Health campaigners and media activists were given fresh cause for grievance last week as new evidence emerged of pro-governmental bias in the BBC’s coverage of the NHS reform bill. A report published on Friday by the independent inquiry OurBeeb went viral over the weekend, providing detailed and wide-ranging facts that lend support to a widely felt sensation that the institution failed to represent national opposition in the run up to the reforms.
The research, which covers the two-year period from the bill’s announcement to its eventual codification as the Health and Social Care Act, is limited in main to the BBC’s online coverage of parliamentary and public response to the proposals, yet the results indicate in no uncertain terms reluctance on the part of the BBC to engage with opposition to the bill. Not only did the online coverage fail to address several crucial objections foregrounded in other newspapers – including the Mail on Sunday’s infamous expose of Monitor – financial links between healthcare firms, the Conservatives and the House of Lords, made public on a number of blogs, were never reported. Meanwhile, the question of democratic mandate was scarcely mentioned, and while Parliamentary antagonists were given a cursory platform, expert critics such as Colin Leys and Dr. Eoin Clarke were not given the space and opportunity to highlight the nature of their objections. Most flagrantly, when the bill was passed on 19 March BBC Online did not publish a single article of analysis.
As a member of the editorial team at OurBeeb, the incredulous task of fact-checking the report’s claims emphasised the extent of the schism between BBC reportage and the public regarding this issue. Critics of the report have been quick in pointing to the extensive results of the search terms “democratic mandate” “opposition” and “privatisation” in the period of the bill’s contestation. On closer inspection, however, such frequency is deceptive. The articles themselves in most cases present the reforms, unqualified, in the closeted language of the government report – “putting GPs in control” – while the critical phrases cited in defence are largely to be found in quotations from Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband and comments beneath the footer. “Privatisation” in particular, a term central to the public discussion of the proposals, is virtually absent from the editorial pieces.
Far from a component in a partisan argument this report therefore raises real questions as to the BBC’s capacity to provide thorough critical analysis of domestic news issues under its current organizational pressures. Why were fears over privatisation not explored or explained? Such glaring disjunction between public voices and public broadcasting should set alarm bells ringing for any organisation that is purportedly acting as a representative body. Most worrying is the emergence of this data in a context in which the organisation’s share of the news market is rapidly rising. A recent study by Enders analysis found the BBC’s share of total news consumption is over 60 per cent while Ofcom’s concern that the BBC is increasingly proving a threat to media plurality, as expressed in their June report, went largely unnoticed.
Given the BBC’s position as the UK’s primary news provider, further investigation into NHS coverage provided on other platforms is an urgent priority. The report’s call to the BBC to reveal the parameters of the complaints they received on this subject while providing a full account of their coverage are good starting points. For while an answer to such demands may not abate wider concerns regarding the problems with internal and external plurality, if the BBC is to move beyond defensive talk of “accountability” and be taken seriously as a democratic organisation, the procedures involved in compiling and presenting this coverage must be made available to the public.
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