Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber usefully draw attention to the way in which agenda-driven journalism in right-wing papers such as The Daily Telegraph exploits the notion of “research” into alleged BBC bias to lend spurious legitimacy to their own highly partisan perspective on the Corporation. This process has a long history, but it has been greatly aided in recent times by the growth in power and influence of right-wing “think thanks” (actually opaquely funded lobbyists) such as the Policy Studies Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and Civitas, whose “research”, along with that of the media (actually BBC) monitoring outfit News-watch, is devoured whole by right-wing newspapers and thence regurgitated into the online world.

How this works in practice is illustrated in detail by Patrick Barwise and Peter York in their recent book The War Against the BBC, in which one of the key points made is that the “research” on which this charade is based is, to put it mildly, highly questionable (hence my use of inverted commas). Much of it has been undertaken by those without the relevant academic training or, in some cases, any specialist media knowledge at all; its methodology, where it’s actually apparent, is so inadequate that it wouldn’t pass muster in an essay for a first-year media methods course. And the extreme hostility to the BBC of those who have funded it renders its findings deeply suspect from the outset – findings which could, of course, have been designed to bounce their way on to the pages of the anti-BBC press.

The manifest shortcomings of this pseudo-research become particularly clear when it is measured against the impressive body of academic research into the BBC’s editorial standards undertaken by Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. This frequently reaches conclusions diametrically opposed to those of the BBC bashers – and thus goes almost entirely unreported in the right-wing press (except, that is, when its findings can be distorted to fit a paper’s anti-BBC editorial line). And it is indeed notable that, as far as one is aware, none of the output of the “think tanks” or Media-watch has ever been published in a peerreviewed academic outlet.

Of course, papers that appear to hate universities – and especially their media studies courses – quite as much as they hate the BBC would retort that academic outlets would be bound to be biased against such work. But the plain truth is, based on the numerous reports on BBC “bias” that I’ve waded through over the years, that it would be highly unlikely to navigate the peer review process successfully. One of the main purposes of such a process is to uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, reliability and accountability in academic publishing – something from which many newspapers could greatly benefit.

Peer review is important for credibility

To understand why these reports would in all likelihood fail peer review, and thus cannot be counted as research in the sense that it is understood in academia, let me explain how the process works. As the editor-in-chief of the Journal of British Cinema and Television for more than 20 years and a longtime member of various editorial boards, I do have some experience in this matter.

When an article is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, it is sent out, anonymised, to two referees. Each is asked to write a report on the article, and these, also anonymised, are sent to the author. Unless the referees judge the article to be unpublishable, the author is then asked to revise their article in light of the referees’ comments. The revised version is then scrutinised by the referees and editors. Once all involved are satisfied with it, the article is accepted for publication.

The kinds of questions that referees and editors ask of a piece of submitted work include the following: Is it original? Does it show awareness of, and engage critically with, the existing literature on its subject? Is the research methodology appropriate and properly employed? Is the basic argument convincingly made? Has the work been funded by an external agency? If so, is this clearly acknowledged, and is there any evidence that the funder could have improperly influenced the findings? There are other questions too, but on these main ones, the reports that I’ve examined would all fall at a very early hurdle.

Take News-watch as an example. First, neither of its two named researchers can be counted as accredited experts in the field in which they are engaged, namely analysing bias in news and current affairs coverage, which is an extremely complex subject and one absolutely littered with pitfalls. Its principal, David Keighley, is described on its website as “a former newspaper and BBC journalist. He was the senior publicist of BBC news and current affairs programmes before joining the breakfast television company TV-am, where he was director of public affairs for almost a decade”. Meanwhile senior researcher Andrew Jubb “read English and Media Studies at Sussex University, with a strong focus on media bias, politics and representation. He has worked for News-watch since its inception in 1999”. Neither has any visible publication record – except, of course, for their outputs on News-watch itself.

It’s also significant in respect of the quality of News-watch’s work that when it attempted in 2019 to engage the courts in its campaign against what it alleges to be BBC bias, its request for judicial review of the Corporation was dismissed by the High Court and then by the Court of Appeal on the grounds that it had no real chance of success. The following year, it complained to Ofcom about the “anti-Brexit bias” of Question Time and accused the regulator of “whitewash” when its complaint was rejected.

Secondly, in terms of funding, News-watch is opaque. However, OpenDemocracy has revealed that in the past it received funds from Arron Banks’s Leave.EU (unsurprising, given News-watch’s obsession with what it insists is the BBC’s anti-Brexit stance). Indeed, on its own website, Leave. EU at one point had a page for donations to News-watch, which it described as “an independent organisation providing much needed scrutiny of the politically skewed BBC”. It stated that “We’re raising money to help Newswatch continue its essential work analysing the output of the BBC” and suggested sending “a monthly donation or one-off contribution and help keep this vital service going” – direct to Leave.EU itself! News-watch also received £65,000 from the mysterious but right-wing Institute for Policy Research.

Inevitably, News-watch’s reports, and those of its earlier iteration, Minotaur Media Tracking, have received widespread and entirely laudatory coverage in the papers for whom this kind of stuff is meat and drink. Indeed, it’s tempting to suggest that one of these reports’ main purposes is precisely to generate such coverage. In this respect, it’s significant that in late 2003 Minotaur conducted the research for the Daily Telegraph’s Beebwatch column, which ran three times a week for two months and claimed to show evidence of left-wing bias in BBC programmes. Its debut was announced in an article by the paper’s then-editor Charles Moore on September 9. This was headed “Time to watch the BBC bias that costs each of us £116 a year”, solicited input from readers, and compared the licence fee to compulsory tithes to the Church of England in the 18th century – that is, when not complaining that The Archers hadn’t mentioned the Countryside March (but did mention a Gay Pride one) and that a huntsman in a Radio 3 drama had referred to his “dogs”, as opposed to his “hounds”.

The final reason why it is impossible to conceive of News-watch’s output in the same terms as bona fide academic media research concerns its tone, which is nothing if not partisan, peevish and polemical. The authors appear to be utterly convinced before they even commence their “analyses” of BBC output that the Corporation’s coverage of Brexit, climate change and so on is biased, so all they have to do is “prove” it. The sound of hobby horses being ridden and bees buzzing in bonnets is almost deafening. The problem is that this just isn’t the dispassionate, sceptical spirit in which bona fide research is undertaken. But don’t take my word for it – judge for yourself by visiting the News-watch website.

We’ve been down this road before

In many respects, News-watch is like a reincarnation of the Media Monitoring Unit (MMU), which ran from 1985 to 1990. Its title notwithstanding, it too focused only on television, and in particular on the BBC and on Granada’s pioneering current affairs series World in Action.

Indeed, its modus operandi, as described in The Guardian in September 1989 by the series producer Ray Fitzwalter was uncannily the same as that of News-watch: “Every few months, a neatly-bound survey of television current affairs programmes is delivered to the national press. The next day’s papers can be relied on to run articles along the lines of ‘Powerful evidence of major TV bias … alarming new report … Tory MP’s call to restore fairness’. The Media Monitoring Unit has been at work. The opinions of a small group of highly partisan people has suddenly become ‘powerful evidence’. MPs are solicited and make accusations against people they have never met on the basis of a report many of them have probably never read . . . Bogus evidence of this type is often taken at face value by an unsceptical press or seized upon by politicians to further a prejudice: together they proceed to con the public.”

Whether simply unsceptical or actively partisan, the right-wing press absolutely lapped up the MMU’s findings. For example, on the occasion of the launch of its first report in 1986, the London Evening Standard blared out from its front page “YES! THE BBC IS BIASED”, and many of the following day’s papers followed suit. As the unit’s director Simon Clark explained, possibly unwisely, in the Independent on Sunday article mentioned below: “At the end of the year, you go to the backers with a pile of press cuttings and say, this is what we have achieved. On the strength of this, they either put up more money or they don’t.”

In 1990, the Daily Express actually paid the MMU £1,500 to write a report about whether the Today programme was adhering to the BBC’s requirement for impartiality. It found, on the basis of monitoring two weeks of programmes, that there was a “serious failure to meet acceptable standards of impartiality”. However, as Steven Barnett and Andrew Curry concluded in The Battle for the BBC: A British Broadcasting Conspiracy? (1994): “It was clear to any serious reader that this was a bogus piece of research comprising one page of ‘definitions of balance and bias’ followed by 28 pages of transcript and highly subjective analysis.” But, there again, as Clark admits on his website of the MMU’s output as a whole: “It was wholly unscientific but we used our common sense and got heaps of publicity.”

Of course, the Tory party/press echo chamber went off at full blast, but amid all the uncritical hubbub was an article in the Independent on Sunday in March 1990 by Cal McCrystal and Charles Oulton. This traced “a national furore to one would-be journalist and his tape recorder”, which makes it all sound rather quainter and more amateur than it actually was.

Now, I need to declare a personal interest. When the MMU’s first report was published, I was a freelance journalist. One of the publications for which I regularly worked was the BBC magazine The Listener, and the editor asked me to review it. From the moment I set eyes on it, I had serious doubts about doing so – and even more so after I attended the launch event and sparked a public row with Lord Chalfont, of whom more below. First, the report’s extraordinarily subjective “methods” of detecting alleged bias in programmes, coupled with its habit of indulging in smear and innuendo, meant that for me it was precluded from serious consideration in a serious broadcasting magazine. Secondly, as someone interested in parapolitics, had I reviewed it, I would have wanted to write about the backgrounds of those

involved in producing it and The Listener didn’t seem the appropriate publication in which to do so. And thirdly, I’m mentioned twice in the report. Thus, the review I would have liked to write would have been the perfect opportunity for yet another press onslaught on BBC “bias”, something I had not the slightest intention of providing.

I’m not writing it now, either, but in the context of an article about essentially bogus “research” and its rapturous reception by the right-wing press, I do want to argue that the MMU needs to be understood not simply as anti-BBC but as part of a broad and highly active network of countersubversion in the 1980s.

The men behind the contentious groups

One of its co-founders was Lord Chalfont who, as Michael Cockerell notes in Live from Number 10 (1989), on his own admission saw the BBC as a nest of “Communists, militants and left-wing agitators of all persuasions” and who was “a leading figure in a string of right-wing pressure groups set up to counter ‘left-wing’ subversion in the media and elsewhere”. These included the Committee for a Free Britain and the Committee on the Free World. The other co-founder was Julian Lewis, now knighted, a Tory MP and chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, but from 1981 to 1985 the research director of the Coalition for Peace through Security, which had been founded by the veteran counter-subversion propagandist Brian Crozier. Furthermore, from the mid-80s, he was director of Policy Research Associates, which worked to initiate changes in legislation on, among other things, political “indoctrination” in schools, party political activities by local councils, and impartiality regulations in broadcasting. He also campaigned strenuously against CND.

As mentioned earlier, the unit was run by Simon Clark. Less of a countersubversive than Chalfont or Lewis, he was more on the libertarian right, editing the short-lived student paper Campus (for which Lewis helped to raise funds). This was banned from a large number of university campuses, which took exception to its airing the views of the Federation of Conservative Students (whose increasingly extreme views led to it being dissolved by Tory Julian Petleychairman Norman Tebbit in 1986). On the Cold War front, he was associated with the Russian émigré group the Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) and co-edited the Soviet Labour Review. Today he is director of the pro-smoking lobby group Forest and its sister campaign Action on Consumer Choice.

This is not to replicate the ad hominem attacks that are such a distinctive aspect of the MMU reports, but simply to clarify where the organisation that produced them was actually coming from. Had Britain’s right-wing national newspapers not been as ardently anti-BBC as was the MMU, they might have presented its activities very differently, namely as a determined attempt to subvert the BBC’s independence by undermining trust in its journalistic standards and thus providing legitimation for the government to tighten the impartiality regulations under which the Corporation operated – which, indeed, is precisely what happened with the Broadcasting Act 1990 (a process in which Lewis himself had a hand). So, subversion in the name of counter-subversion, “proof ” of bias from the ferociously partisan – it’s amazing what you can get away with when backed up by a little “research”. Not to mention a captive press.