Beware Confected Outrage Aimed at BBC

Thoughts From a Former BBC Staffer on the Latest "Scandals" to Hit the Corporation

Broadcasting House, the BBC’s London HQ. Photo credit: BBC

The last few weeks have seen the BBC embroiled in a series of “scandals” that have taken up the usual disproportionate amount of air time and column inches. It’s been prime fodder for the right-wing press, who love nothing better than to present the BBC as a hive of deranged Bolsheviks bent on the destruction of polite society.

I witnessed this first hand. I worked in the BBC’s press office for over six years. A large part of our work was to parry such attacks. It was a relentless task. A constant rearguard action, which meant that our focus was never on doing things to please The Guardian (which is what we were always accused of) but on doing things to placate The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun, and most of all, The Daily Mail.

This hyperawareness was pervasive among the executive. They were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries. For better or worse, I played a small part in helping them do this.

But politically and ideologically the divisions were never as clear. A significant number of senior staff lent towards establishment thinking. Of course they did. They were the establishment. Private education. Oxbridge degree. Fast-tracked up the corporate ladder. All the usual stuff. I mean, come on, the current Director-General Tim Davie was once deputy chairman of the Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative Party. Let’s not even get started on Machiavellian characters like Sir Robbie Gibb.

My point is that the tendency within the BBC is not, as the right-wing attack hacks claim, to advance some kind of secret communist agenda, but to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints. Anyone who looks hard enough can see this. The outrage is confected, just as much today as it was when I was at its sharp end.

Not that there aren’t things that might justify criticism from the right. Across much of its entertainment output, there surely exists a kind of achingly performative progressivism at work, but it’s mostly coming from a good place, and it’s not going to destroy the fabric of British life anytime soon.

But this was never about Doctor Who or Match of the Day, despite the weaponisation of culture when it’s useful. No, this is about what really counts: BBC News. That’s what they really care about. It’s their territory too. Thus, the strategy of confected outrage is on one hand designed to constantly clip the BBC’s wings, while on the other meant to convince the world that the BBC is endlessly biased against the right, and antithetical to the ruling class, when in fact they know the opposite is true. That way, they get to play victim while also nudging the BBC rightwards and thus shoring up their own agenda. It’s a well-trodden technique known as “working the refs.”

In reality, BBC News is prone to a centre-right, pro-establishment line, broadly in keeping with the ideological disposition of the people at the top. Aside from the fact that it ultimately depends on the government for its mandate via the Royal Charter, it also hides behind the shield of “impartiality,” compelled toward a form of false balance reporting that too easily distorts the factual reality of certain important stories and limits its ability to truly hold power to account.

And so to the recent outrages. Again, knowingly lambasted by the right, and by a government also desperate to distract the people, the BBC have done what they usually do: which is anything they can to conciliate them. The difference here is that the entity working the refs this time is that morally corrupt mob of politicians, lobbyists, journalists and pundits (let’s call them the “MCM”) who make it their mission to defend the Netanyahu government at all costs.

Outrage 1 involves the live broadcast of Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” chant at the Glastonbury Festival. I’ll park that one in the bullshit bus straight away. This furore is pure distraction and has served the MCM well, filling up the airwaves, while the IDF press on with the actual killing. Given half a second’s thought, it’s obvious that the phrase “Death to…” is a figurative expression intended to signal opposition to the force that is committing genocide in Gaza. It doesn’t mean “let’s kill the actual soldiers in the IDF,” it means “let’s oppose, condemn, and ultimately dissolve the organisation known as the IDF because they’re doing very bad things and we want it to stop.”

The BBC’s response (on the website I used to run) was atrocious and confirms the points I make above. Rather, than taking it on the chin, acknowledging its provocative nature, but asserting the right of artistic free speech, they immediately cowed to the confected outrage of the MCM.

As part of their official statement they said: “The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves.” If I’d still been at the Beeb, it would have been my job to publish that statement. In some other world, I can only hope that other me would have refused. Saying the chant is “antisemitic” equates a justifiable rhetorical criticism of a foreign military force commonly suspected of committing war crimes in Gaza with the real perniciousness of antisemitism. It undermines the gravity of genuine antisemitism. It’s nonsense.

Outrage 2 actually has some limited editorial justification. I’m talking of the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone. An internal review has found that the film breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines for failing to disclose its narrator was the son of a Hamas deputy minister for agriculture. Clearly, there were oversights around due diligence committed here, but the main responsibility seems to rest with the production company who apparently knew, but did not inform, the BBC.

That said, this was the only breach the review found. It seemingly had no problem with the father’s status itself, only the fact it wasn’t disclosed. “Regardless of how the significance or otherwise of the Narrator’s father’s position was judged, the audience should have been informed about this,” the report stated. In addition, nothing “in the Narrator’s scripted contribution to the programme breached the BBC’s standards on due impartiality”. Lastly, the report notes how there should have been more care given to the editorial concept overall, to putting the boy in such a position, a point I agree with given the potential dangers this might have exposed him to.

Anyway, as per usual, the BBC bottled it yet again. Tugging their forelock to the MCM, prostrating themselves with all due seriousness to show how well behaved they can be. They pulled the film. They conducted the review. Tim Davie apologised. Job done. Everyone happy? Um, no. That’s not good enough for the MCM.

Take Zionist stenographer Jonathan Sacerdoti’s piece in the The Spectator. The indignation is off the chart. You’d have thought the sky had fallen in. The report was a “cover-up” he writes, but it gets even worse than that: “What the BBC has now produced is not an act of accountability, it is an act of institutional self-preservation. A cover-up of a cover-up. A report written not to confront failure, but to excuse it. And in doing so, the BBC has confirmed precisely what so many critics already feared: that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the BBC is no longer a broadcaster, it is a partisan actor.”

I mean, where do you start with this bullshit? It’s designed to foster a sense of righteous outrage in its audience, to cause a commotion over something that doesn’t really warrant it (it’s been taken down!) and deflect and distract from the real story: the ongoing, relentless destruction of the Gazan people, day after day after day. It’s textbook ‘working the refs’, and its part of a concerted strategy by the MCM to cover for the criminality of the rogue regime they seem hellbent on defending. What these people really hate about this film is that it humanises Palestinian children.

And what was happening in Gaza on the day that Sacerdoti published his rant against the BBC? That’s right, at least another 61 Palestinians were murdered. And this just two days after six children were blown apart while queueing for water, the result of a ‘malfunction’ according to the IDF, who “regret any harm to uninvolved civilians”. Oh well, that’s ok then.

Yes, Sacerdoti’s diatribe, and the handwringing of the Culture Secretary, and a hundred other pieces of incensed commentary about Outrage 1 and Outrage 2 are nothing but a sea of blood-red herrings. And not only do they obscure the real story, they (intentionally) conceal the real failings of the BBC. Its partiality towards the Israeli narrative and the role of our own government in propping it up.

It was only a few weeks ago that more than 100 BBC journalists penned an open letterto their superiors expressing concerns over what they called “opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine”.

The letter goes on: “This hasn’t happened by accident, rather by design. Much of the BBC’s coverage in this area is defined by anti-Palestinian racism. The inconsistent manner in which guidance is applied draws into focus the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, on the BBC Board and BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. We are concerned that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle, an outlet that has repeatedly published anti-Palestinian and often racist content, has a say in the BBC's editorial decisions in any capacity…”

“All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military. This should be a cause of great shame and concern for everyone at the BBC.”

It really is incendiary stuff, which follows on the heels of a body of independent research that demonstrates the BBC’s flagrant bias when it comes to this issue. It speaks to my point about BBC management and their ongoing obeisance to the MCM. And we haven’t even got to their recent decision to pull a second documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, for reasons just as opaque as those cited by the journalists, again handed down from on high, and distilled in yet another vague and dishonest statement that it once would have been my job to publish.