By Thomas Scripps
23 December 2019
23 December 2019
In its coverage of the 2019
general election, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) repeatedly
protected incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson while promoting
false and then illegally obtained information that would negatively affect the
Labour Party’s campaign.
So naked were the BBC’s
displays of political bias that, in an interview with Radio 4’s “Today”
programme, Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary Andy McDonald said the BBC had
“consciously” played a part in Labour’s election defeat. If “the BBC are going
to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial
manner, they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror,” he said.
The incidents of alleged bias
during the campaign began when the BBC doctored footage shown in its news
programmes to save Johnson embarrassment.
On November 12, the BBC Breakfast show
replaced a video report of Johnson’s participation in this year’s Remembrance
Day event with footage of him attending the ceremony as foreign secretary in
2016. Johnson was widely regarded to have made a fool of himself at this year’s
event and was criticised for laying his wreath the wrong way around. The
broadcaster claimed that an “administrative error” was responsible.
During a November 22 Leaders’
BBC “Question Time” event, which saw Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
take half an hour of questions from a studio audience, Johnson was asked, “How
important is it for someone in your position of power to always tell the
truth?”
The audience laughed at this
obvious nod to Johnson’s record of lying, as the prime minister struggled to
reply. In a subsequent BBC news report, the laughter was edited out of the
footage.
This was only a foretaste of
what was to come. In the final days of the election, BBC political editor Laura
Kuenssberg first disseminated demonstrably false Tory propaganda, without
checking her sources, contravening broadcasting rules and later broke electoral
law—both in order to comment negatively on the Labour Party campaign.
On December 9, the early news
reports were dominated by photos of a sick four-year-old child forced to sleep
on the floor of a Leeds hospital A&E department on a makeshift bed of coats
while waiting hours to be seen by a doctor.
Things were made worse after
Johnson, confronted by a reporter, refused on camera to look at a picture of
the child and then pocketed the phone of the reporter who tried to show it to
him.
That night Kuenssberg repeated
false claims circulated by Tory sources that the Conservative Health Secretary
Matt Hancock had been assaulted by a Labour activist. She tweeted, “So Matt
Hancock was despatched to Leeds General (sorry not just Leeds Hospital), to try
to sort out mess, hearing Labour activists scrambled to go + protest, and it
turned nasty when they arrived—one of them punched Hancock’s adviser,” followed
by “not entirely clear what happened, but Tories suggesting Labour campaigners
offered to pay cabs for activists to go and heckle Hancock—fair to say not
panning out as anyone had expected in what has been a relatively flat
campaign.”
When this lie was exposed,
Kuenssberg issued a pro forma apology. But this came long after the original
claim had gained a large readership.
Two days later, in
an interview with the BBC’s Politics Live the night before Britain
went to the polls, Kuenssberg stated, “The postal votes, of course, have already
arrived. The parties—they’re not meant to look at it, but they do kind of get a
hint—and on both sides people are telling me that the postal votes that are in
are looking pretty grim for Labour in a lot of parts of the country.”
Postal ballots are forbidden
from being counted at opening sessions and communicating any information from
these sessions is an offence. The BBC’s efforts to take down footage of
Kuenssberg’s statements is a tacit admission of their illegality.
The BBC is so thoroughly
exposed that a report in the Observer Sunday stated that the
broadcaster “is considering restricting its journalists’ use of Twitter. If the
plan is approved, top correspondents will be told to move away from using
online platforms to break stories or offer instant analysis.”
Despite this, Kuenssberg has
not only avoided any police questioning but was kept at the very centre of the
BBC’s political coverage. She gave live commentary on the election the night
after her illegal act and within a week was narrating a programme on the
government’s Brexit policy.
This is not the first time
Kuenssberg has been involved in disinformation campaigns against Jeremy Corbyn
and the Labour Party. In 2017, she was censured by the BBC Trust for
inaccurately reporting Corbyn’s views about shoot-to-kill policies in the aftermath
of the terror attacks in Paris in 2015. This July, she oversaw the Panorama witch-hunt
featuring an array on Blairites and supporters of the Zionist Jewish Labour
Movement, “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?”
After McDonald’s heated
remarks, the exposure of the BBC’s naked bias will likely never be raised again
by the Labour Party. As a party of state, its MPs would never bring into
question the BBC’s pose of impartiality because of the vital role it plays for
British imperialism worldwide.
In 2003, a report revealed
that the BBC had been the most pro-Iraq war of all the major TV broadcasters in
the UK.
The BBC World Service was
acknowledged in the 2018 National Security Capability Review’s “Fusion
Doctrine” as a vital form of “soft power” used in pursuit of British interests
abroad.
Today, the BBC refuses to
publish on the groundswell of support for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—the
most high-profile political prisoner in the world, held without charge in
Belmarsh prison. The BBC’s last comment on the issue came on November 19 with
one article reporting, “Julian Assange: Sweden drops rape investigation” and
another titled, “Julian Assange: Campaigner or attention seeker?”
The broadcaster ignored a
letter signed by over 60 eminent doctors and sent to the Home Secretary and
shadow home secretary warning that Assange’s life is in danger and demanding
that he be given access to medical treatment. This is despite the initiative
receiving wide coverage across major print and online media, with significant
pickup on social media. In doing so, the BBC facilitated the British ruling
class’s efforts to prevent Assange’s persecution from becoming an issue in the
general election—an effort backed by Johnson and Corbyn alike.
By contrast, the Socialist
Equality Party (SEP) sought to challenge the blackout, sending a complaint to
the BBC regarding its non-coverage of the doctors’ letter, noting its “clear
political bias and censorship” and demanding that the organisation “does its
job as the national broadcaster.”
A reply which states “we had
referred your complaint to the relevant people and regret that it may take a
little longer before we can reply. Please do not contact us in the meantime”
suggests no answer will be given.
However, in opposing the BBC’s
censorship, the SEP is articulating a growing popular distrust of the
broadcaster and its coverage.
According to a recent YouGov
poll, just 44 percent of Britons trust BBC news journalists to tell the truth.
This lack of confidence increased markedly in the period of the election, with
the percentage of people who do not trust the BBC “at all” jumping from 14
percent to 20 percent since the end of October.
This is the reason for the
recent statements made by BBC Director General Tony Hall and leading newsreader
Huw Edwards accusing those who criticise the broadcaster of engaging in
“conspiracy theories” and “toxic cynicism.” As Edwards openly worries, such
criticism might “undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of
stability over many decades.” The answer, according to Hall, is the effective
censorship of social media, which “offers a megaphone to those who want to
attack us and makes this pressure greater than ever... And I think it’s
something social media platforms really need to do more about.”
Hall is lining up behind a
programme of censorship being pursued by the British ruling class—as part of a
global attack on democratic rights—which will soon see whatever limited
independence sections of the BBC can exercise wholly curtailed. Johnson’s new
government is reported to be seriously considering decriminalising non-payment
of the licence fee households must pay to legally access the broadcaster’s
programmes. This would amount to abolishing the fee, costing the BBC hundreds
of millions of pounds and making the organisation more dependent on the
government.
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