During the UK election campaign, there will be right-wing populist claims that the BBC’s coverage is biased to the left. But the real silent majority don’t agree with that, explains London Business School’s Patrick Barwise.
For the first time in my life (and possibly ever), we are only weeks away from a UK general election without being completely sure who will be prime minister on election day, although, barring a miracle, we do know who will be PM afterwards. Just as strange, many of the loudest complaints about the state of the country are from supporters of the party that’s been in charge for the last 14 years.
These unusual times are also creating uncertainty about how some UK media will cover the election. Will Rupert Murdoch again, as in 1997, switch to support Labour and then, when they win, again claim ‘It’s The Sun wot won it’? What will be the scale and impact of heavily loss-making GB News (without Nigel Farage, who has now said that he is standing as a candidate, which precludes him from presenting)?
Whichever way Rupert jumps, the Telegraph, Mail, and Express will presumably still back the Conservatives, although the Express may be tempted to go for Reform UK, as it once went for Ukip. But which Tory faction – hard right or even harder right – will they back? And which story will they lead on: economic ‘green shoots’, ‘stopping the boats’, or saving the country from wokery and socialism? The Guardian and Mirror will presumably back Labour, and it’s quite likely that The Times, the FT, and the Star will too, leaving the Conservatives unfamiliarly isolated in the national press. Who knows?
Amid all this exciting uncertainty, it’s reassuring to be able to make two confident predictions about the media in the run-up to the election:
- Right-wing populist voices will claim that the election coverage on the UK’s most trusted news source, the BBC, is systematically biased pro-Labour and anti-Conservative, and that they are saying this on behalf of the silent majority whose voices have been suppressed by the left-wing cabal controlling the country.
- In reality, the silent majority of the public won’t agree with the claim, supposedly made on their behalf, that the BBC’s news coverage has a systemic left-wing bias.
The claims of left-wing bias in the BBC’s news coverage
Point 1 is easy to predict: it’s what right-wing British populists do. There are plenty of examples in my book with Peter York The War Against the BBC. More recent ones include: Douglas Murray in The Sun casually referring to ‘the BBC and other left-wing media’; Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times saying the BBC’s ‘palpable’ bias ‘shines through almost every day’; Conservative MP Scott Benton (now a former MP after a lobbying scandal forced him to resign, triggering the Blackpool South by-election which was won by Labour) saying Channel 4’s ‘liberal-left metropolitan bias almost makes the BBC look impartial’; former Prime Minister Liz Truss sycophantically telling GB News ‘[You’re] not the BBC, you actually get your facts right’; Janet Daley writing in the Telegraph that the BBC ‘can never cure itself of bias [because it] sees itself as the voice of righteousness’; and the former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, as a guest on Allison Pearson’s Planet Normal podcast, claiming that the BBC has ‘abandoned’ impartiality (the podcast’s name none too subtly suggesting it represents the views of ‘normal people’ like Pearson and Moore).
Even the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lucy Frazer, who claims to be a BBC supporter, told the DCMS select committee, ‘I think that the BBC on occasion is biased, yes’, although, questioned by a fellow Tory MP, she could not give any examples.
So it seems pretty safe to predict that right-leaning politicians and media will claim that the BBC’s 2024 election coverage has a left-wing bias and, at least implicitly, that most of the British public (‘normal people’) would agree with this claim.
What the real silent majority thinks
Point 2 is also easy to predict because we have long-running data from YouGov’s biannual public opinion tracker, which includes the question ‘Is the BBC more favourable towards Labour/the left or the Conservatives/the right?’ This consistently finds that about 20 per cent of people do agree that the BBC has a systematic left-wing bias, but about 20 per cent think the exact opposite, that it tends to favour the Conservatives and the right. It’s a bit like football supporters thinking the referee is biased against their team. And the real silent majority – the 60 per cent or so in between – say ‘It is generally neutral’ (about 25 per cent) or ‘Don’t know’ (about 35 per cent).
We can debate the extent to which saying you don’t know if the BBC has a left-wing or right-wing bias implies that you think it’s unbiased. But what is not debatable is that the great majority of the British public either explicitly (20 per cent plus 25 per cent equals 45 per cent) or implicitly (another 35 per cent) disagree with the claim that the BBC’s news coverage exhibits a systemic left-wing, pro-Labour bias, leaving only 20 per cent or so who agree with it.
As you would expect, the responses vary by age group, political affiliation, and which way the respondent voted on Brexit, with the over-50s, Conservative voters and Leavers much more likely to say the BBC’s coverage is ‘left-wing’. To a lesser extent, the same is true of men (across the country) and, geographically, those living in southern England, especially outside London, and the Midlands; while women and those in northern England, Scotland, and Wales are somewhat more likely to say it leans to the right (the YouGov survey covers Great Britain, so it excludes Northern Ireland).
Inevitably, the numbers also wobble about a bit. In the October 2023 survey, the most recent at the time of writing, 22 per cent said the BBC leant to the left and 20 per cent said it leant to the right. But in the one before that (May 2023) it was the other way round, with 20 per cent saying left and 25 per cent saying right. Overall, the numbers are remarkably stable with no clear trend. And other independent surveys tell much the same story.
So I’m pretty confident about both my predictions.
Looking beyond the election
What about the media after the election? One uncertainty is who will own and control the Telegraph and Spectator, although it will be surprising if their right-leaning political stances shift much under new ownership, whether it’s Rupert Murdoch, Sir Paul Marshall (one of GB News’s two main backers) or any of the other names in the frame. Apart from anything else, alienating their core readers would be commercial madness.
Even with a Labour victory, the right-wing attacks on the BBC’s impartiality will doubtless continue, while still failing to convince most of the public.
The real threat to the BBC’s long-term sustainability is financial: the combination of deep funding cuts since 2010 (34 per cent in real terms), rising real-terms content and distribution costs, and having to increase investment to adapt to disruptive technology and consumption trends.
Given the growth of online disinformation, much of it sponsored by states hostile to Britain, it is to be hoped that a Labour government will make the BBC’s, and commercial public service broadcasters’, sustainability a high priority. The financial stakes are quite low: the cost of a TV licence is equivalent to one takeaway coffee a week for the whole household, excluding those who pay nothing. The social, cultural and democratic stakes are much higher: international comparisons show that having a strong public service broadcaster is a key source of public resilience to online disinformation.
This post is based on a chapter to be published in: John Mair, ed, General Election 2024: The Media and the Messengers, MGM Books, July 2024. This post represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
