The recent resignation of Tim Davie as Director-General of the BBC, following accusations of the Corporation’s left-wing bias, is the latest scene in a saga that goes back to the BBC’s inception. It is, in part, a story of ideological antagonism between a public service broadcaster and right-wing politicians, commentators, and newspaper owners. If we go back to the debate’s origins, however, it is also clear how far it was shaped by the commercial rivalry between the print press and the emergent BBC. If we want to understand the current dispute, which is all the more complex in an era when news organisations are producing global digital content, then we need to look at how accusations of left-wing bias first came about.
Fraught negotiations accompanied the founding of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922. Newspaper proprietors recognised that radio posed a major threat to newspapers’ business models, and the Press Association argued that the BBC should not be allowed to cover the news at all – even news that had already appeared in print.
This demand might seem surprisingly extreme today, but proprietors had already realised that the BBC had clear competitive advantages that needed to be combatted. Radio could potentially report on events in real time, rather than being tied to print schedules, and news bulletins would be available to anyone with a radio licence. The peculiar status of the new broadcaster was equally threatening. From the start, the BBC was conceived as a private monopoly performing a public service. While it was led by a syndicate of the six leading radio manufacturers, the notion of the public good shaped both how it was licensed by Parliament and how it was perceived by early audiences.
.jpg){kind=link}
Eventually, several compromises were made. First, the BBC would not give news bulletins before 7 p.m., so as not to conflict with newspaper editions. Second, it would not employ its own journalists, but use copyrighted material from the news agencies. Third – in an agreement that echoes down to the present day – it had to refrain from covering topics deemed ‘controversial’ and from ‘editorialising’.
These restrictions did not merely apply to political coverage. Sports results were a particular bone of contention. When the BBC broadcast live from the 1926 Epsom Derby, they were barred from giving a description of the race or disclosing the winner. The outcome was farcical: a botched attempt to evoke the atmosphere of the race, with the sound of horses’ hooves, bookmakers’ cries, and the cheers of the crowd. This failure, however, was also a watershed. The following year, the BBC had full commentary of both the Derby and the FA Cup Final.
As the decade progressed, the demand for radio news increased—as did politicians’ interest in being able to make their case to the electorate over the waves. This was not just about communications strategy. The Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin saw an impartial news broadcaster as offering a bulwark against the ‘power without responsibility’ exercised by newspapers such as The Daily Express and The Daily Mail, which were under the direction of their influential owners, Lord Beaverbrook and Viscount Rothermere. During the General Strike in 1926, when striking printworkers ensured newspapers could not be published, the BBC put out five bulletins a day instead of the mandated two, and this convinced many in government of the benefits of a largely impartial broadcast news service.
Not, of course, that everyone considered it impartial. The left branded the BBC ‘The British Falsehood Company’, accusing it of not reporting on the strikers’ demands fairly. When Stanley Baldwin made a statement live on air, the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald was denied a right of reply. Winston Churchill, meanwhile, demanded more vociferous support for the government, complaining that the BBC ‘had no right to be impartial between the fire and the fire-brigade’. The broadcaster’s then Director, John Reith, was faced with the balancing act of demonstrating loyalty to the government while retaining the appearance of neutrality.
Reith’s success over the course of the strike no doubt contributed to the first BBC Charter in 1927. The Charter guaranteed the editorial independence of the new British Broadcasting Corporation and allowed it to start employing its own journalists rather than relying on press agencies. The ban on contentious subjects was lifted in 1928, allowing one further incursion into the terrain of the newspapers. The BBC had played the long game, and the press barons found themselves slowly but surely outmanoeuvred.
It is with the lifting of the controversy ban that we find the first hints of the left-wing bias trope. In the words of the Morning Post, which would later merge with The Telegraph, the BBC’s ability to address controversial topics ‘open[ed] up a vista of horrible possibilities.’ The Morning Post was itself hardly scared of controversy: it had previously vaunted Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the commanding officer at the Amritsar Massacre, as ‘the man who saved India’. It had also translated and published extracts from the notorious antisemitic conspiracy pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To the Morning Post the ‘horrible possibilities’ evidently lay in the BBC becoming an ever more powerful commercial rival. In the election of October 1931, the BBC was ‘first with the news’ for results in 210 parliamentary constituencies, which undermined newspapers’ exclusives. This made the Corporation a target, not just for their media rivals for the incoming National Government.
Why did left-wing bias become such a potent line of anti-BBC attack? One reason is that it is easy to allege and difficult to disprove. One of the most even-handed reflections on perceived bias of the period came from The Telegraph’s radio correspondent in 1935, who concluded that the balance of opinion presented on the BBC allowed every listener to think that the position they disagreed with was over-represented. This resembles a line of defence that continues to this day – if both left and right complain of BBC bias, they’re probably getting the balance about right – but the partisan sympathies of Britain’s press ensured that attacks from the right were consistently given a national platform. This created a feedback loop that provided further support for the BBC’s right-wing critics.
There is something intuitive in the idea that a public service organisation will skew to the left. Nevertheless, many historians have characterised the BBC’s vision of public service broadcasting less as social democratic than patrician conservative. Indeed, accusations of left-wing bias sat uneasily with the institutional make-up of the BBC, where many senior BBC Board members were prominent members of the Conservative Party. In March 1933, the incoming Chairman of the BBC, the former Conservative Home Secretary, Lord Bridgeman, found himself accused of left-wing bias by members of his own party. The man brought in to lead BBC News in 1934, John Coatman, was considered a protégé of the Conservative statesman Lord Halifax, yet he too was soon accused of being too left-wing.
The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence. It began with a report about the many letters the Mail had received, complaining that BBC coverage of the Spanish Civil War was skewed towards the Republican government and against General Franco. One might wonder whether a Fascist insurgency against a democratically elected government poses a limit case to impartiality, recalling Churchill’s quip about not being impartial between a fire and the fire brigade.
The lasting significance of the campaign lay in how the Mail conducted it. Placing readers’ letters at the centre of its initial report served to mobilise its readership. Further streams of letters from readers in the coming days became the subject of follow-up reports, and led to a question being asked in the House of Commons.
The campaign seems to have borne fruit. By March 1937, The Daily Worker was accusing the BBC of being ‘shamefully misleading’ in its treatment of the Republicans. That same month, the Conservative MP E.H. Keeling, on a visit to Seville, reported that the BBC’s reporting seemed more ‘balanced’ in favour of Franco. These may simply indicate that different listeners were hearing different programmes and judging accordingly. It may also reflect the fact that journalists were obtaining greater access to areas under Nationalist control. They do suggest, however, that the Mail campaign had resulted in tacit changes to the BBC’s editorial position. This would create a template for future anti-BBC campaigns.
Today, the rivalry between the BBC and the press is more intense than ever. What was previously a contest between a broadcast monopoly and commercial newspapers is now a competition for the same terrain: internet traffic, whether on websites or apps. Changes enacted from the 1980s onwards, which require that the BBC get more of its funding through commercial activities, are now also pushing the Corporation to compete for audiences across the globe. This may explain the sustained interest in the BBC from politicians like Donald Trump. Ever more American citizens are using the BBC News app as media companies in the US try to gain a greater foothold in the UK. As the stakes get higher, so does the volume.