BBC loses the plot on the deficit argument
Five Live Drive presenters
I do not quite believe what I’m hearing on Radio 5 Live this afternoon, and what accompanies it on the BBC’s Have your Say website.
Here’s a taster from the Have Your Say website:
MPs will be breaking up for the summer tomorrow, 27 July, but when they return they will still have to deal with the £156 billion deficit which looms over Britain.
This week, BBC Radio 5 live Drive is looking for your big ideas to drive down the deficit. Today the focus is on home savings, including on health, education and local services.
And here is my Mr Bloody Angry of Skelmersdale email fired from the hip on hearing the radio prattle about, including constant reference to the ‘overdraft’, and a totally uncontested interview with Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers Alliance.
I am frankly astonished that the BBC, supposedly a politically balanced organisation, is starting a ‘competition’ on Five Live and on its ‘Have your Say’ website about how to ‘deal with the £156 billion deficit which looms over Britain’.
Is this an attempt to save your licence fee by doing whatever the Coalition government wants you to do, and even pre-empting it?
There is a perfectly valid argument that there the deficit is not ‘looming’ at all, and that we do not need to ‘deal with’ the deficit with either spending cuts or tax rises. There is indeed a very strong argument that making these cuts and increasing taxes now will widen the deficit.
I recommend strongly that you desist from this childish nonsense, which equates the UK economy with a piggy bank, and get on with reporting economics and business properly, and with due balance.
As I write, this shite is still going on, and is due to take place all week. I simply do not remember a time when the BBC showed such astonishing bias and lack of editorial judgment.
This is the email I’m about to send to the Labour leader candidates:
Dear Ed/Ed/David/Diane/Andy
You may not be aware yet of the outrageously biased coverage taking place all this week on Radio 5 Live (Drive) about ‘dealing with the ‘£156 billion deficit which looms over Britain’.
My blog on the matter is here [link to be added], where you will find my immediate email response to this outrageous bias from the BBC.
I do not know if my email will get air time, but I do know that what is needed is a response from Labour leadership candidates to challenge what the BBC is doing here, and to ask relevant questions about whether this series is nothing more than an attempt to bribe the government into maintaining the BBC licence fee.
Update 1830 hrs: The BBC interviewer just interviewed Matthew Sinclair of the TPA again! Uncontested, again! I continue to be astonished.
bloody right Paul, I didn’t hear it, but if you say there was uncontested air time for the TA chap, then this is cause for concern, the BBC ought not to fall into this fucking great bear trap. Good on you.
This is piss poor reporting.
The Tories are winning this and they are going to wreck the country again, and blame the outgoing administration again, and get away with it for a generation again and no amount of “I told you sos” in a decade is going to be ample to sate me, you or paul krugman. Goddamit, who do I complain to?
Next time a Tory trys to tell me how the BBC is obviously a conspiracy to disseminate left wing propaganda on the taxpayers time, I am going to force feed this disgusting example!
It seemed to me that the BBC decided to take a ‘collaborationist’ attitude towards certain things quite some time ago. There was a similar ‘competition’ on R4′s Moneybox which was before the election IIRC.
Heard the Taxpayers Alliance fella and was amazed, trotting out the usual guff about “cutting managerial and non-frontline staff” in all areas, including the NHS by ten per cent, and he was presented as some sort of objective analyst rather than a an ideologue with an agenda and member of a right-wing, pressure group.
I thought the BBC had cottoned on to the TA. A while back they used to wheel them out with monotonous regularity as though they were some non-partisan group analysing taxes, I used to scream at the radio. Then they got outted as a group of wealthy Thatcherites, some of whom do not even pay UK tax and they appeared much less regularly.
Then like a bad smell they are back again!
Another thing about the BBC Radio 5 Live ‘Drive’ show is that its financial correspondent is Declan Curry, a fat fella who does little to disguise his his free-market, neo-liberal bias. He will say “..and now let’s hear what the City reaction is” as though we are now getting the rational, objective summary of what has gone before. And some City spiv will be bo be a bowled a few slow, easy balls to knock out of the ground.
Shouldn’t be a suprise really. When BBC staff took strike action against job cuts in 2005 andwere operating with a skeleton staff, Curry was one of the very few BBC scabs to cross the picket line.
Update: Wrote to two Labour leader candidates I thought most likely to challenge this, seeking their media action. No response.
The BBC increasingly infuriate me. I don’t think it’s deliberate bias, merely crap, lazy journalism. I occasionally email them to point out errors on their website, since unlike broadcasts that can easily be gone back over and corrected, but it never does any good.
The last one was after the Budget, where they said “only once your income gets near to £50,000 will you be worse off as a result of the tax and national insurance changes announced by Mr Osborne”. That was based on the table in the Red Book that included the changes announced by Alistair Darling in March, so what they said was entirely untrue. I sent them a polite email pointing this out, and got a response ‘thanking me for my observation’. They didn’t bother to actually edit the article, though.
http://order-order.com/2010/09/07/bbc-is-the-guardianistas-broadcasting-arm/
Interessant, n’est pas?