Balance at the BBC?

Battling bias on the BBC is much more difficult than in the corporate press.  They do portray themselves as providing a spurious balance. The coverage of economic and business matters is the area of the media subject to more spin than any other and the BBC seem to fall for it all the time.

So there can be little surprise that BBC Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders, is now off to work for the US’s largest bank J.P. Morgan. Is this by any chance the same J.P.Morgan managed by Jamie Dimon who met US regulators following investigations into whether they misled investors last week?

The US media reported that they could agree to financial penalties of several billions of dollars to pay back investors who lost money through transactions relating to mortgage-backed securities. Apparently a sticking point in the negotiations over a settlement centres on an admission of wrongdoing, which could open the bank up to a flood of lawsuits.
Is the the same J.P.Morgan that agreed to pay $920m to settle charges relating to the "London Whale" trading scandal? And in 2011, did they not settle similar charges relating to misleading investors about mortgage-backed securities with, the Securities and Exchange Commission? Agreeing to pay $153.6m in June and $296.9m in November.

So buying up Stephs ‘balance’ and PR skills may be a good move.

I see also that after his stroke Andrew Marr is back to smooch politicians. His bias is even more difficult to combat as his history films and books are promoted by the entire BBC machine with its incredible reach as a broadcaster and publisher giving them tremendous authority.  

Now I rarely agree with Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph but when he wrote that Marr’s History of Modern Britain was, “ignorant and patronising” I had to let out a little cheer.  Its not just that Marr gets his facts wrong, the publishers paid out a "significant sum" in damages to Erin Pizzey after the book mistakenly linked her  to the 1970s terror group the Angry Brigade. Macmillan pulped thousands of copies and issued an “urgent” stock recall notice citing legal reasons.
Pity we cannot issue a similar recall notice for the omission of socialists, trade unions and co-operatives from the Building of Modern Britain. It is bad enough that current left wing ideas and campaigns are ignored by the BBC. Being written out of the future is bad enough but to be air-brushed out of the past is intolerable. Ken Loach was not the only one to find Marr’s defence of Mrs Thatcher’s and the swallowing of her odious ideology as distasteful.
Now Robert Peston, the BBC News’s Business editor, the man who bought down Northern Rock, has decided to give us his history of shopping. This is what Time Out calls history “written by the winners”. There is little or no analysis of the consequences of some of the changes we have seen on the High Street with Peston it is very much in the Marr mould of shaping the facts to fit the story.
Let me just give you a few examples of how by getting the facts wrong he distorts the true history of the period he describes. Firstly his assertion that Marks and Spencer was the first large scale retailer to launch its own brand. The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) was making own brand products in 1876. Crumpsall Biscuits being the first.
Marks and Spencer’s was not formed until 1894. He suggests that M&S was the first to introduce own branded goods to escape retail price maintenance. The CWS did this far earlier using its Pelaw’s Pharmaceutical Works. In 1906 a group of patent medicine manufacturers decided to boycott co-op stores for paying a dividend on their products, which they saw as a price cut rather than the return of profits to members. The CWS responded by expanding the output from their Pelaw Drug and Dry Saltery Works, founded in 1902, thereby producing their own medicines to fight the boycott. This process was repeated with the famous Defiant Radios in 1933.
Dixons was featured for its innovation as a photographic retailer in the 1960s. The CWS had been selling cameras and photographic supplies to co-operatives through its Manchester, Newcastle, and London operations in the 1920s, and on a national basis from 1931. By 1933 the CWS was producing and marketing its own brand of photographic film.
He also claimed that Sainsbury’s opened Britain’s first self service store in Croydon in 1950. This of course can only be true if you ignore the first purpose built Co-op Self Service store opened by Portsea Island Society in 1948 and that there had been self-service departments within London Society stores even earlier.
The point is that you do not need competition and free markets to generate retail innovation but this does not fit the story so gets ignored. These may appear to be minor errors. But this is part of systematic blind spot on the role of the Co-op in our history. I am dreading the portrayal of the Co-op – or the lack of it in the First World War with next year’s commemorations.
The systematic ignoring of the positive role of trade unions and co-operatives in our past helps to deny us a possible role in the future and needs to be challenged.