The BBC is a big part of why the United Kingdom is less free than the United States. If your chief exposure to Britain’s state broadcaster is through dramas (Dr Who) or documentaries (Planet Earth), you will have little idea of the pervasive and sedulous news bias of what is still Britain’s most watched TV channel.
Now that President Donald Trump has launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against the Beeb, which had spliced two sections of the speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021 to make it look more incendiary than it was, perhaps I should explain a bit about how the Corporation works.
The most bizarre thing about the BBC is that it is funded by a tax on every TV set known as the “license fee.” Long familiarity has habituated Brits to this absurdity, which dates back to the early twentieth century, when the BBC was the only broadcaster in the land.
Imagine if there were an annual $230 tax on every machine capable of playing music — your car stereo, your smartphone, your hidden speakers — the revenue from which went to a single state-backed record label. Or imagine if there were a tax on every newspaper sold and that… hang on, you actually did have one of those. It was called the Stamp Act and, as far as I recall, it went down badly.
Anyway, being state-funded, the BBC is subject to various public service broadcasting regulations, one of which is that it must be politically impartial. When it comes to straightforward British party politics, the BBC generally meets that obligation, following clear rules on allocating each party proportionate airtime, offering politicians a right of reply and so on.
As soon as it moves into the cultural space, however, any pretense at neutrality goes out of the window, and all the BBC’s soft-Left prejudices come out: immigrants good, Israelis bad, trans good, guns bad. Naturally, as an organization paid for with public money, it tends to see politicians who favor higher spending as compassionate, and those who oppose it as mean — which bias goes a long way to explain the fiscal mess than Britain is in.
Many of these structural biases were highlighted in an internal memo, which was leaked earlier this month, and which sparked the letter from Trump’s law firm. The editing of his speech was only one minor part of the report. It also detailed how US election coverage had been slanted toward the Democrats, not in the direct sense of giving them more airtime, but in the more pervasive sense of talking about their issues (abortion rather than immigration or the economy, for example) and in their language (“reproductive rights”).
The report detailed persistently slanted reporting on race issues in Britain – a false claim that there was an “ethnic premium” for car insurance, for example, and a ludicrously tendentious story about minorities having more insecure jobs.
What was most striking, though, was the bellicose way on which it reported on the Gaza conflict, uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda claims and, on one occasion, airing a clip about life in the Gaza Strip by the son of a Hamas minister.
Any doubt about the partiality of the BBC has been removed by the reaction to this report. Conservatives have called for root-and-branch reform to ensure objectivity or else for the scrapping of the license fee. A commercially funded BBC could be as one-sided as it pleased, and it would be no one’s business but its viewers.’ Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians, by contrast, have lined up to defend what they insist is a completely impartial broadcaster. QED, you might say.
The last thing Britain’s Labour administration will do is weaken the organization that promotes its view of the world. Trump’s lawsuit may help it. Just as we criticize our own countries or our own families, but bridle when others make the same criticisms, so many British people will resent what they see as bullying from overseas, dismissing Trump’s claim as bombastic and unfounded.
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Given that he won the presidency, they will say, and given that he has since spoken warmly in favor of the rioters, it is quite a stretch to argue that he has suffered a billion dollars’ worth of damage. Yet that is his lawyers’ assertion:
“Due to their salacious nature, the fabricated statements that were aired by the BBC have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums, which have reached tens of millions of people worldwide,” — which, unless “salacious” has a different meaning in Florida, strikes me as quite the claim.
Even so, the BBC has been fatally weakened. It will not survive a change of government.
