Many have accused the BBC of 'bias' for failing to cover Saturday's anti-austerity march which took place in Central London. So are they right?
Many have accused the BBC of ‘bias’ for failing to cover an anti-austerity march. So are they right?
Many have accused the BBC of ‘bias’ for failing to cover Saturday’s anti-austerity march which took place in Central London.
So are they right? Well yes and no. Media bias is one factor, but there are also other less encouraging reasons which explain the media’s relative disinterest. Here are four:
Protests (on their own) rarely achieve anything
Protest has its place but on its own it rarely achieves a great deal. Paradoxically it tends to work better in those places in the world where it is forbidden: the heavy handedness of the authorities can often result in protests swelling to millions of people. In authoritarian states protest is also a revolutionary act. In liberal democratic Britain it isn’t.
That’s not to say that protest is pointless; but it would be naive to overestimate its possible impact. Much like the newspaper sellers who hang around these events, those who cling to the idea that peaceful marches in Central London can make a huge impact haven’t adapted to a changed world: online activism is far more effective at reaching a large audience than marching through the Capital. It’s also less tainted by any association with the strange people who sometimes hang around the fringes of protests, such as these people.
This specific argument has been lost
For better or worse, the anti-austerity argument was lost back in 2010. Since late 2013 a majority of people have also told pollsters that austerity is actually good for the economy: 42 per cent now say cuts are good for the economy while 37 per cent say they are bad.
One needn’t confer respectability on an idea simply because it is popular, but it does perhaps help to explain why the media failed to give Saturday’s protest the level of coverage the organisers believe it deserved. There is no longer a mainstream anti-austerity narrative. The Tories and the Lib Dems are making cuts, Labour are going to make cuts and no one who isn’t is going to get anywhere near power anytime soon. As far as the media is concerned the debate is over.
There comes a point when sound and fury aren’t enough
People want to know what the protesters would do instead, and they feel they aren’t getting it. ‘No cuts’, declared the banners on Saturday. But no cuts invariably mean tax increases. ‘Tax the rich,’ I can hear you say. Fine, lots of us would like the rich to pay a higher proportion of their income in taxation; but why pretend this is a panacea?
Peter Mandelson famously said that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and left-wing critics of previous Labour governments have picked up on this quote as an example of Labour servility to the well off. What critics forget is that, in a globalised economy, it’s actually quite hard to tax the rich ‘until the pips squeak’, to use former Labour chancellor Denis Healey’s phraseology, firstly because the rich would probably leave the country, taking their businesses, tax revenue and jobs with them. You may profess not to care about such things, but whether you like it or not you still need money to pay for services and the like.
As the Laffer Curve demonstrates, increasing tax rates beyond a certain point is counter-productive for raising further tax revenue. The big challenge for the left in the 21st century will be figuring out how to tax the rich progressively transnationally, because a nation state-based approach is no longer enough.
There is some media bias at work
But this is less because of a deliberate decision to exclude anti-austerity protests, and more because of the class backgrounds of many journalists. British journalism already favours the rich, powerful and glamorous over the poor, weak and unfashionable, journalist and author Peter Oborne wrote a few years back, and having little invested in the services this government is cutting means that many journalists slip effortlessly into narratives of the cuts being “inevitable” and austerity coming as a consequence of “runaway government spending”.
This problem is being exacerbated as journalism becomes the preserve of the upper-middle classes due to unpaid internships and the collapse of many local newspapers.
So yes, there is bias, but not in the way many think.
74 Responses to “The real reasons the media didn’t cover Saturday’s anti-cuts march”
fake
The argument for austerity has been settled, because the anti cuts brigade dont put foward any alternative other than “tax the rich”.
Except 100% income taxes on the rich would still leave a deficit, and no one is proposing 100% taxes?
Maybe that deficit is affordable (I buy the theory you can run a 2-4% deficit indefinatly, maybe), but its not a strong argument to most people.
And when you talk to many of these protesters, they say as someone else said *”what – The massive debt accrued by reckless bankers and financial institutions
and the year on year destruction of industry by corrupt politicians?”*
Well yea, so…..erm….. what?
what has that actually got to do with raising tax revenue, what is it we should be doing to “fix” this rather nebulous problem.
If you want to fight the cuts, you have to stop crying nonsense about the bankers (who’s issues are real but seperate), and you have to get people to vote for higher taxes.
The only way to fight the cuts is higher taxes, not just on the rich, but on middle england as well.
Jasper
The Laffer curve doesn’t demonstrate anything. It is a graphic way of representing a point of view.
John Mitchell
I disagree and the blame cannot all be put at Westminster any longer. Scotland has significant powers under devolution and there are two sides to the financial cost/benefit analysis that would show that as far as spending per head goes Scotland gets the best settlement after Northern Ireland at £1,200 per head.
As I wrote in my last post the whole argument that Scotland will take a radically different course is somewhat redundant. If it was the case why isn’t the Scottish Government doing it now with the powers it already has?
Recent reports from Norway suggest the Krone may be devalued due to the fluctuating oil based economy. Norway generally isn’t a good example (other than the oil based economy) because they’ve built the oil fund up for decades and pay much higher taxes than the average person in Scotland would be willing to accept as reasonable.
The destruction of industry happened 30+ years ago and not just to Scotland. The global economy has changed (not necessarily for the better) but it has changed.
There are many successes from Scotland being in the UK and there are also negatives.
People don’t always get the government they voted for. Every district in Oklahoma in the 2012 presidential election voted for Mitt Romney but ended up with President Obama. The SNP won a majority in 2011 on 25% of the vote. Democracy is flawed and not everybody is always going to get what they want, that is the trade off.
Yes, but this isn’t an election and is being treated as such by both sides in the referendum campaign. Irreversible means the gravity of the decision is magnified and should be thought about under more scrutiny. It’s not good enough for the Scottish Government to say on things such as currency that the other side is bluffing.
carol_wilcox
‘e’s ‘aving a Laff …er.
David Lindsay
It is not about whether you agree with No More Austerity, and it beats me what Russell Brand of the Libertarian Right was doing there. It is about whether you think that 50,000 people marching through central London is not news.
The BBC can find the only Scottish football fan in Brazil. It can report perhaps a thousand people demonstrating in Iraq. It can bang on about Labour and owls for days on end.
It can report as news the fact that Nigel Farage has drunk a pint of beer in a pub, or the proceedings of some football tournament up the Amazon which “England” is no longer in, and in which no other part of these Islands has had any part from the beginning.
But 50,000 people outside its own front door? Not a word. That is not negligent. That is deliberate.
The same is of course true of ITV News and of Sky News. Like them, the BBC also ignored a huge demonstration, the largest in the history of Manchester, in support of the NHS at the last Conservative Party Conference.
Then as now, while honourable mentions on both occasions go to Channel 4 News for saying anything at all, the hero of the hour was RT, with its very extensive coverage indeed. RT has become the only way of knowing what is going on in the United Kingdom.
That single event had 50,000 participants. The Durham Miners’ Gala has twice as many as that every year. It is the largest event of its kind in Europe. But is it ever on the national news? What do you think? Something very similar is true of the Tolpuddle Festival.
Next month, the national BBC and ITV will not be at either of them. Nor will Sky. But RT ought to be. In fact, I shall be rather disappointed if it is not.
Andy Burnham’s promise to repeal the Health and Social Care Act ought to be huge news. But that could only happen if anyone had ever bothered to tell the electorate about the Health and Social Care Act in the first place.
If the BBC, ITV and Sky told the electorate about the NHS privatisation now giggled off as a fait accompli (to absolutely no broadcast publicity whatever) by someone called Jane Ellison of whom no one had ever previously heard, or if they told the electorate about the never-ending fiasco that is the Iain Duncan Smith whom Question Time had to ensure a free ride, then Labour would be 20 or more points ahead.