Floods

Well, it looks as if Oxfordshire has experienced the worst, touch wood. One of my friends lives in Abingdon and he has been sheltering several of the neighbours on Monday afternoon (the floods peaked Monday night) due to his house being raised off the road. He's also been helping build sandbag defences.

Book Review: Robin Aitkin's"Can We Trust The BBC"

The BBC is frequently pelted with accusations of bias, with the debate between the corporation and other media outlets such as the Daily Express and Indymedia often resembling a game of Dodgeball.

What makes Robin Aitken's (constructive) pelting of the BBC so useful is that he has had a long career within the organization and is therefore able to give an insider’s perspective. views the BBC as a media outlet of great power with commands great respect across Britain, while reminding us that compared to other foundations such as the Church of England and parliament, the BBC is less than a century old.

He also points to the licence fee, paid by all those who own a radio or television, and the world-wide nature of its reach as further evidence of its status. Therefore, Aitken is disappointed with the attitudes of many BBC journalists, with the central theme of his text being that journalists at the BBC are unable to separate their political views from their reporting.

Aitken provides many examples of this across a wide range of political issues, for example AIDS and religion, but fails to separate his own bias from his narrative. The text would read better if the author had remained neutral on political issues.

Instead it is clear that Aitken’s views are strongly conservative, whether he is denouncing Scottish industry as “state-sponsored dinosaurs” or describing the Thatcher economy as having “worked”.

Aitken does not consider the possibility that this perceived liberal bias may be a reaction to the majority of criticism from the BBC being from the conservative media, with only Indymedia and far-left newspapers such as the Morning Star critiquing (or pelting) from the left.

Neither of the latter media outlets is as widely read. For example, the Morning Star has around 14,000 readers (according to the BBC) while the Daily Express (with frequent headlines such as “BBC caused of promoting the “nanny state”) has 761,637, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

It does seem that Aitken’s view of liberalism may be slightly to the right of someone more politically neutral, and therefore those trying to create politically unbiased journalism may seem to him to be creating left-of-centre journalism.

His view of the BBC does sit at odds with the wide range of voices heard among the audience at “Question Time” (regardless of the often debatable political makeup of the panel itself) as well as Tariq Ali’s publication of an alleged letter from Greg Dyke to Tony Blair claiming that not only were senior editorial figures prevented from attending “the anti-war march” (which most likely relates to the 2003 march) but that every effort was made to find Iraq War supporters for Question Time “at a time when it was very hard to find supporters of the war to come on. This letter is published in his book Rough Music.

Aitken also claims that the BBC was biased towards Labour during the 1997 election, yet fails to comment on the allegations made by Nick Jones in his book Sultans of Spin, which paints New Labour, both during the election and afterwards, as a machine that bullies journalists whether from the BBC or elsewhere.

He is on firmer ground when he critiques the relationship between Greg Dyke and New Labour, given the large donation Dyke made to the party. Aitken is also very persuasive when dealing with individual BBC employees (both past and present) such as Andrew Marr. However, he does not mention more conservative employees such as Nick Robinson (a former chairman of the Young Conservatives) or Jeremy Clarkson (yes, he’s a presenter with is own show, but gives voice to a range of conservative political opinions on his popular show, and could be seen as an icon in his own right).

He does give evidence that there is a large amount of movement between the BBC and New Labour, but this ignores the vocal and public attacks made on the BBC over documentaries such as Death on the Rock.

By contrast, many of the attacks made by New Labour have, until Nick Jones’ book, been more private.

Therefore, it is hardly surprising few BBC employees join the Tories (and it is worth noting that former Tory MPs such as Matthew Parris and Michael Portillo have either presented or regularly appeared on BBC news programmes).

Overall, Aitken’s message is affected by his own bias. It seems in some places in the text as if he agrees so much with one side he is shocked by the BBC presenting extensive coverage of the other side. Despite this, he makes an interesting case and in some areas is able to present his case in a more neutral way.

Saying The Unsayable

On Friday evening I was lucky enough to hear Armando Iannucci, A.L.Kennedy and Mark Thomas debate the question of taboos in comedy at the Southbank Centre, as part of the London Literary Festival. The opulent Purcell Room resounded with laughter as the trio described situations where they felt comics had confronted taboos, such as Shazia Mirza’s line soon after the attacks on New York “"My name is Shazia Mirza - or at least that's what it says on my pilot's licence." The panel were optimistic about the power of comedy to bring activists together and to help channel anger. Towards the end, however, they seemed pretty tired, and didn’t really answer the last two questions as well as the others. The bizarre phrasing of the last question, about Iraq and the Australian Defence minister, may have contributed to this. Some excellent anecdotes were also produced by the panel, such as Armando speaking at a literary festival, and encouraging his audience to repeatedly shout “Well, Harold, what do you mean exactly?” in the direction of Harold Pinter’s adjacent tent, only to end up signing books next to him. Mark Thomas and A.L. Kennedy were also keen to discuss the restrictions on comedy brought about by political events, with Thomas discussing his attempt to highlight the ridiculousness of the SOCPA law restricting demonstrations by using mass lone demos (where thousands of people sign up to say they will be demonstrating, thereby deluging the police with paperwork). More information on this law can be found at http://www.markthomasinfo.com, as well as some photographs of the banners. Thomas is hopeful that as a result of the lone demonstrations, Gordon Brown will lift the ban, an example of the positive power of humour.

For me there was one main comment which really resounded with me, even though it wasn’t directly about comedy. Armando commented that “the only censorship on television these days isn’t censorship of sex or swearing…it’s censorship of intellectualism”. Anyone who has glanced down the television listings and seen that you can watch any show you like between 8pm and 9pm, so long as it’s a reality show, will sympathize. As Armando says, most programmes that focus on literature or require thought do seem to have been banished to BBC4 (a minority channel that requires a £15 Freeview box), although Channel Four does sometimes surprise. It does seem that unless people are prepared to be more vocal about their demands for terrestrial channels to broadcast intelligent and educational programming, we will see more mindless reality TV shows during primetime viewing.