The BBC's Brexit failure

Harsh, but it needed to be said.

The BBC is an Anglican broadcaster, which faces the same conflict of purpose. It follows the highest journalistic standards, yet it feels it must also reflect the national mood. Britain voted to leave the EU. The nation spoke, and in respecting “the people’s verdict,” the BBC has done what every enemy of free inquiry wants reporters to do. Like Eliot, it frets about whether “this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at this present time.”

The BBC’s reporting of the scandals around the Brexit referendum is not biased or unbalanced: it barely exists. It is as though the US networks had decided the Mueller investigation was no concern of theirs. There have been three huge stories the BBC has covered with only the most perfunctory reports: the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data leak, the Brexit campaign funding scandal, and the exposure of Russian interference in British politics.

When the whistleblower Christopher Wylie brought The Observer and The New York Times details of how data Cambridge Analytica, a British company partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer (who funds numerous conservative causes), Cadwalladr and Wylie offered the BBC a share of the story... The BBC was given the opportunity to interview the whistleblower and have a documentary ready to go once the news was out. But like Eliot rejecting Orwell, the BBC’s investigative program Panorama backed away. There was no “smoking gun,” it said. Within days, the smoke from Facebook’s burning reputation was billowing from its Palo Alto headquarters.

The pattern repeated itself with Shahmir Sanni from the Vote Leave campaign (whose deliberate refusal to present the British public with a workable plan for Brexit I mentioned earlier). Sanni turned whistleblower and showed how the group had bypassed electoral law and allegedly breached the official spending limit of £7 million ($9.3 million) during the run-up to the EU referendum. One leading London lawyer said the breach was of a scale and seriousness beyond anything Britain had seen in modern times. Once again, the BBC did not want the scoop. “We don’t have enough evidence to turn this around in three weeks,” a Panorama bureaucrat wrote to Cadwalladr. _

Cadwalladr received copies of Arron Banks’s emails showing that he had had multiple meetings with the Russian ambassador during the referendum campaign and was offered a business deal involving six Russian goldmines. All the Today program would do was try to set up a staged confrontation between Cadwalladr and a propagandist for Brexit. It would not report on the emails as news; nor did it use its vast resources, hundreds of times larger than those of The Observer, to investigate.

In the preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell provided a line that today would be apt for the walls of the BBC headquarters: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” No doubt, if the shift of public opinion against Brexit continues, the BBC’s silence will end and, like a weather vane, it will swing with the prevailing wind. It will receive no plaudits from me.


https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/