the false analogy between species and race, and the untruth about Ashley Cole’s birthplace. It wasn’t a blanket objection to coverage of the BNP. But Rod McKenzie’s reply doesn’t address those issues, it only asserts that Newsbeat has a duty to cover the BNP – which is puzzling, given that I never claimed otherwise.

It’s confounding to be presented with an editor who seems unable to acknowledge that, as well as deciding whether or not to cover an issue, his journalists have the capacity to cover something well or (as in this case) very badly indeed. McKenzie presents editing in this email as a matter of inclusion or omission, not quality control.

Underlining the slightly patronising tone is McKenzie’s expectation that those who complain about the piece would be shocked to discover that the BNP has support: “This may surprise you, but a great many texts we received yesterday – were broadly supportive of the BNP.” (It’s the dash he slips in to anticipate my astonished pause that really aggravates me here.) Whereas it’s that kind of positive reaction to the propagandising Newsbeat interview that many of the complainants will have anticipated, and feared.

After the jump: McKenzie’s reply in full Continue reading →

BBC fails on BNP: AVERT PANDICIDAL CRARROW CRISIS NOW!

3 October, 200912 October, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 8 Comments

BBC journalism often excels its commercial rivals. For detail, depth and balance, it’s easily my preferred source on many stories. Within a year, we’re very likely to have a Conservative government which has already declared itself hostile to the BBC; as Johann Hari points out, it’s probably more important than ever that the BBC’s supporters proclaim its strengths as often as they can.

It’s also more important than ever for the BBC to display those strengths. But this Newsbeat interview with two BNP activists shows that the corporation is as capable of slack, sloppy, damaging journalism as any other organisation. Roy Greenslade goes over the major flaws in his media column for the Guardian, but it comes down to a willingness to accept and republish BNP beliefs on their own terms, rather than do the dirty work of challenging them.

When the two activists compare white British people with endangered species such as the giant panda, interviewer Debbie Randle timorously suggests, “But we’re the same species which makes it a bit different, doesn’t it?” The BNP supporters reply with:

You could say that but if all of a sudden there weren’t any sparrows and there were only crows, I’d still be sad there weren’t any sparrows.

This not only fails to address Randle’s wholly accurate comment about species, it also repeats the fallacy by using two different species to represent white people in opposition to people of all other races (who are the crows here, presumably because BNP voters think Dumbo is a good treatment of racial politics). Randle doesn’t ask what would happen if the crows and the sparrows were able to mate and breed, or how the crows are going to kill the pandas. The reiterated statement is allowed to pass, and then published unchallenged on the BBC website.

According to the bit.ly link, this article was originally titled “Young BNP members explain beliefs”. It now appears as “BNP members challenged on beliefs” – suggesting that someone in the editorial process realised that inviting the BNP to “explain” their racism really wasn’t going to pass as a probing piece of journalism.

However, the journalist responsible seems to consider her work acceptable – on the left is a screengrab of a Twitter update, in which she suggests that it’s unfair to judge the interview on the basis of the edited version on the website.

And her editor, Rod McKenzie, is just as clueless: in a post on The Editors (the internal watchdog of BBC news), he argues that the fact that Newsbeat received texts and emails supportive of the BNP shows he was right to publicise their views in this way.

This shrugging off of journalistic responsibility sits badly with my inclination to admire and cherish BBC news. Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, takes the name of his personal blog from the CP Scott dictum, “comment is free, but facts are sacred.” Randle and McKenzie have allowed the BNP’s comment to suffocate facts here: white people aren’t endangered, white and non-white are not different species, Ashley Cole was born in the UK, and so endlessly on.

The Newsbeat interview might be helpful as evidence that the BBC isn’t a fulminating hive of left-wingery; as evidence of the corporation’s newsgathering and reporting prowess, it’s devastatingly poor. Complain to the BBC at this link.

Jeremy Hunt and the BBC: your ballot or your job

24 September, 200925 September, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 3 Comments

Jeremy Hunt

The BBC should be more right-wing, says shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt. And to counter what he sees as the organisation’s “innate liberal bias” he wants the BBC to start actively recruiting Tories:

“I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their newsgathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the BBC tend to be from the centre-left.

“That’s why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr called an innate liberal bias. I think the important thing with the BBC is that it belongs to all of us.”

Press Gazette, “Jeremy Hunt: BBC News needs more Tories”

Let’s skip over the obviously questionable assumptions in Hunt’s comments – like, what constitutes a “liberal bias”, and how does he know the BBC has one? (Personally, I think there’s merit in Medhi Hassan’s contention of right-wing bias in the corporation, while Greg Philo’s statistical analysis of the BBC’s Israel-Palestine coverage has shown the Beeb to be strikingly distant from any supposed liberal consensus on the Middle East. But then, perhaps any interest in or adherence to external evidence would be interpreted as a genuflection to reality’s well-known liberal bias.)

Leaving all that aside, we can look directly to what Hunt is asking for – a quota system based, not on externally visible risk factors for discrimination like gender and race, but on the internal and private quality of political affiliation. When Cameron moved to introduce the priority list system, with the intention of engineering an increase in the number of female Conservative MPs, the grass-roots party was hostile; presumably, Hunt has calculated that positive discrimination in favour of media Tories will be welcomed more sympathetically.

There are some cases where membership of a particular political party is genuinely counter to someone’s suitability for a job. I’m supportive of the ban on police and prison officers joining the BNP, because the BNP is a party with openly racist beliefs that would plausibly compromise an individual’s fitness for those roles.

But Hunt is suggesting something else: he’s asking for a cobbled-together parody of proportional representation, in which the publicly-funded broadcaster is forced to become a constitutional mirror of a parliament which is itself a grossly distorted representation of the electorate. It’s absurd, it’s impractical (what if an employee was recruited as a Conservative only to become a late-blooming advocate of Marx?) and – what should make the Toriest of Tories despise it – it’s a supremely state-meddling approach.

But logical failings probably can’t hold back ascendant political will: choose the bits of the BBC you love, and get ready to fight for them when the next government comes in.

Conserving ignorance

28 August, 2009 ~ Sarah Ditum ~ 5 Comments

Is it ever worth responding to a Peter Hitchens piece? The New Statesman invited him to provide the counterpoint to Medhi Hassan’s “actually, the BBC is right-wing” argument. Hassan’s feature is – I think – a tightly argued piece of journalism, drawing on verifiable details about the careers of high-profile BBC personnel and analysis of the corporation’s new content. It strongly makes the case that the BBC has no case to answer in terms of left-wing bias.

How does Hitchens reply? By saying that party bias is not the issue (even though the Hassan piece focused more on policy bias) and arguing cultural bias instead. Quantifiable cultural bias, no less – although Hitchens, as ever, has trouble telling the difference between something that is capable of being quantified, and something that already has been:

Were I a multibillionaire, I could commission the proper research into nuance, tone of voice, who gets the last word, presenters’ backgrounds, running order, drama, soap operas and cultural coverage, that would demonstrate beyond any doubt that the BBC is on the side of the cultural and social revolution that I and many other licence-fee payers oppose with all our hearts.

New Statesman, “They hoped I’d be pro-torture”

Actually, you don’t have to be a multibillionaire to commission this sort of study. You could be jobbing journalist like Nick Davies, or even (at the time) a jobbing comedian like Al Franken, and recruit a group of research students to your project. Hitchens could access the sort of information he is hoping for, but his interest in knowledge ends long before it could have any influence over his opinions – his feelings about the BBC (like his feelings about drugs, families and the monarchy) come from his gut, and he emits them with the same thoughtfulness you’d give to any other stomach contents.

Related:
Abort the antichrist! (BBC drama does pro-life)
They’re coming to stick pins in your children (more of P Hitchens failing with numbers)