Anyone else getting irritated by the BBC’s lurch to the right?

The Labour party recently made a “serious complaint” to the BBC about a lack of political balance in its news coverage

According to the Guardian – ‘Party officials monitored invitations, and time given, to senior Tory and Liberal Democrat figures on the BBC’s main news outlets against that allotted to Labour counterparts. Their analysis showed that Labour has been represented less than half as often as the coalition. here is also broader concern amongst the Labour Party that the BBC is becoming an “echo chamber” for a press that is dominated by newspapers “determined for David Cameron to succeed”.’

But it’s worse than just there being a lack of a voice for Labour – I mean, frankly, who cares if Labour even got an equal share of air time with the Tories – the power elite in the Labour Party don’t actually represent the people of the United Kingdom anymore any way – Too many of them are elite educated, career politicians – and Labour stand for the city as much as the conservatives – and let’s not forget that they didn’t actually support the N30 strikes either.

Of broader concern is the fact there is a real lack of critical voices in the Beeb –the mainstream news agenda is extremely narrow – take the coverage of the credit crunch and the reaction (student protests, strikes, LSX) as an example – there really has been very little discussion of alternatives to the cuts – even though many alternatives exist – the agenda simply focuses on ‘what we should cut’ or, when people protest about the cuts, the media focusses on ‘the vandalism’ or ‘the disruption’ to ordinary people.

If you believe BBC chief Mark Thompson – then this lurch to the right is a relatively recent departure – Thompson argues that in the ‘70s and ‘80s the BBC used to be dominated by a ‘tribal leftism’ and there were certain issues that were off the media agenda.

So why is it that the BBC has lurched to the right? Possibly the answer lies in the fact that the conservative government which controls the BBCs budget is extremely right wing and, compared to the right wing press (the Mail and the Murdoch empire) to whom the government is so closely allied, the Beeb appears as something of a pain in the side, and this article by Polly Toynbe – reminds us that the Beeb has recently faced a 16% cut.

So could it simply be a matter of those in charge of the Beeb lurching their news agenda rightward in order to please their right wing pay masters and avoid harsher cuts and potential job losses? While this is a tricky area to research – intuitively at least it makes sense that media professionals would try to please their bosses in a time of job cuts!

It’s worth remembering too that many people who work for the Beeb (50% if you believe Monbiot) will be privately educated and themselves have a right wing bias – so moving further right, and cutting leftist analysis out wouldn’t be too much of a deviation from business as usual.

Whatever the reason for the Beeb’s narrowing agenda – we are fortunate that the growth of social media allows us to selectively choose our media outlets – and there are plenty of leftist voices out there which we can use instead of the once decent BBC – check out some of the links (to the left, obviously) for antidotes to the Beeb…

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