Journalists defer to power - Village Magazine

44June 2015

hen someone says they have no poli-

tics, it means that their politics align

with the status quo. None of us are

unbiased, none removed from the

question of power. We are social crea-

tures, who absorb the outlook and

opinions of those with whom we

associate, and unconciously echo

them. Objectivity is impossible.

The illusion of neutrality is one of the

reasons for the rotten state of journal-

ism, as those who might have been

expected to hold power to account drift

thoughtlessly into its arms. But until I

came across the scandal now erupting

in Canada, I hadn’t understood just how

quickly standards are falling.

In , reporters at CBC, Canada’s

equivalent of the BBC, broke a major

story. They discovered that the Royal

Bank of Canada had done something

cruel and unusual even by banking

standards. It was obliging its junior

staﬀ to train a group of tempo-

rary foreign workers who

would then be given their jobs.

Just after the ﬁrst report was

aired, according to the website

Canadaland, something odd

happened. Journalists prepar-

ing to expand on the investigation were

summoned to a conference call with

Amanda Lang, the senior business cor-

respondent and a star presenter. The

reporters she spoke to say she repeat-

edly attempted to scuttle the story,

dismissing it as trivial and dull.

They were astonished. But not half as

astonished as they were when they dis-

covered the following, unpublished

facts. First, that Amanda Lang had

spoken at a series of events

run or sponsored by the Royal

Bank of Canada, for which she

appears to have been paid in

some cases around

Can$,. Second, that she

was booked to speak at an

event sponsored by the outsourcing

company the bank had hired to imple-

ment the cruel practice exposed by her

colleagues. Third, that her partner is a

board member at the Royal Bank of

Canada.

Even the BBC’s coverage

of bank bailouts was

dominated

by ﬁnancial voices.

By George Monbiot

Journalists

defer to power

Also in this section:

RTé Digital volunteers 46

Referendum balance 48

Hymn to Broadsheet.ie 50

MEDIA

This article ﬁrst

appeared in the

Guardian

www.monbiot.com

June 2015 45

The website Canadaland, which

exposed Lang’s conﬂicts last week,

found that other journalists at the

broadcaster were furious, but too

frightened to speak on the record. But

after CBC tried to dismiss the scandal

as “half-truths based on anonymous

sources”, Kathy Tomlinson, the

reporter who had broken the

story about the bank,

bravely spoke publicly to the

website. The following

morning, staﬀ in her oﬃce

arrived to ﬁnd this message

spelt out in magnets on their

fridge. “Jesse Brown snitches

get stitches”. Jesse Brown is

Canadaland’s founder.

CBC refused to answer my

questions, and I have not had

a response from Amanda

Lang. It amazes me that she

remains employed by CBC,

which has so far done noth-

ing but bluster and berate its

critics.

It’s grotesque. But it’s

symptomatic of a much

wider problem in journal-

ism: those who are supposed

to scrutinise the ﬁnancial

and political elite are embed-

ded within it. Many belong

to a service sector aristocracy, wedded

metaphorically (sometimes literally) to

ﬁnance. Often unwittingly, they

amplify the voices of the elite, while

muﬄing those raised against it.

A study by academics at the Cardiﬀ

school of journalism examined the BBC

‘Today’ programme’s reporting of the

bank bailouts in . It discovered

that the contributors it chose were

“almost completely dominated by

stockbrokers, investment bankers,

hedge fund managers and other City

voices. Civil society voices or commen-

tators who questioned the beneﬁts of

having such a large ﬁnance sector were

almost completely absent from cover-

age”. The ﬁnanciers who had caused the

crisis were asked to interpret it.

The same goes for discussions about

the deﬁcit and the perceived need for

austerity. The debate has been domi-

nated by political and economic elites,

while alternative voices – arguing that

the crisis has been exaggerated, or that

instead of cuts, the government should

respond with Keynesian spending pro-

grammes or taxes on ﬁnancial

transactions, wealth or land – have

Amanda Lang then interviewed the

chief executive of the bank on her own

show. When he dismissed the story as

unfair and misleading, she did not chal-

lenge him. That evening, she

uncritically repeated his talking points

on CBC’s main current aﬀairs pro-

gramme. Her interests, again, were not

revealed. Then she wrote a comment

article for the Globe and Mail newspa-

per, suggesting that her colleagues’

story arose from an outdated suspicion

of business, was dangerous to Canada’s

interests and was nothing but “a side-

show”. Here’s what she said about the

bank’s employment practices. “It’s

called capitalism, and it isn’t a dirty

word.”

scarcely been heard. Those priorities

have changed your life: the BBC helped

to shape the political consensus under

which so many are now suﬀering.

The BBC’s business reporting breaks

its editorial guidelines every day, by

failing to provide alternative view-

points. Every weekday morning, the

‘Today’ programme grovels

to business leaders for 

minutes. It might occasion-

ally challenge them on the

value or viability of their

companies, but hardly ever

on their ethics. Corporate

critics are shut out of its

business coverage – and

almost all the rest. On BBC

‘News at Six’, the Cardiﬀ

researchers found, business

representatives outnum-

bered trade union

representatives by  to one.

“The BBC tends to reproduce

a Conservative, Eurosceptic,

pro-business version of the

world”. This, remember, is

where people turn when they

don’t trust the corporate

press.

While the way in which the

media handle the stories

that are covered is bad

enough, the absence of coverage is even

worse. If an issue does not divide the

main political parties, it vanishes from

view, though the parties now disagree

on hardly anything. Another study

reveals a near total collapse of environ-

mental coverage on ITV and BBC news:

it declined from .% (ITV) and .%

(BBC) of total airtime in  to .%

and .% in . There were as many

news stories on these outlets about

Madeline McCann in  – seven

years after her disappearance – as

there were about all environmental

issues put together.

Those entrusted to challenge power

are the loyalists of power. They rage

against the social media and people like

Russell Brand, without seeing that the

popularity of alternatives is a response

to their own failures: their failure to

expose the claims of the haute monde,

their failure to enlist a diversity of

opinion, their failure to permit the

audience to see that another world is

possible. If even the public sector

broadcasters parrot the talking points

of the elite, what hope is there for

informed democratic choice? •

Civil society

voices or

commentators

who

questioned

the beneﬁts

of having

such a large

ﬁnance sector

were almost

completely

absent from

coverage

“

The ﬁnanciers

who had

caused the

crisis were

asked to

interpret it

“