Balance and Bias in Radio Four's Today Programme, During the 1997 General Election Campaign

Balance and Bias in Radio Four's Today Programme, during the 1997 General Election Campaign. Guy Starkey, M.A. Institute of Education Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ABSTRACT This research considered aspects of balance and bias in radio broadcasting, focusing on thirty-nine editions of the Today programme (Radio Four) during the last general election campaign period. The rationale for such a selection was that during a campaign, broadcasters are under the greatest obligation, both morally and legally, to ensure overall 'balance' in their coverage. In Chapter One, a literature survey compares different perspectives on balance and bias, both professional and academic, and relates them to public controversies about political coverage in the period preceding the election. In Chapter Two, the survey extends to interviewing techniques and the presence of confrontation in political interviews. Both chapters set Today in a wider context. Chapter Three considers the research methodology. Attention is paid to the potential for reflexivity in such an analysis, and the possibility of textual readings being distorted through additional hermeneutic layers. During the campaign period, a self-selected but coincidentally representative group of listeners provided both quantitative and qualitative feedback via an original questionnaire. This is reported in Chapter Four as producing some interesting conclusions about audience reading of radio texts and perceptions of balance and bias. These data were compared with readings by a party political monitor whose role during the campaign was to analyse political coverage on Today. Chapters Five and Six present a detailed textual analysis, by both quantitative and qualitative means, of the programmes themselves. Emphasis is placed on the objective rather than the subjective, determining common points of reference and comparing like elements. Finally, a number of specific conclusions are reached, about the conduct of the programme makers themselves and about more general practices in political coverage by broadcasters. CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: THE ACHIEVABILITY OF 'BALANCE' 6 CHAPTER 2: CONVERSATION OR 44 CONFRONTATION? - THE NATURE OF THE TODAY INTERVIEW CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO 95 BALANCE CHAPTER 4: AUDIENCE READINGS OF TODAY 134 CHAPTER 5: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS BY 210 QUANTITATIVE METHODS CHAPTER 6: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS BY QUALITATIVE 264 METHODS CONCLUSIONS 303 BIBLIOGRAPHY 308 APPENDIX: QUESTIONNAIRE 311 attachment (inside back cover): COMPACT DISC OF PROGRAMME EXTRACTS 4 LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES FIGURES 1 — 23: Questionnaire respondent data (except FIGURE 3: Votes cast in 1997 general election; FIGURE 14: Radio audience data; FIGURE 15: Data from Loughborough University study) FIGURES 24 — 45 and 50: Quantitative data from the programmes (except FIGURE 26) FIGURES 26 and 46 — 49: Qualitative data from the programmes 5 CHAPTER ONE: THE ACHIEVABILITY OF 'BALANCE' "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. It is a core value and no area of programming is exempt from it." BBC Producers' Guidelines, 1996, 14 The idea that impartiality is possible and a quality to be striven for runs throughout not only the BBC's own literature, but also the welter of technicist manuals which attempt to set the parameters within which journalists and broadcasters operate. The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which 'due' impartiality was achieved over the critical period of the 1997 general election campaign in one of the BBC's most important radio programmes: Radio Four's Today. The BBC's own Guidelines defined 'due' as meaning "adequate or appropriate to the nature of the subject and the type of programme" (ibid, 14). Today, as a news magazine, itself covers in each daily edition a vast range of subjects, and discussion of its own 'impartiality' frequently assumes importance in the nation's news agenda. Issues of rationale and generalisability are pursued later, but this first chapter will attempt to establish how achievable 'impartiality' actually is, both in broadcasting in general and on Today in particular. The notion of impartiality in broadcasting can be traced back to the first Director General, John (later Lord) Reith, who saw it as essential in a public service which was then intended to enjoy a monopoly of broadcasting. With the use of the radio frequency spectrum then much less efficient than today, the liberal tradition as manifested by the 6 existence of a free press with a variety of titles and a diversity of ownership was deemed inappropriate for a new medium benefiting from only a very limited number of possible channels. The early development of the medium has been chronicled by a number of media historians - their work ranging in scope and detail from Briggs' meticulous first volume (1961) to Scannell & Cardiff (1991) and Crisell's brief excursion (1994) through the key events. Other commentators have written from a more sociological perspective: typically, Thompson, who noted that the concentration of provision of radio broadcasting - 'ownership' in today's terms - meant that in the 1920's a new interpretation of the liberal tradition was considered necessary: "(The BBC) could sustain the traditional liberal idea in this new context only by remaining scrupulously neutral with regard to political parties and organized interest groups, and by insulating itself from the government of the day by the mechanism of the licence fee, which provided (it) with a source of revenue independent of government-allocated funds." (1990, 258) Only then could such a privileged and monolithic organisation claim to be acting in the public interest. However, Thompson identifies immediate and repeated compromise in practice of this 'operative ideal' (ibid, 258). Reith himself abandoned his own principle of neutrality during the 1926 General Strike. Crisell (1994, 20) described the then British Broadcasting Company as "broadly pro-government", but since the episode pre- dated the establishment of the Corporation under a Charter, Reith's move is characterised by some as more pragmatic than party politically-motivated. Resisting calls for the BBC 7 to be 'commandeered' for the duration of the national emergency, he instead chose to support the government against the strikers: "If the Government be strong and their cause right, they need not adopt such measures. Assuming the BBC is for the people and that the Government is for the people, it follows that the BBC must be for the Government in this crisis too." (quoted in Thompson, 1990, 258) Whether pragmatic or not, adopting such a position may have set a damaging precedent. What, after all, constitutes a crisis so important as to abandon 'neutrality'? One could further ask whether crises come in degrees, each perhaps demanding partial abandonment. Who are 'the people' if they do not include large sections of the working population who, in 1926, chose to strike? (Reith probably had in mind a notion of an 'establishment', or a ruling class, rather than the whole population.) In what way was the government 'for' the people, and what, then, would be the role of Her Majesty's opposition? The reality is that Reith chose - albeit perhaps out of necessity - to temporarily align the BBC with the government, thus adopting a partial stance. Thompson blamed the "difficulty of defining the public interest" in times of crisis (ibid, 259) and identifies this as the 'hidden risk' of public service broadcasting: "The point is not simply that, on the occasion of the General Strike and on various occasions since then, the BBC has favoured the government or bowed to pressure from the government or other agencies of the state; rather, the point is that the principle of public service broadcasting... carries with it the risk that the neutrality sought for... will be compromised in practice by the systematic favouring of the concerns and perspectives of officials of the government and state." (1990, 259) 8 As regards the specific context of the Today programme: Donovan (1997) chronicled its development from an initial proposal by Robin Day in July 1955 to the subsequent programme's fortieth anniversary in 1997. His analysis of the question of bias (ibid, 201- 6) suggests that by 1997, balance had become less controversial than during the early to mid-1990s - a phenomenon which he attributed to "both the Tory leadership and... BBC culture (being) less partisan and more consensual in approach" (ibid, 201). Although the BBC in general and Today in particular had by the 1980s begun to attract more criticism for attacking government than for supporting it, Donovan quotes Conservative interviewees - their party then in power - as denying the existence of any systematic bias in Today. That, though, does not exclude the possibility of bias being sporadic - nor as such, its being unconscious rather than intentional. Echoing Reith's earlier alignment of the Corporation with the government of 1926, as late as July 1968 presenter Jack de Manio began the Today programme thus: "Good morning - and let's start the morning by raising our hats to the London policemen, who once again have had their weekends mucked up by a lot of silly hooligans." (in Donovan, ibid, 29) De Manio's 'hooligans' had been in London's Grosvenor Square, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. Even if, as the uncrowned king of the on-air faux pas, his comment is viewed charitably, it was not made as result of a set editorial policy regarding Vietnam, demonstrations, dissent or freedom of

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