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The BBC has been caught up in a number of controversies and contradictions over the last few weeks. Here's a sample ...
On June 7th the infuriatingly self-assured Radio 4 Today presenter John Humphrys told a Labour MP that Trump hadn't said something that he had been taped saying only days before. evolvepolitics.com/listen-bbc-jou…
On June 5th BBC online published a feature about how 'party girls can do politics'. Rather than explore the - very obtrusive phenomenon - of escalating engagement by young people in politics in the UK, the BBC focused on a young Conservative and Turning Point UK 'influencer'.
(This feature had all the hallmarks of a 'ready made' - where a media organisation produces engaging content at low cost by working with an independent provider. For the BBC to engage with Turning Point UK in this way is very troubling). bbc.co.uk/news/av/storie…
On May 28th the BBC announced that it would hold two debates on network television for the Conservative Party's candidates to replace the current Prime Minister. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
According to the BBC this is 'firmly in the national interest' even though only a tiny handful of the population will have any say. There's no suggestion that the other parties will receive commensurate coverage so they can present themselves as a natural party of government.
The point here isn't that the BBC is always biased in favour of the Conservatives, or hostile to actual left-wing currents of thought while working with (and indeed employing) extreme right-wingers.
No doubt social conservatives can find much to complain about in the BBC's coverage. (They have been doing so in a strange, mutually gratifying, minuet with the BBC since the days of Mary Whitehouse.)
As @ta_mills points out, the issue isn't the editorial decisions themselves. It's the structure of decision-making that produces them. At the moment that structure is opaque to the public, and vulnerable to both intimidation and seduction by political and economic elites.
The question to ask ourselves - once we have exhausted our outrage at the decisions and the self-congratulatory defence the BBC provides for them ('everyone hates us, so we must be doing something right!) - is 'what kind of structure do we want to establish for the BBC?
How can we make it accountable to the population at large, rather than to a tiny number of politicians and media operations, backed by a wealthy and insouciant social layer? How do we inscribe opportunities for egalitarian reflection and sense-making into its operations?
In other words, how do we make the BBC, and the wider communicative field, into something we understand, and that we can make into a resource for the discovery and refinement of popular priorities? (There are answers to this question ...)
Trump's unguarded comments about the NHS being 'on the table' are extremely important and should worry us. Here's @carolinejmolloy explaining why for @openDemocracyUK - opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/nhs-…
The Conservative party is well worth studying. Here's the latest @poltheoryother podcast, which features a fascinating interview with Alexander Galls about the nature of Thatcherism. soundcloud.com/poltheoryother…
Meanwhile Twitter can give you a much better sense of how young people are engaging with politics than the BBC seems willing to offer. There's no law of physics that makes the BBC behave in the way it does, though. It *could* become a space where a real diversity of opinion ...
.. becomes accessible to large audiences, and a space where those audiences could see people like themselves engaged in a process of open-ended but consequential debate about who is talking sense, who bullshit.
But the BBC will not, cannot, become this through its own exertions. We have to come together, against the odds and without permission, to describe the public media system we want in the digital age, and to make this description the stuff of political action.
This is another odd one. Radio 4's Start the Week - an author is joined by a UK academic and ... a right-wing think tanker to discuss his book? bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…
