How the BBC dismantles the left without us noticing

BBC right-wing bias is peculiarly dangerous precisely because it is subtle and exploits the corporation’s reputation for impartiality

BBC news impartiality is a vexed question. The corporation has long been the locus of a left-right tug of war with each side accusing it of favouring the other.

The BBC’s attempt to defend its neutrality by pointing to accusations of bias from both the left and the right isn’t valid. These opposing directions of criticism don’t mean the BBC enjoys an impartial resting point in the middle. The accusations are perfectly compatible with one, not the other, being correct. 

There is a strong case for the view that BBC news coverage has a predominantly right-wing bias though. 

First, consider projection which, as a typically far-right trait, describes the (Trumpian) strategy of distancing oneself from a position by attributing it to the ‘enemy’: ‘It’s Europe, not the US, that suppresses free speech’; ‘It’s the woke left, not the right that’s maliciously undermining democracy’, etc. The right-wing insistence that BBC bias is ‘left, not right-wing’ can plausibly be seen as another preposterous case in point. 

The BBC’s right-leaning tendencies show in its board members. These include Robbie Gibb, appointed by Boris Johnson and described by Emily Maitlis as an “active agent of the Conservative party”. Its director general, Tim Davie, is a former Conservative party councillor and deputy chairman of a London branch. The chairman, Richard Sharp, donated over £400,000 to the Conservative Party. Sharp resigned after failing to disclose his role in an £800,000 loan to Johnson. The current chairman, Samir Shah co-authored a Race Report with Johnson dismissing institutional racism in the UK.

Research also highlights these rightward tendencies, corroborating the evidence of our own eyes. Cardiff University found a clear preponderance of right-wing panellists in BBCs Question Time. During the referendum the BBC failed in its duty to inform the public about Brexit’s implications. BBC news platforms now give disproportionate coverage to Reform over the Lib Dems, a party with over fourteen times as many MPs, and the BBC is currently exploring how to attract more Reform supporters. There are further causes for concern but these points alone suggest that the latest ‘Reform’ plan isn’t a valiant attempt at greater balance, but just another instance of right-wing positioning.  

Behind the words

The right-wing gutter press wears its prejudices on its face. The red meat it blatantly dangles is spotted easily. Whereas the subtlety and sophistication of BBC bias makes its influence more insidious. 

News bias research covers many types of variables. But it’s useful to explore the qualitative aspects of BBC textual meaning and significance by putting the day-to-day linguistic tactics used by BBC journalists under the microscope. Adopting this fine-grained approach, text samples can be highlighted that display subtle nuances of insinuation, subtext and alternative meaning at play. 

To this end, I’ve selected two sample articles from high-profile, influential BBC journalists (Laura Kuenssberg and Chris Mason). Both concern Labour’s recent Spending Review, with Kuenssberg’s written just before, and Mason’s just after its delivery on 11 June. Whilst the observations here aren’t generalisable to all BBC news articles, they do represent common trends. 

Little digs

An antipathy towards Labour in much of Mason’s writing features in his Spending Review account. He informs us that, in the presentation, the numbers were delivered: “After plenty of words about the government’s priorities”

This wording sounds innocent enough. But in ‘plenty of’ there’s a quiet allusion to ‘empty words’. This, in turn, signals suggestively that the government fails to fulfil promises. It’s a gentle, ambiguous insinuation but the first step in Mason’s veiled drip-feed of discreditation. 

He goes on to say that: “We can expect ministers to claim that much of what it has done in its first year in office has been about fixing the foundations. This is code for the tricky stuff”.

Again, this sentence sounds carefully neutral. But using the word “claim” takes it uncomfortably close to the aspersion that “ministers are pretending to have fixed the foundations” the convenient invisibility of which explains a seeming lack of progress. The subsequent reference to “codes about tricky stuff” also insinuates that truths are perhaps being concealed from us. 

Similarly, Kuenssberg wields her knife deftly at the start of her article by describing: “Huge fights inside government about the Spending Review”.

Competitive tension over the departmental allocation of resources is inevitable. But the inflated notion of “huge fights” serves a different purpose by conveying a ‘rats in a sack’ vision of Labour as internally unstable and damagingly disputatious. 

What train crash?

At this juncture, both writers could pause to outline the unprecedented hurdles facing Labour. But the BBC rarely explores the enormity of the train-crash legacy Labour inherited. The party’s deep conundrum is how to present a positive future whilst trying to salvage a nation devastated by 14 years of austerity. 

Labour’s spending task is to allocate funds across a jostling range of institutions: courts, prisons, the NHS, education, policing, social care, housing, special educational needs, security, migration, defence, councils, transport, further education, etc, all trashed and all gasping for life-saving injections of funds. Labour is squaring this circle whilst simultaneously attempting to resuscitate a nation stuck in an economic doom loop of stubbornly low living standards and growth. 

This is not to say that Labour has handled its allocations brilliantly, only that it would be a reasonable moment to acknowledge the truly existential magic-trick required by any governing party in 2025. 

Hyperbole and innuendo

Instead, Mason reminds readers swiftly and forcefully about Labour’s unpopularity, noting the “whack suffered”, shifting it “a long way backwards” from its “whopping” majority, a descent so bad it’s “rare”. Labour’s popularity has declined since coming to power. But there’s an added dimension of unseemly relish here in Mason’s lavish iterations. 

It’s as if this hyperbole has been gratuitously added to remind readers about ‘how disliked the party is’ and to keep them negatively disposed towards the aims of the spending review. 

Kuenssberg’s account is similarly laced with phrases that stealthily mock and impugn these aims. The Treasury is: “Already trying to convince the public the review is about significant investment … Reeves boasted of funnelling billions more taxpayers’ cash … You can bet they’ll want to use every chance they have to say they are spending significantly more than the Tories planned”.

Here Kuenssberg could simply have said the review concerns significant investment. But the preface “already trying to convince” gives the sentence multiple new layers of meaning. “Trying” implies possible motives of desperation and deception. We use the phrase “try to convince” when there’s resistance and likely failure. And “convince” is itself loaded. It means ‘to make someone believe that something is true’  or ‘persuade’. Common synonyms are ‘cajole’ and ‘wheedle’.  

The ’boasted’ tag gives Reeves an air of Truss-style egocentric rashness; whilst ‘already’ implies that Labour habitually pushes Kuenssberg’s insinuated deceptions onto the public. 

Equally, she could have stated simply that Labour plans to spend more than the Tories. But her preface ”You can bet they’ll want to use every chance”, overlays her exposition with a tone of fevered gossip that undermines Labour’s competence and intentions, painting it again as desperate (”needing every chance”) and predictably opportunistic (“you can bet”).

As the article progresses, the condemnatory phrases become more explicit. “Frankly”, we’re told “Sir Keir Starmer arrived in government without having worked out what he really wanted to do.” “Maybe”, she continues with sarcastic optimism, “the idea of this lacklustre government that didn’t have a plan will be blown away by July?”

Damning defeatism then takes over: the “rosy view of how the chancellor might be able to play a difficult hand … might not be reality.” Along the way, she alludes to a “whiff” of “mutiny” within Labour ranks, whilst taking further potshots at Reeves as a chancellor in whom city confidence is both “diminished and diminishing”.

She ends with a last stab at portraying Labour as insufficient, incompetent and dysfunctional: “A senior Labour source said, Wednesday will be ‘the moment this government clicks into gear, or it won’t’. There’s no guarantee.”

Here Kuenssberg’ journalistic use of overblown cliff-hangers to engage readers is framed by negativity. Her chosen source lends her sentence authority whilst portraying Labour as still not functioning properly (clicked into gear), and whose odds for success are essentially precarious. 

Power trip

Why is this kind of bias so destructive?  

Emotive hyperbole, insinuation and ambiguity isn’t mere journalistic licence, i.e. the use of colourful terminology and suspense to keep readers engaged. These devices are doing considerable extra work in the articles considered by portraying Labour as incompetent, unstable, untrustworthy and weak. 

This messaging has considerable reach. Beyond the spending review, a similar tone of muted discreditation features in the BBC’s coverage of other issues now rendered ‘infamous’ such as Labour’s ‘U turns’, EU and migration policies. 

The analysis here is just a tiny snapshot of the steady, daily injection of anti-left-wing nuance that pervades much BBC news output, the subtlety of which helps it evade detection. Taken individually the phrases look innocuous, but they contribute to setting a tone, across articles, topics and time, that is cumulatively formidable.

This nuance surely plays a self-fulfilling role in Labour’s low popularity? When articles relentlessly insinuate in veiled language that a party is incompetent, deceptive, disliked, not in control, this ‘attack drip-feed’ spreads into the political water supply, working its way into public reaction and the polling data. The BBC’s commentary on Labour’s low polling is, arguably, a reflection on a predicament partly of its journalist’s own making.  

The right-wing nuance in BBC news content is also safeguarded by the BBCs long-standing, powerful reputation for impartiality where it excuses surface readings of articles whilst masking their subtleties. But this stubborn reputation is seriously outdated, hinders proper scrutiny of BBC content and would be blown away by further in-depth qualitative research.

Image credit: Stuart Pinford – Creative Commons