, Associate Editor of The Times, reckons We’re to blame for BBC bias. It’s an interesting, and hopefully wry, take on the causes of the BBC’s cultural mentality. Here’s the key part:
If Zimbardo is right, then the political slant of BBC reports is not the result (or at least, not mainly the result) of the disposition of the BBC’s reporters. It comes about because of the role they see themselves playing.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards and the prisoners behaved very differently, despite being similar types of people. Each of them behaved as they thought they were supposed to. This is the key. Understanding BBC bias and how to change it depends on understanding how their reporters come upon the idea that they should behave as they do.
And I have a controversial candidate for the powerful group helping to make the BBC reporters biased against Israel. It’s us.
Listen to an immigrant talking to their British-born children. The parent talks with the accent of their homeland, but the children don’t. They talk with the accent of their peers, their mates.
This is how the BBC works. It is a very large, very diffuse organisation. There is no single source of power. In these circumstances, BBC reporters are constantly looking around, eyeing their mates, trying to work out what their identity is, what a good reporter should be saying, how people like them are supposed to behave.
I can see some merit in Danny’s explanation for the BBC’s collective groupthink, though I’m sure Danny is being facetious with his suggestion that the BBC would become less biased if the BBC’s critics ceased to point out its bias.
To my mind, at least half of the problem is just getting the BBC to accept that they do have problem with institutional bias, that they are indeed out of step with the perceptions of their telly-taxpaying customers. Only then will the BBC even begin to do something about the problem.
Thank you to Biased BBC reader Max for the link.
The BBC big-wigs and probably smaller wigs, know that it is a left-wing organisation, they just don’t see it as a “problem” as they have been getting away with it for so long. The non-politicised masses don’t understand political bias, in the same way that politicised people do. If it had a right-wing bias (as difficult as it is to imagine!) the average listener or viewer wouldn’t be aware of it either. They expect to get opinions forced on them, rather than make up their own minds, that is why daily national newspapers are like they are. I would only become a serious problem for he BBC if there was a mass boycott of the licence fee, but anti-BBC sentiment cannot be mobilised enough to induce enough people to break the law.
To your average Beeboid, the BBC has to be left-wing, because it is the morally the correct thing for them to do and is seen as the main pillar of the organisation.Without it’s left-wing bias, the BBC would not exist in the state the Beeboids want it to exist, to them, the BBC just wouldn’t the BBC.
He is completely right except for one small detail – the BBC’s “mates”, as he calls them, are not the general populous of the UK, but their old university arts graduate chums, who make up a tiny minority of the population – the left “intellectuals”.
You have to be a complete d*ckhead if you cannot spot from reading ‘Have your Say’ for a day that there is a massive gap between the views expressed in the most recommended posts and those pushed by the BBC. Presuming the BBC aren’t d*ckheads, I conclude they are deliberately not fulfilling their Charter’s requirement to provide balance.