Why has the left failed to fix the BBC’s economic Bias?
The Labour Party has put itself in a headlock based on lies, disinformation and ideological bias. Yet progressives are inexcusably silent about "what needs to be done" to change the terms of debate.
I’m writing this in frustration having just finished a project that involved researching how the media shapes the public’s understanding of the economy.
Part of the work involved analysing the media narratives established during and the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-10. It’s startling how the discourse remains so entrenched more than a decade later.
A landmark review by Cardiff University backs this up. Dr Mike Berry’s analysis showed that:
Media coverage during and after the GFC overwhelmingly framed austerity as “inevitable,” sidelining debate about alternatives.
Deficit and debt were almost always presented as the result of Labour “overspending,” rather than the global financial meltdown or policy choices.
Right-wing and business voices dominated news coverage; academic and alternative perspectives were all but ignored.
Editorial decisions and sourcing were shaped by ideological leanings, relationships, and a culture of groupthink.
The net effect was to entrench economic orthodoxy and shut out the very voices who might have offered a different way forward.
Recently the BBC’s own impartiality review into its economics coverage, published in 2022, (10 years on from the GFC) made it painfully clear that those distorted orthodoxies continued to set the terms of debate in Britain, endangering the BBC’s impartiality when reporting on the economy.
Why isn’t the left demanding reform?
Why is the left so quiet about this? Why haven’t they gone on the offensive? Why isn’t Labour’s culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, on the case? Why isn’t the House of Commons culture committee investigating? Which backbench Labour MP wants to make a name for themself campaigning for genuinely progressive cause? Why aren’t the Lords up in arms?
Why are the people with the evidence, the arguments, and power, just… so silent?
Let’s not mince words, there is an open goal here for the left. It’s two years since the BBC’s own impartiality review exposed deep flaws in how Britain’s most powerful broadcaster covers economics - but what happened since then?
Tumbleweeds……….
We’re living in a moment in which the old economic orthodoxies never looked weaker. As a nation, we are desperate for renewal (physical, infrastructural, political and ideological renewal). The public is crying out for different answers to the cost-of-living crisis, they deserve explanations about why investment is so low, it is simply no good enough they are still being told - endlessly, relentlessly - that “there is no alternative” to never ending fiscal conservatism and austerity.
No-one is willing to explain to the country why our debt to GDP is unsustainable, necessitating strict self-destructive fiscal rules, yet Japan’s, France or Italy’s - whose debt is far worse - still manage to invest far more than we do.
Why is no-one explaining how, if we were broke in 2010 when government lending rates were low, we remain broke today - despite 15 years of austerity - and remain even more broke today with the cost of lending higher.
Politicians have treated Brits like a bunch of marks: the targets of a political con and, make no mistake, that con was enabled by the media.
Do MPs understand how their brand of “computer says no” politics fuels the public’s fatalistic sense that our politics and economics are rigged, regardless of who holds power?
Meanwhile, the single most significant official review of BBC economics reporting in a generation, that could be the launchpad for a new era of public understanding just sits there, gathering dust.
The BBC’s impartiality review wasn’t subtle.
Despite the linguistic gymnastics the BBC review is couched in, its findings were startling. It concluded that BBC’s economics coverage was:
too narrow
ill-informed,
captured by establishment thinking
ignorant of other perspectives - particularly those outside the Westminster bubble, and
laid bare how the supposed “neutrality” of economics news is actually a breeding ground for groupthink and elite consensus.
Why no outrage from the left?
This was a golden opportunity - a shovel-ready case for change. Instead, we got… nothing. Just the same timid, media-savvy statements about “fairness,” “growth,” “credibility” and “tough decisions.”
Even bond vigilantes are coming to think the UK’s fiscal position is insane.
Speaking to the FT recently Isabelle Mateos y Lago, chief economist at BNP Paribas bank, said the UK’s austere attitude to debt (an attitude reflected at the BBC and thoroughly Fisked in the review of its economics reporting) is nonsense.
The strictness of Reeves’ fiscal rules “actually damages the UK’s credibility with the markets because they have to hurt themselves so much to meet them”, Mateos y Lago added. “It is an unfortunate place for the UK to be.”
Let that sink in for a second: The bond vigilante’s think the British government’s fiscal rules are bonkers.
The left has the evidence, the public mood and even the bond traders partially on side. So what are we doing? Why is the government so afraid to take on the media? Why isn’t it pressuring the BBC and demanding true plurality in reporting?
Where are the campaigns, the open letters, the public calls for implementation of these recommendations? Where is the lobbying of parliament? Where is the TaxPayers Alliance style hyperbole? Where are the left-leaning think tanks, the communications consultants, researchers and policy wonks who should be fighting to shift the Overton window?
The silence is deafening
We’re told a “progressive” government is now in charge, but guys… seriously, no-one can help you, if don’t help yourselves.
The BBC review was a gift on a plate… No10 and No11 should be lapping it up. The BBC review told us in black and white that economic reporting was failing. The left’s failure to act on that is not just an embarrassment - it’s a dereliction of duty. Literally letting a crisis go to waste.
If we can’t even fight for the basics - for truth, clarity, and a diversity of voices in how the news explains our economic lives - then what exactly is the point of a left in power?
It’s time to demand better. And The BBC review cannot be allowed to slip down the memory hole. If the left won’t fight for it, who will?
I also feel frustrated. It feels to me like a self-reinforcing problem. Some people in society at large can see the problem (e.g. George Monbiot is very articulate and detailed about BBC bias), but they're simply not heard very loudly outside the circles of the already-persuaded because the discourse works to marginalise them.
e.i. The only people who have the authority to "cut through" the bias are Nandy herself or other people within government who are treated by the BBC as central to the discourse, rather than sprinkling a little pepper to make it more flavoursome for media consumers (which is how Monbiot is treated). But such people are not appointed to such positions: Nandy is a case study of someone who used to have ideas of her own but appears to have traded them in for power.
So I suppose that change only happens when, by some twist of events or wider shift in politics, someone is one day appointed to the Nandy position who is not an apparatchik. And they get rid of some of the Tory apologists and satisficers and Oxbridge fools near the top of the BBC, which then shifts behaviours lower down.
I agree too about the problem of the "left ecosystem". There aren't many left think tanks, researchers, etc, and most of them are preoccupied with economic and institutional problems for which there would otherwise be no informed left critique at all.
Hi Indy.
It would take:
- Salience: a proactive/reactive strategy of making trouble and holding BBC to account about this issue across a variety of comms channels, but particularly media.
- some movement building & alignment across campaigns who have an interest in making the media change the way it reports on the economy, but starting with the BBC.
- political strategy. Basically targeting MPs, including those closest to power, like Nandy and the select committee, but also MPs/Lords and those close to political power.
A ongoing shovel ready synthesis of existing research plus quick and dirty in house research would help too.
Basically needs a small organization, would need funding, either/ and through foundations and individual giving.