The billionaires’ ownership and sponsorship of corporate media helps explain why the corporate media narrative serves their interests. In Britain, five billionaires own 80% of print media. This represents a trend happening in Britain and globally. And here's why it matters.
For one, despite bloodshed occurring across the planet, our mainstream media is constantly beating the drums of war, because war profits the 1%. The mainstream media cheerleads for fossil fuels despite the intensifying climate crisis. It ignores endemic corruption and it prevents the public from truly understanding how austerity policies have failed society.
But the corruption of our news media isn't happening only in private hands: it is a standard feature of state-owned media as well, which is arguably worse since that media carries an air of impartiality. In 2014, Occupy.com reported how the globally respected British state broadcasters, the BBC, have effectively become news by and for the 1%. Recent charges against the broadcaster include rigging the 2015 UK General Election and exhibiting a blatant pro-union bias in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum.
Today, the claims of pro-establishment bias at the BBC are escalating further.
Making the news
On Jan. 6, the BBC stage-managed the resignation of an MP live on its afternoon Daily Politics show, as Stephen Doughty resigned from a junior position on the front-bench of the opposition Labour Party. He is hardly known outside political circles, but the state media’s involvement indicates this was not just any ordinary resignation.
At 9am that day, Laura Kuenssberg, BBC’s Political Editor, discovered that Doughty had plans to resign. The Daily Politics show then contacted the MP, asking him to hold his resignation and announce it live on air just before Prime Minister’s Questions. In the words of Daily Politics producer Andrew Alexander, the move was done for “maximum political impact” (the blog that contained Alexander's quotes has since been deleted).
Leaks enabled Prime Minister David Cameron to learn about the resignation before Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn knew of it. As a result, Cameron used that information to deflect attention from the climate crisis that was sweeping Britain that week, as swathes of Northern England went underwater after severe flooding.
More broadly, the BBC’s actions played into a wider attack against Corbyn. Since rising in the leadership election for the Labour Party last summer, and even more so since his landslide win, the opposition leader has been under constant assault from the media with story after story presenting doom-laden scenarios of what a Corbyn-led Britain would look like.
One Daily Mail article imagines the apocalypse caused by new Labour's rejection of austerity and re-nationalization of public services. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper the Sun actually ran a piece entitled “Corbyn's cat's name isn't Chairman Meow but... Cat,” in which it criticizes Corbyn for calling his cat "El Gato," Spanish for cat.
Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, the first leader of the opposition for decades to break away from the neoliberal consensus. His platform against Britain’s perpetual war machine, against austerity and in favor of rebuilding public services have threatened the 1%’s power and privilege.
The corporate media pack hungry for Corbyn’s blood has been creating a crisis within the Parliamentary Labour Party. It is true that there are divisions between neoliberal members who want to retain their previous New Labour direction. Yet the platform that these dissenting voices are being given – and the moderate way their arguments are being framed – demonstrates the way the media are actively fomenting a crisis rather than merely reporting on the situation.
Concerning the Doughty case, the impartial platform Media Lens explained that even after revelations surfaced of BBC have staged the MP's resignation, corporate media backed up the BBC rather than digging further.
In this sense, the BBC has become perhaps even more dangerous than corporate news: because it gives a slanted news agenda the respectability it would not have have were it reported by the corporate media. Doughty's stage-managed resignation is just one among other ongoing cases that demonstrate BBC bias. For example, repeating the way the BBC attempted to exclude the Greens from the 2015 General Election, the Scottish Greens have suggested the broadcaster is now attempting those same tactics in the run-up to Scotland’s 2016 elections.
The BBC doesn't look impartial, either, when one considers that it has given the far-right UKIP party three broadcasts a year, while handing none to the Greens – despite the face that each party has one MP.
What’s not making the news?
The BBC’s quality of output isn't the only question. There is also the news it does not tell. One crucial story of corruption is the claim by whistleblower Nicholas Wilson, untold by both the BBC and the corporate media, that he has evidence of Britain’s largest bank, HSBC, mis-selling high street customers in a fraud amounting to over £1 billion.
The scale of that fraud eclipses even the Swiss tax evasion by HSBC – which only broke into the corporate media narrative after Telegraph editor Peter Oborne explained that he was resigning due to his newspaper’s refusal to publish the story. The HSBC mis-selling scandal also has similarities with the citizen-led case against the banker giant Rodrigo Rato in Spain. The politician-banker, whose former bank Bankia was engaged in practices including mis-selling, now faces jail time with his accomplices.
And in the same way that Rato links to wider spread corruption in Spain, there is a link between HSBC and the BBC that goes to the very top of the decision-making chain. A director of HSBC, Rona Fairhead, also heads the BBC Trust, which governs the BBC. But Fairhead’s appointment seemed to go against the whole idea of "trust": While working in the HSBC risk department, Fairhead was responsible for overseeing the department that enabled drug gangs and terrorists to launder millions of pounds. Fairhead continues to receive a salary of over half a million pounds from HSBC, along with the shares she holds in the bank – all of which amounts to far more than the sizable salary she already gets from the broadcasting corporation. Fairhead has denied all accusations that her dual roles helped influence any BBC content.
It can be expected that the billionaires who control the corporate media see little reason to change a system that brings them so much profit. Unfortunately, and perhaps more unexpectedly, however, the same can now be said for the BBC. And what's worst is that the broadcaster wields such influence and impact both at home and abroad – while maintaining a veneer of impartiality.
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