In its recent consultation The Future of News: Impartiality, Trust and Technology, the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee asked a very strange question: “How adequately are news media organisations ensuring that efforts to provide trusted information and tackle disinformation do not alienate some sections of society in the process?” But what sane person could possibly be “alienated” by such efforts, and, if they are, why on earth should a Lords committee take them remotely seriously?
The answer to the first question is: influential columnists in the Tory press. This also provides the answer to the second. One such “alienated” individual recently contributed an article to The Daily Telegraph headed “BBC Verify is becoming a tool for elite control of discourse”. Curiously enough, the author – Lord Frost, no less – is himself a member of the elite but the article is premised on the conceit that “academics, quangocrats, the BBC” are members of a “new establishment”. That Frost seems to feel himself cruelly excluded from this entity – phantasmagorical though it might be – serves to bring to mind Neil Ascherson’s deathless description of a certain kind of journalism as “populist imbecility nourished on the porridge of resentful prejudice”. This exclusive club is apparently “obsessed with misinformation and disinformation”, particularly about the origins of the pandemic, the economic consequences of Brexit and the efficacy of the Covid vaccine, all hot button topics that obsess the Telegraph and like-minded papers.
One of Frost’s major gripes concerns the sources Verify consults in its work – dismissed here as “other supposed experts”. To illustrate his point, he takes Verify’s fact-checking of Nigel Farage’s views on net zero by means of consulting the findings of the Climate Change Committee. But although such findings, according to Frost, “may be received wisdom amongst much of the establishment”, they are also “definitely controversial”. On this basis, he complains that Verify “aren’t checking facts; they are also checking opinion”.
However, like a reverse Mr Gradgrind, Frost actually has very little time for facts: “Very often in politics,” he opines, “the facts only take you so far,” and he goes on to argue that what really matters is how facts are interpreted. On this basis, he concludes: “The whole BBC Verify programme is based on a fallacy. On most political issues not only is there simply no authoritative interpretation of the facts, but what a fact tells you depends on the interpretation you bring to it. The only way to reach an outcome is to have free debate, allow all to make their case, and see who wins the argument.”
BBC Reality Check gets a view of reality from the Press
Which in this case, of course, will be those who shout the loudest and have access to acres of newsprint, GB News and the ear of Conservative politicians. So much, then, for John Stuart Mill’s “marketplace of ideas”, which Frost appears to be invoking here. Such faux postmodernist musings
– particularly in a paper so resolutely opposed to cultural theory of any kind
– wouldn’t be worth bothering with if they didn’t have considerable
antecedents elsewhere in the right-wing press. And presumably it is these that explain the Lords committee’s bizarre concern with such tendentious nonsense.
To take but a few recent examples. An article by Fraser Nelson, in The Daily Telegraph, headed “There’s a chilling new punishment for those who question certain ‘facts’; It’s ‘political correction’: the narrowing of debate by fact-checking bodies that purport to defend truth.” Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, arguing that, with regard to LGBT+, climate change and aspects of race, what Verify “see as ‘disinformation’ will often be little more than their preferred word for attitudes they dislike or stories they wish to suppress”. Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, complaining that the job of the BBC’s Reality Check “involves telling everybody who has ever had the slightest twinge of doubt about Covid vaccines or lockdowns that they’re wrong and probably mad” and that “the biggest problem with the reality check craze” is “the wholly bogus Manichaean division between ‘real news’ and ‘false news’”. And an editorial in The Sun, headlined “Licence to lie”, which called Verify “a sick joke – a perfect expression of the corporation’s bias” and “an absurdly self-regarding unit” formed of “the same left-wing activists who infest all the corporation’s newsrooms”.
On one level, this furore is simply the latest manifestation of the endless war against the BBC by certain newspapers, whose motivations are at once economic, ideological and political. For far too long, the BBC has remained resolutely silent in the face of such assaults. However, when the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, appeared before the Lords Communications Committee, she was questioned by the chair, Baroness Stowell, about a highly negative piece by the former BBC director of television Danny Cohen that had appeared that very day in The Daily Telegraph. This accused Verify of being “a tool for promoting BBC’s alleged anti-Israel bias”, on the grounds that it had endorsed reports on the war in Gaza by the BBC diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley and Lebanese-based journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah, both of whom a clearly outraged Cohen regarded as biased (to put it mildly).
Turness responded that “the report was positioned in a hostile media outlet, which has always reported negatively on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza issue” and stated that “we are happy that the way we approached that story was fair and impartial”. This caused Cohen to complain bitterly in a further article that Turness’s response “suggests that the BBC’s approach is to ignore legitimate criticism if it does not like where it comes from. The idea that you can dismiss evidence of journalistic malpractice because it is in a newspaper you don’t like reveals institutional arrogance and political bias”. However, just how “legitimate” is such criticism from a paper with an extreme anti-BBC bias, a highly pronounced pro-Israel agenda, and a well-developed tendency to denounce criticism of its own journalistic standards by those that it doesn’t like is surely open to question.
As noted above, particularly in relation to Frost’s diatribe, the manner in which Verify deals with climate change has been a particular target of papers such as The Daily Telegraph. This is, of course, all of a piece with their fury over the BBC’s decision – extremely belated though it was, and not always enforced subsequently – to abandon the “false equivalence”, supposedly in the interests of impartiality, of “balancing” scientific experts and climate change denialists (who, as often as not, turned out to be fossil fuel lobbyists).
This decision was the result of the 2011 BBC Trust Review of Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of Science, which stated that “programme makers must make a distinction between well-established fact and opinion in science coverage and ensure the distinction is clear to the audience” and that “there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence”. This was in response to Professor Steve Jones’s contribution to the review, which argued: “Equality of voice calls for a match of scientists not with politicians or activists, but with those qualified to take a knowledgeable, albeit perhaps divergent, view of research. Attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims interest can make for false balance: to free publicity to marginal opinions and not to impartiality, but its opposite.” And, indeed, exactly the same should be the case when it comes to any other matters of substance that the BBC covers, not least politically controversial ones.
“Fake news” and dis- and misinformation are actually an acutely sensitive subject for sections of the UK national press. Having relentlessly argued that such abominations should be expunged from the internet, newspaper owners and editors have repeatedly and successfully demanded that the online versions of their papers should be entirely exempted from any such measures, as proposed, for example, by the Online Harms White Paper in 2019 and raised in the DCMS select committee inquiry into “fake” news in 2017.
Some social media distortions are created by newspapers
And this in spite of the fact that a great deal of highly dubious “news” that circulates on social media has its origins directly in distorted and sensational newspaper stories deliberately designed as clickbait. However, as I have illustrated in detail elsewhere, any attempt to ameliorate this state of affairs is routinely met with apoplexy by bodies such as the News Media Association, which, for example, instructed the DCMS committee in no uncertain terms: “The term ‘fake news’ is being hijacked by those hostile to the press. The debate over fake news is degenerating rapidly in ways that are fraught with danger, with the term being used to attack real news, typically with the aim of bullying the press, silencing dissent, and shutting down debate.”
Similarly, Press Gazette revealed that after the publication of the White Paper, Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, had written to the then-culture secretary Jeremy Wright, asking him: “Who will decide what is fake news? While we appreciate that the press and media as a whole are not the target of any new regulation in this area, there is a great deal of experience of those who wish to restrict the freedom of the media using laws never intended for that end.”
It’s small wonder, then, that given the paranoia in sections of the national press that attends any attempt to distinguish facts from speculation and mere opinion in the news media, certain kinds of publications are so viscerally hostile to Verify and organisations such as Full Fact.
That publications in which the conventional journalistic distinction between news and views, fact and opinion, was long ago obliterated should have such conniptions about the BBC trying to retain and operate just such a basic distinction is neither new nor surprising. However, there is something new that has seeped into the poisonous brew here, and that is Brexit, or rather what Chris Grey, of the highly authoritative Brexit Blog, calls “Brexitism”.
A clue to this new ingredient can be found in the Sunday Times article by Liddle mentioned above, in which he complains that reality checking “stemmed from the staunch Remainers in the BBC hierarchy … deciding that a new approach was needed to dismantle stories with which they disagreed”. With the promises of a new post-Brexit dawn now revealing themselves as at best simply wishful thinking and as at worst lies, and the warnings of Brexit’s dire consequences proving only too horribly prescient, the reaction of many of the most ardent Brexiters in the Conservative Party and the party-in-the-press has been simply to retreat into reality denial (that is, when not ferreting out scapegoats and “traitors”).
But Grey sees Brexitism as stretching beyond debates on Brexit to embrace a new and particular way of dealing with political reality as a whole. As he argued, in Brexitism “the very basic stuff of political debate, some shared commitment to basic facts, evidence, rational argument, and logical consistency is missing. Or, even, that having such a shared commitment matters or is possible”.
Brexitism is thus detached from almost any commitment to reality or truthfulness in any policy area. Thus, for example, we found the thenenergy secretary Claire Coutinho suggesting, entirely without foundation, that Labour would introduce a “meat tax”; Rishi Sunak announcing that he was scrapping a non-existent policy that would allegedly have required people to put out seven recycling bins; or the Tory insistence during the election campaign on repeating that a Labour victory would mean a £2,000 tax increase across the board, in spite of the claim being rubbished by numerous highly authoritative sources. Similarly, Rafael Behr in The Guardian had recourse to the apt metaphor of a revolutionary movement which, “having defeated facts on the road to power”, then has to “sustain itself on perpetual war against reality and its institutional redoubts in the prerevolutionary establishment”.
It was only just over seven years ago that many in Britain gasped in sheer disbelief at senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway telling NBC’s Meet the Press that the Trump team’s inflation of the numbers attending his swearing-in as president, and its concomitant deflation of those participating in anti-Trump demonstrations, were simply the result of their offering “alternative facts”.
But such tactics quickly became increasingly common on the political front in Britain, and significant sections of the press, along with GB News, have eagerly endorsed them. Far from speaking truth to power, which is supposed to be the proper role of the media in a democratic society, certain media outlets have instead, in pursuit of their political and ideological ends, embraced a nihilistic form of ontological relativism and taken an axe to the very notion of truth.
In Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell spent nearly 20 pages exposing the lies and distortions about the Spanish Civil War in the left press at the time the war was being waged. And in his 1942/3 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, he lamented the fact that most newspaper reports of the war, on both the left and the right, “did not bear any relation to the facts, nor even the relationship which is implied in the ordinary lie”. He averred that “this kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”. The behaviour of sections of the media in helping to usher in our ‘post-truth’ era is proving his fears only too well-founded.