How “balance” at the Beeb is about to betray Britain – yet again

I have a good friend who is incensed on a daily basis by what he sees as BBC bias in the interminable debate about leaving the European Union. His perfectly reasonable thesis is that the esteemed corporation has adopted “leave” as the default position for all political discourse when in fact “leave” closes down opportunities for a parallel debate on “stay” – which of course remains an option. An increasingly viable one.

I have every sympathy for his sense of outrage. It has meant that for two years the idea of not pursuing the silly, self-destructive and perniciously arrived-at decision to exit from the EU, has been presented as beyond the norms of serious debate. (And all the while we are treated to the narcissistic delusions of headbangers in the European Research Group.) That is most certainly a kind of BBC bias.

But it is not the same as the wilful deceptions that are pursued by newspapers and the cacophony of opinions on line. My guess is the chattering classes who run and work for the Beeb are as despairing of the Referendum decision as my friend and I. Their current position is the result of timidity rather than active bias – the terror of what will befall their institution if they are perceived by people in power to be escaping the dismal dungeon of “balance”.

There’s nothing new about the yellow streak in the veins of our otherwise laudable beacon of broadcasting enlightenment. We had to hear from people convinced that the MMR vaccine was dangerous long after it was clear that the source of the alarm was a single aberrant doctor. It’s only in recent months that the BBC has given up its ludicrous requirement to parade mad people denying the existence of global warming whenever someone wanted to say that climate change is a bad thing.

The problem with this rather quaint and obviously foolish but ultimately safe attachment to a misunderstood view of balance is not only that it results in pairs of interviews which cancel one another out. Cumulatively they are as damaging to truth as the tweets of Donald Trump. They form the opinions of hundreds of thousands of people and, even if they are not directly opinion-forming, they create doubt, and allow people with even more unreliable views to move in and assert themselves. Why else are there still fanatics campaigning against MMR when we know that if they had their way they would put the lives of children at risk in a resurgent measles epidemic?

     Balance is cumulatively as damaging as Donald Trump tweets

Recent days have seen reporters forced grudgingly to treat the possibility of not leaving the EU with a little more seriousness than they have in the last two and a half years. Not because anything fundamental has changed –Teresa May has never given us the impression that she would be able to negotiate an acceptable exit deal. And definitely not because the “balance” has changed. Leave is still the BBC’s default position. But, as happened progressively with climate change and MMR, the debate is starting to catch them out.

I must say that I have sympathy with journalists who are faced with needing to say honest things which powerful people find unpalatable. When I was a journalist at a local level I saw how vicious the reaction could be, and doing so is clearly a very big deal at a national level in frenetic political times.

But if the role of the BBC is merely to reflect the will of the establishment it’s doomed. We’ll be no better informed if we switch to reading the Daily Mail. Our national broadcaster has a responsibility not just to treat everyone with equal disrespect in interviews, but to be objectively analytical when faced with disparity, and to nail known lies and distortions when it becomes aware of them. It’s outrageous that this job has been left to programmes like More Or Less while news journalists sail on regardless.

     Truth is disregarded in favour of politicians’ obsessive self-belief

The endless succession of interviews with MPs, who each gainsay the wishful thinking of the one before them, has come to feel like the chaotic rabble of children at a party who’ve eaten too many sweets. This is not informing the public, and it can only remotely be said to “highlight issues” on the first couple of iterations; after that it becomes a form of political white noise. The babble of these excited little horrors arguing over Brexit and telling us what they want us to believe is never going to extract the truth, or even the balance of truths. It’s insulting to pretend that it could.

And, incidentally, visiting a string of towns outside London to talk to people with their own variety of sometimes very ill-informed views on what should happen next is not so much balance as patronising. I used to run a vox-pop in our community newspaper when I had an empty double-page spread to fill. It’s nothing to be proud of.

The tragedy for the BBC is that it cannot even learn from its own catastrophic mistakes. At the time of the build up to the Iraq War – another point in history when “truth” was disregarded in favour of politicians’ obsessive self-belief – the BBC gave way to political bullying. A journalist’s report on the gross exaggeration of Blair’s Dodgy Dossier about the imminent danger from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was withdrawn when government Press Secretary Alastair Campbell protested. The journalist was sacked, a government scientist committed suicide after leaking the story (conspiracy theorists say he was murdered), Blair was able to blackmail Parliament into approving his illegal war, and the entire structure of the BBC was changed on the pretext of improved control of its output. Yet the story of the Dodgy Dossier which precipitated this appalling sequence of events proved to be categorically true. The UK pays dearly when the BBC is too frightened to stand up for the truth.

It looks as if this dreadful mistake may be about to be repeated in its lily-livered coverage of Brexit, not because those running the Beeb want us to be misled but because it’s hard and its scary to properly confront the cheats and liars. Even so, to repeat past mistakes will feel to many of us like a national betrayal.