Daily Mail: ‘Migrant’s Channel stroll to asylum in Britain’; ‘1m more migrants are on their way’; ‘Surrender on illegal migrants’; ‘Deadly cost of our open borders’; ‘Record number of jobless EU migrants in Britain’.
Daily Express: ‘Britain faces migrant chaos’; ‘EU opens door to 79m from Turkey’; ‘EU migrants soar yet again’; ‘2m EU migrants grab our jobs’; ‘You pay benefits for EU’s jobless’.
According to one analysis of EU referendum coverage,143 weighted to take account of both the content of articles and the circulation of the newspapers in which they appeared, pro-Leave material had an 82 per cent circulation advantage over pro-Remain articles. And of course that coverage was reinforced by the twice-daily press reviews that appeared on broadcast media, when headlines are shown and read out but rarely put into context or challenged.
Within hours of the result of the EU referendum becoming known, the editor of The Sun, Tony Gallagher, remarked: ‘So much for the waning power of the print media.’144 But, in my view, that reaction is almost certainly far too glib, as there is no conclusive evidence that newspapers do have a significant direct impact on voting behaviour. On the other hand, a relentless drumbeat on a single subject will inevitably seep into the national consciousness, and when voters express fears about illegal immigration, or about millions of potential Turkish migrants flooding into the UK, even in areas of the country where there are relatively few immigrants, it is not unreasonable to deduce that those fears are based at least in part on what they have read or heard in the media.
Editors have learned from experience over many decades that feeding on fear has always been a highly profitable commercial activity. Their traditional defence is that they do not stoke their readers’ fears but merely reflect and report the fears that already exist. It is an argument that comes perilously close to the chicken–egg debate, but it seems unarguable that when a significant section of the print media speak as one on a single subject – and when their coverage is then reflected in the broadcast media – it must have some impact on the way people vote.
Nevertheless, I am not a believer in a tougher, state-backed regulatory regime to teach the press the error of their ways. While I acknowledge that newspapers could, and should, be much better than they are at accurately reflecting the reality of the world around us, I have an instinctive suspicion of anyone who wants to ‘crack down’ on media misbehaviour. It is no coincidence that the first step that any authoritarian government takes, whether left-wing or right-wing, is to curtail press freedom, and I have no desire to live in a country in which newspapers risk being put out of business for the sin of causing offence or getting something wrong.
I do not seek to minimise the very real distress caused to people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves pilloried or worse in the full glare of the media spotlight. Christopher Jefferies, for example, who had the misfortune to have rented a flat to Joanna Yeates, who was murdered in Bristol in 2010, was disgracefully labelled as her suspected murderer after police had arrested him and leaked highly damaging speculation about him before releasing him without charge two days later. He had every reason to feel aggrieved at the way he was treated, but the proper target of his anger should have been the police, not the press. I have rather less sympathy for show business celebrities whose agents assiduously court publicity when they have something to sell but then cry foul when their clients are caught, sometimes literally, with their pants down.
What the Leveson Inquiry into press behaviour revealed was that far too often, police leak damaging tittle-tattle to reporters when their investigations are at a very early stage. It is unrealistic to expect reporters not to seek to obtain as much information as they can, but it is not unrealistic to expect police officers to act professionally and in accordance with their own code of conduct. When a newspaper reports that ‘police believe…’ something, it is guilty of nothing more than doing its job, which is why I have always believed that the focus of the Leveson exercise should have been far more on those who talk to newspapers than on those who publish the information they provide.
I do not, however, believe that the identities of people who have been arrested should be kept out of the public domain unless and until they are formally charged. The disappearance of people after they have been dragged from their homes by police in a dawn raid is something that should happen only in a dictatorship – who has been arrested, and where they are being held, is information that must be made public, if only for their own protection. Police gossip about what they may or may not have done is a very different matter.
For an individual who is wrongly arrested, and then released without charge but after having been publicly identified – especially if the arrest relates to sexual offences – the price of press freedom can be very high. But, harsh as it may sound, I do believe that the price we would pay if the police could drag people into custody without revealing who they have arrested and why would be even higher.
For me, the bottom line is that the press cannot be half free. Journalists are, of course, obliged to obey the law just like anyone else, and that includes the laws of libel, contempt and incitement to hatred or violence. But, in my view, the best way to combat inaccurate reporting is to contest it, not ban it. Social media provide an ideal platform from which to do so.
The former owner and editor of The Guardian (or Manchester Guardian as it then was), C. P. Scott, famously wrote: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’ So he would be mightily perplexed by the world in which the media now operate, a world sometimes called a ‘post-facts’ or ‘post-truth’ world. More than a decade ago, the American journalist Ron Suskind quoted an aide to George W. Bush as decrying what he called ‘the reality-based community … people who believe that solutions emerge from [a] judicious study of discernible reality’. That’s not the way the world really works any more, the aide said. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’145
The multi-millionaire Arron Banks, who gave £5.6 million to the UKIP-backed Leave campaign ahead of the EU referendum, made a similar point. Quoting the approach adopted by the campaign’s American advisers, he said: ‘What they said early on was “facts don’t work” and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally.’146
So we have moved on from ‘facts are sacred’ to ‘facts don’t work’. And, for journalists like me, that creates real problems. Because if facts no longer matter, what is the point of us burrowing away day after day, week after week, to discover the facts that someone wants to keep hidden? If newspapers can print lies and still make money, where does that leave the papers that prefer to stick to the truth?
The digital revolution makes the question even more pressing, with the pressure on content providers to maximise clicks in order to maximise revenue. Neetzan Zimmerman, who used to work for the celebrity gossip website Gawker, said in 2014: ‘Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real. The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it.’ In 2015, the US-based online entertainment magazine Slant offered to pay its writers a basic $100 a month for three articles a week, plus $5 for every 500 clicks.
What price facts when clickbait is where the money is? ‘Fake news’ suddenly became a serious global issue after the 2016 US presidential election campaign, during which deliberately faked material was widely shared over social media. If I write a story claiming that Elvis Presley has been found alive and well and living on the moon, and if enough people click on it and share it, I will make money from it. Who cares if it’s total tosh?
Perhaps one reason newspaper sales are falling is that readers do in fact care about the difference between truth and lies, and they no longer want to buy papers they don’t trust. According to a survey carried out by the European Commission in 2015, only 22 per cent of respondents in the UK said they ‘tend to trust’ what they read in their newspapers, the l
owest percentage in any of the EU’s twenty-eight member states.147 By comparison, when respondents were asked in a survey commissioned by the BBC which one source of news they most trusted, 57 per cent replied the BBC, followed by ITV (11 per cent), Sky News (9 per cent) and Channel 4 (3 per cent).148 The highest scoring newspaper was The Guardian on 2 per cent.
So why does the BBC face such constant criticism for the quality of its news coverage, especially of contentious political issues, if so many news consumers regard it as trustworthy? The answer is in the question: it is precisely because so many people trust the BBC that those who believe their own viewpoint is not being fairly represented complain so vociferously. In addition, because of the way the BBC is funded, by means of a compulsory licence fee, everyone feels that they own the BBC and that it should, therefore, reflect their interests and their views.
My own experience, having worked at the BBC news coalface for more than twenty years, is that its journalists do try as hard as humanly possible to be fair, accurate and impartial. But that is not the same as saying that they always get things right, or that they are as ready as they should be to admit to their errors.
The first major problem faced by the BBC’s journalists is who they are: just like their counterparts in other media organisations, they are overwhelmingly university-educated, overwhelmingly London-based, overwhelmingly young, and overwhelmingly middle class. It is not a problem that is unique to the BBC, but BBC journalists do tend to share a common background, and often they share a common outlook. The key agenda-setters on the Today programme on Radio 4 or Newsnight on BBC2 are producers in their thirties who think up the story ideas and book the contributors for their programmes. Jeremy Paxman was unforgivably rude but only half exaggerating when, shortly after he left the BBC, he described Newsnight as a programme ‘made by thirteen-year-olds … It’s perfectly normal when you’re young that you want to change the world.’
When Helen Boaden was head of BBC news, she once asked me to give a talk to a group of young news producers. ‘You should listen to him,’ she told them, ‘because the people you’re making programmes for are much closer to his age than they are to yours.’ She might have made me sound like a dinosaur on display in a museum, but I understood her point. The average Radio 4 listener is in their mid-fifties; the average BBC1 viewer is nudging sixty.
The BBC has a legal obligation to be impartial in its news coverage. According to its editorial guidelines, it is obliged
to do all we can to ensure controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality in our news and other output dealing with matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy … The term ‘due’ means that the impartiality must be adequate and appropriate to the output, taking account of the subject and nature of the content … Due impartiality is often more than a simple matter of ‘balance’ between opposing viewpoints. Equally, it does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles.149
You can always tell when the BBC is struggling to be impartial – you hear an interviewer telling an interviewee: ‘But some people say…’ It is an unmistakable signal that someone, somewhere is doing their damnedest to abide by the guidelines.
Interviewee: ‘It took Phileas Fogg eighty days to travel round the world, you know…’
BBC interviewer: ‘But of course, some people say the world is flat…’
Absurd? Clearly, but where should the line be drawn? Whether it is the discredited theory of a causal connection between autism and the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, or the influence of human activity on climate change, or the claim that the UK sent £350 million a week to Brussels, at what point does accuracy take over from impartiality?
These issues are far more difficult to resolve than the BBC’s critics often claim but, in my view, the BBC does itself no favours by appearing too often to be uncertain about what it should be doing. The default posture of most BBC interviewers – and I was as guilty of this as anyone else – is to challenge whatever their interviewee says. It stems from a belief that by challenging them and putting the opposing viewpoint, no matter how outlandish, listeners or viewers are given an opportunity to decide for themselves how convincing they find the interviewee’s claims. This default mindset is sometimes called ‘bothsidesism’, because it subscribes to the principle that both sides of an argument always deserve a hearing.
I nearly called this book ‘But surely…’, as those are the words with which I began so many hundreds of interview questions.
Interviewee: ‘Tomorrow will be Thursday…’
Lustig: ‘But surely, some people will argue that it could equally be Friday…’
On the eve of the EU referendum in June 2016, more than a thousand business leaders signed a letter to The Times backing the UK’s continued membership of the European Union. The BBC headline reporting this fact ‘balanced’ it with another fact: that the vacuum cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson took the opposite view. As the leading media analyst Professor Ivor Gaber of Sussex University has pointed out, this was hardly news, given that it had already been reported two weeks earlier. It was an entirely spurious attempt to inject balance where there was no need.150
One way of approaching the impartiality conundrum is to try to find a way to assess the credibility of the people on each side of a contentious issue. But who assesses credibility? If three hundred professors of economics say the country is heading for disaster, and one hundred professors say the opposite – but they come from more ‘prestigious’ academic institutions – where does that leave the hapless BBC interviewer? It places a heavy responsibility on the BBC’s senior specialists: the economics editor, the science editor, or whoever, to whom non-specialists will turn for advice. It also means that in the constant search for fresh voices and fresh viewpoints, journalists need to balance their craving for novelty with their duty to check the credentials of the author of a new theory about, for example, a cure for cancer.
Too often, the BBC has seemed to confuse ‘balance’ with ‘impartiality’. There is no obligation on the BBC to balance truth with falsehood, nor to include an opposing view every time a contributor suggests that genocide is evil or that rape can never be justified. As the BBC’s own guidelines point out, impartiality ‘does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles’. The BBC should never give the impression that it is impartial between good and evil, or between freedom and servitude – but it can sometimes be extremely difficult to steer a proper path.
The BBC as an institution is constantly aware that it is paid for, compulsorily, by people of very different political opinions. It needs to try to satisfy licence-payers who vote UKIP and those who vote for the Green Party. So what do its journalists do if a UKIP candidate makes false claims about, for example, immigration levels, or the cost to the UK of belonging to the European Union? Should the BBC refuse to broadcast them, and risk being accused of censorship, or broadcast them but then also broadcast an immediate rebuttal and risk being accused of partiality?
The issue came to a head during the EU referendum campaign, when the Remain side complained bitterly that the BBC had failed to challenge sufficiently robustly false claims by Leave campaigners. The BBC’s response, as so often when it comes under attack, was to point to explanatory material that ran on its website or on Radio 4, putting rival claims into context and dispassionately examining the available evidence.
But the BBC’s vast output can often work to its disadvantage: no viewer or listener can possibly access everything it transmits, which means that complaints usually focus on the most viewed, or most listened to, programmes. It is no good the BBC replying to complaints about skewed coverage on the Ten O’Clock News or the Today programme by pointing to a much better item on the website or on the Radio 4 statistical analysis programme More or Less.
It would have been far better if it had embedded its excellent online Reality Check m
aterial in its mainstream broadcast output, even at the cost of generating more complaints from campaigners whose definition of impartiality is coverage that favours their own viewpoint. The problem, as I see it, is that the BBC hates generating complaints – it is, by its nature, a cautious, almost timid, creature, craving love and affection and terrified of causing offence. Its former chairman Michael Grade once told me that the BBC’s default posture was a ‘pre-emptive cringe’, which is totally inappropriate for any self-respecting journalistic organisation.
It needs to be accepted, however, that much of the time, when people demand ‘facts’, what they are really searching for are judgements with which they agree. I lost count of the number of times during the EU referendum campaign when people said to me: ‘I just want the facts about what will happen if we leave the EU,’ not realising that there are never ‘facts’ about potential future consequences of a particular course of action outside the realm of pure science.
And even in science, facts are sometimes less conclusive than many people would like to think. In the 1990s, the media were full of stories about how eating beef from animals suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (‘mad cow disease’) could risk causing a fatal neurological condition called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. How serious was the risk? No one could say for certain, and for a time ministers seemed unsure how seriously they should take the warnings. The scare stories were so prevalent that one government minister, John Gummer, arranged to be photographed trying to feed a beef burger to his four-year-old daughter in an attempt to reassure people that it was still safe to eat beef. (She refused, so he was forced to eat it himself.)
Is Anything Happening? Page 43