It would be consoling to think that the BBC, alone among our supposedly unpartisan TV news providers, is guilty of hopelessly biased coverage of the US presidential election. This would conform to the increasingly popular notion that Auntie is in a place beyond redemption, unique in its iniquities.
That notion may be true, but it is not true of its US election coverage. All of the news providers have been biased and the BBC is probably one of the least egregious of offenders. It would seem to me that all the broadcasters broadly concur that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the US, for democracy and for the world and that therefore the normal rules of balance are not applicable. They demonstrate this bias in the following four ways:
- Story selection.
- The tone of reporting.
- Choice of interviewees.
- Editorial comment
I have not watched enough of ITV’s coverage to generalise that it is by far the worst, but the edition of its Friday night News at Ten – which seemed to be presented by a great white shark with a quiff – was relentless in its bias. Gaffes made by the Democrats were explained away, those by Donald Trump not so.
It was implied – indeed, stated – that Trump had wished upon Liz Cheney a firing squad which would shoot her in the face. This was a pretty grotesque misrepresentation of Trump’s point, which was that Ms Cheney would be less hawkish if she herself had to face the consequences. His point, nastily expressed for sure, did not seem a terribly complex allusion to unravel, but even the notion that it might possibly be an allusion was ignored: Trump had said she should be shot in the face, end of.
The package which followed contained all the signifiers of casual, unthinking, bias. So, for example, a voter who professed himself a Trump voter was asked a subsidiary question along the lines of ‘don’t you worry that he is a despotic orange-faced right wing maniac?’ (or words to roughly that effect), while his neighbour, who was for Harris, was asked no subsidiary question (such as ‘don’t you worry that she was a fabulously useless VP with the IQ of a bottle of tomato ketchup?’).
On the same evening, a little later, Newsnight – presented by the excellent Katie Razzall – gave us an admirably weighted debate about the same issues. I mention this not to exonerate the Beeb, which in its straight news coverage does display a marked tilt towards Harris, but to suggest that it is not the worst offender. This bias is almost universal on our screens.
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