Peer review

In my previous post I mentioned that BBC bias was one of three subjects I discussed with Chris Snowdon and Tom Slater on the latest edition of the Last Orders podcast.

I suggested the subject because it was (a) topical, and (b), for five years from 1985 to 1990 I was employed to monitor current affairs programmes for political bias. Officially the Media Monitoring Unit was founded by Julian Lewis (now Sir Julian, Conservative MP for New Forest East since 1997) and Lord Chalfont, a former Labour minister under Harold Wilson in the Sixties.

In reality, it was very much Julian’s baby. Nevertheless, I should have taken far more interest in Lord Chalfont than I did. For many years, Alun Gwyn Jones was a career soldier. After he left the army in 1961 he joined The Times as defence correspondent. Three years later he was summoned to see Harold Wilson, the new Labour prime minister, and much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he departed the meeting having been made a life peer and a minister at the Foreign Office, despite the fact that he was neither a socialist nor, prior to his appointment, a member of the Labour Party.

Appointed minister for disarmament, he reportedly ‘spearheaded Labour’s push for nuclear disarmament and the drive to join the EEC’. In 1968 he also undertook what in hindsight was an extraordinary trip to the Falklands that was intended to promote the idea of Argentinian sovereignty, which Chalfont (and presumably the Foreign Office) supported. The islanders, however, were firmly against the plan and without their support it was abandoned, although it no doubt sowed the seeds for the Argentinian invasion 14 years later.

Two years after Labour lost the 1970 election, Chalfont stood down as the party’s defence spokesman in the House of Lords, and in 1974 he resigned his party membership. I won’t go into every detail of his life but it’s worth noting that he advised all the main parties on defence whilst developing ‘an increasing obsession with supposed communist infiltration’ of organisations like the BBC. He also wrote the foreword to my first Media Monitoring Report whose publication in November 1986 prompted one newspaper to lead its front page with the headline, ‘YES, THE BBC IS BIASED’.

My only recollection of meeting Lord Chalfont was when he hosted a private dinner for a handful of influential journalists at his flat in Westminster. The late Paul Johnson and TE Utley (father of Tom) were there, plus several who are still alive so I won’t mention their names, but the idea was to brief them in advance about our first report. In truth it wasn’t wholly successful because opinion among our guests was divided. One or two were sceptical about the project, and one was openly hostile, but Johnson in particular became an outspoken supporter, writing several articles about our work for The Spectator.

Given Chalfont’s subsequent comments about communists infiltrating the BBC, his foreword to our first report was surprisingly measured. For example:

There is a widespread belief in political circles – although this is not necessarily shared by the general public – that news and current affairs on television are neither objective nor impartial; and that they are, in fact, persistently biased in favour of the left.

The evidence for this has, in the past, been largely anecdotal, although nonetheless powerful for that. There is a clear impression that much of the output of the BBC, as well as that of Independent Television, is unbalanced, clearly reflecting editorial opinions held by radically-minded presenters, reporters and producers. It is an impression which is not confined to news and current affairs programmes, but to much of the output of the drama department as well.

This report by the Media Monitoring Unit is an attempt to discover whether this impressionistic evidence would be supported by a systematic monotorimg operation. It is a result of a year of careful analysis of the news and current affairs output of BBC Television and Independent Television. The results appear to give some support to the widely-held belief that there is a serious lack of objectivity and political balance in much of television news and current affairs, both BBC and commercial.

The report will, however, provide no ammunition for those who seek to condemn either the BBC or Independent Television out of hand. It reveals that some of the most careful and objective reporting and some of the worst examples of unbalanced propaganda can occur on the same network or even within the same series.

He concluded:

The opinions contained in this report are, of course, entirely those of the Media Monitoring Unit. However, even those who disagree with them will find it difficult to contest the factual evidence upon which those opinions are based. It may be too much to hope that it will cause any great heart-searching in an industry which is not intolerably plagued by self-doubt. It might, however, serve to demonstrate that criticisms of ‘bias in the media’ are not etely the products of the fevered imagination of over-sensitive politcians. As Henry Kissinger once remarked, “Even paranoids have real enemies”.

Thereafter he was far less engaged with the MMU, but the association did him no harm. Indeed, it arguably led to his appointment, by Mrs Thatcher, as deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1989, and chairman of the Radio Authority in 1990.

I am currently reading his autobiography, The Shadow of My Hand: A Memoir, courtesy of a secondhand copy purchased on Amazon last week. Regarding BBC bias and the MMU, he wrote:

In 1984 the editor of BBC Radio News and Current Affairs invited me to take part in a confidential internal research project as an aid to informing editorial policy … It was my own clear impression that the unions were given a substantially better platform for their views than the government.

I was also asked to write a foreword to a report produced by the Media Monitoring Group (sic), an organisation quickly rubbished as ‘right wing’. In fact, as I said in my foreword, the report would give no ammunition to those seeking to condemn the BBC or ITV out of hand … What the report did seem to show was a strong strand of anti-American, anti-police, pro-unilateralist dogma running through much of television’s current affairs output.

By attempting to reach a position of moral neutrality, broadcasters found themselves in a position where they would routinely describe the IRA as ‘interrogating’ soldiers and ‘executing’ informers; what these words meant to the vast body of society was ‘torturing’ and ‘murdering’. Journalists would high-handedly speak of ‘innocent’ victims of terrorism, as if a young soldier blown to pieces in the course of trying to keep the peace on behalf of other citizens was somehow a ‘guilty’ party.

Sound familiar?

Alun Gwyn Jones (aka The Rt Hon Lord Chalfont OBE MC PC) died, aged 100, in 2020. You can read one of several obituaries here.

Below: the first Media Monitoring Report, published in November 1986. As you can see, I still have a copy. Photo: Chris Snowdon