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I’m awfully fond of the BBC, but it sometimes makes itself hard to defend. Today is a case in point. It’s Brexit Day at the Beeb, more properly known as Brexit: Your Stories, a themed day when 12 lucky members of the general public get to be “involved in editorial decisions” across the corporation’s output. Hmmm.
I’d like to say nice things about this, and I can, sort of, understand how the BBC got to the point of thinking this is a good idea. But I think Auntie would be better off listening to an 18th-Century Irish philosopher than 12 upstanding members of the British public. I’ll come to my argument for a Burkean Broadcasting Corporation in moment. First, the BBC’s plan.
The panel is “made up of a cross-section of Britain, with different political views and from different social and economic backgrounds,” the BBC says. “They represent the full range of public opinion.” They will be able to “offer their own questions and ideas” to BBC editors and correspondents throughout the day, helping shape story choice and content across platforms. The whole exercise is described as a much larger version of the Today Programme’s Christmas habit of hosting “guest editors” who get to choose a few topics for coverage at a time of the year when no-one important is actually listening.
I have several worries about this, some relatively minor and one quite fundamental.
A minor quibble is that this is just bad tactics for an organisation trying to defend itself from attack: it won’t work, and might just make things worse. A decent rule of defensive PR is that you shouldn’t admit you have a problem unless you can also – at the same time – solve that problem. Otherwise, all you do is confirm you have a problem and tell people you can’t or won’t solve it.
So the BBC, by inviting “ordinary people” to have a say on its Brexit coverage today is corporately admitting that those ordinary people and their ordinary opinions are not at other times fully represented in its editorial choices. That, I fear, is going to do nothing to allay the suspicions of those (on both sides of the divide) who say BBC Brexit coverage is unreliably partial. If you tell people you’re going to listen to them for one day of the year, don’t be surprised if the first question they ask is “So what do you do on the other 364 days then?”
Nor, I think, will Brexit: Your Stories achieve its stated aim of opening up the journalistic process to the public. According to Kamal Ahmed, BBC News’ editorial director, “we want our news rooms across the UK to be less a set of secret castles where, to the public, mysterious things happen.”
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