Stumbling and Mumbling

Yes, the BBC is biased

Over the weekend we saw two related examples of BBC bias. One came from Emily Maitlis, who said:

So often people read conspiracy into a thing when it’s really a confluence of cock-ups.

Sensible people, however, do not allege any conspiracy at the BBC. Instead, we have other concerns. Some are about incentive structures: which mistakes does it regard as mere cock-ups, and which as more serious offences? Another is that journalists, like all professionals, are prone to deformation professionelle – the fact that our training inculcates into us particular, and partial, ways of seeing things – which entails missing other things.

It is factors such as these that lead the BBC into error. Tom Mills, for example, says the corporation is too deferential to business and the state. It was perhaps this that, for example, led Laura Kuenssberg to repeat the government’s false allegation that a Labour activist had assaulted one of Matt Hancock’s aides. And Mark Oliver complains, rightly, that the Beeb wrongly prioritizes speed over context; misuses experts and thinktanks; and worries too much about reach and not enough about improving public understanding.

My second example of bias lies in Broadcasting House’s review of the decade (11’25” in). It failed to mention what is the most important fact about the last ten years – the productivity stagnation*. And yet it was this that led both to Brexit and Corbynism, in part because flat-lining living standards provoked discontent with both elites and capitalism. I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it: the most important book for understanding the last ten years is Ben Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.  

I say these are both related examples of bias because they demonstrate something of which I’ve complained before – that the BBC has a bias against emergence. It does not see that many social phenomena are not simply the product of individual agency but instead arise independently of what people intend. Sometimes, these outcomes are benign, sometimes not: this issue was one of the differences between Smith and Marx **.

So, for example, Ms Maitlis doesn’t seem to realise that the BBC, like many organizations, can develop a logic of its own; they are not simply individuals writ large. Equally, the productivity slowdown is not the result of any individual’s action; it’s the unintended by-product of millions of dispersed decisions.

The BBC has consistently under-reported the latter because of another bias, shared by most journalists (what was that I said about deformation professionelle?) – a tendency to neglect slow-paced but important change. This is the same bias that has caused it to largely overlook the decline in global poverty in recent decades.

In saying this, I don’t pretend that the bias against emergence is confined to the BBC. It’s part of journalists’ training to look for agency – to ask, who’s to blame? Whodunnit? But the social sciences are not (often) an Agatha Christie story.

What we have here, therefore, is a troubling distance between the BBC and the social sciences; the latter are confined to niche programmes on Radio 4 whilst TV prefers the moronfests of Question Time and vox pops. Andrew Neil’s recent tweets claiming that “the academic study of politics is increasingly irrelevant and in sad, serious decline” and deprecating “academic econometrics” are symbolic of this distance.

But it matters. If journalists ignore the social sciences they will find it even harder to overcome the blindspots created by their own backgrounds and training: the sociological imagination can be a good corrective to journalists’ own distorted perspective.

That perspective, however, in turn distorts public debate. The fact is that the public are woefully misinformed about many things. Of course, this is not wholly the fault of the media: as Bobby Duffy points out in his excellent The Perils of Perception, people can go wrong without the help of journalists. But surely, the BBC – as the dominant source of news – must accept some of the blame for it. That it does not do so, at least in public, betokens an overconfidence which is the enemy of learning and improvement.

* To his credit, Niall Ferguson did allude to this.

** Both men were right: it depends on context.

A case for collective leadership

The debate about who should be the next Labour leader begs the question: should there be a single leader at all rather than a leadership team?

There’s much to be said for the latter*. For one thing, a good leader must do several jobs. They must develop policy; unite and inspire the PLP; win the votes of older Northerners without alienating metropolitan liberals; and motivate and recruit activists and organize an effective ground campaign. (The latter is important: Labour cannot win a top-down campaign and needs a strong mass membership to combat media lies.) There’s no reason to believe that the candidate best able to do one or two of these jobs an do them all. That’s a case for collective leadership.

Nor is there any reason to suppose that Labour members are well-equipped to choose a single best leader, and not just because they prioritize perceived ideological homophily over evidence of competence. Leftists have a long history - from Napoleon to Chavez and perhaps Corbyn – of investing leaders with qualities they do not in fact have and of regarding leadership as some magic quality.  Collective leadership would put an end to these silly habits.

It would also help defuse the personal attacks which the next leader will face from the media. It will present (say) Keir Starmer as an out-of-touch privileged elitist but unleash a torrent of snobbery and sexism against (say) Rebecca Long-Bailey. But what if both were members of the leadership team? They could make one attack, but not the other. They’d be playing a futile game of whack-a-mole.

 And there’s much to be said for collective leadership. As Jeffrey Nielsen showed in The Myth of Leadership, rank-based organizations demotivate subordinates and ignore the tacit knowledge of the many. In the same spirit, Archie Brown argues in The Myth of the Strong Leader that “strength” is much less of a virtue in leaders than things like energy, wisdom, adaptability and ability to handle diversity – virtues more likely to be found in a group than a single person. When a leader dominates his party, says Brown, he is often in fact kowtowing to some other group or person: Corbynites who attack Blair for following Bush and Murdoch, and Blairites who attack Corbyn for being in thrall to Milne would both agree with this. Collective leadership avoids that problem.

Better still, for me, is that it would help change the agenda. In choosing a leadership team rather than a individual, Labour would be making an important and true point – that large complex organizations cannot be run by a single person from the top down, and the belief that they can is a big cause of both inequality and inefficiency. They would raise a key question about all organizations: does this need to be run by Stalinist top-down methods and of so why? That’s the start of a direct assault upon inequality and centralized power.

For this reason, choosing a leadership team would be very different from the “all must have prizes” indecision that led to the Booker and Turner prizes being jointly awarded. A single prize is justified for an outstanding candidate. But leadership is not a prize. It is a means to an end. And sometimes, the end is best achieved by collective leadership.

Of course, such leadership requires that the joint leaders subordinate their egos to the collective good. But anybody unwilling or unable to do this is, by definition, unfit to hold a senior position in a socialist party.

The counter-argument to all this is that it doesn’t answer the question voters and the media will ask: who’ll be Prime Minister if Labour win the next election? One answer to this is that the UK does not have a presidential system, and shouldn’t. Prime Ministers used to be regarded as primus inter pares, and the question of who chairs Cabinet meetings should be only one that voters ask, and not be the most important. Politics is not an episode of Love Island, where you vote for your favourite character.

Yes, offering a leadership team will be presented by the media as "weak." But so too will any individual Labour leader, and leaders of the opposition often look weak simply by virtue of not being in power. Labour could reply to such silly allegations that there is strength in numbers, and the party has enough talent to provide several leaders, not one.  

I say all this in the sure and certain expectation that Labour will do nothing like it. The party’s fixation with top-down (rent-seeking) leadership emulates the worst of capitalism. In this respect, it is not as radical as it should be.

* The Green party has, on and off, had co-leaders and principal speakers for years. I’m not sure whether their experience teaches us much, though. The challenge for a small party is how to raise its profile whereas the challenge for Labour is, in part, to avoid its leader being a liability.

The failed marketplace in ideas

The “marketplace of ideas” is failing. That is the message of Stefan Stern’s complaint that, in this election even more than others, lies seem to be winning.

Of course, Stefan is right to say that politicians have always been economical with the actualite. But there is, surely, a big difference between Johnson and, say, Thatcher. Whilst we lefties hated much of what Thatcher did, we only rarely thought she was lying. Being a liar was the least of Thatcher’s sins. But it is the essence of Johnson’s identity.

This was not supposed to happen. Liberals used to think that the marketplace of ideas was like other markets – that good products would drive out bad, that, as Mill said, “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.

But they don’t. A big reason for this is that, just as ordinary markets can fail, so too does the market in ideas. And it does so for reasons we can also see sometimes when other markets fail. Here are five such reasons.

1. Monopoly. The problem here is not merely that the press is owned disproportionately by billionaires. It is also that almost all prominent journalists (though definitely not junior ones) will be hit by Labour’s tax rises, which surely imparts a bias, or at least reinforces one. And then there’s the fact that incentives to be first with a story leads to an over-reliance upon misleading (often Tory) sources: Laura Kuenssberg’s libelling of a Labour activist yesterday fitted the pattern described by Peter Oborne. On top of this, there’s  what Musa Okwonga calls “the innate bias towards parties in power.”

Perhaps a bigger problem is that journalists, like all professionals, have their perspective distorted by their training, and indeed are selected to have such distortions. What’s especially damaging here is that they like the “theatre of politics” – the “knockabout”, the “who’s up and who’s down.”

This doesn’t just cause them to regard the Tories utter mess of Brexit as being drama rather than chaos. It also causes them to underweight two other perspectives.

One is these is that politics isn’t a game, but a matter of life and death – austerity, poverty and benefit sanctions kill. The other is that regarding politics as theatre leads journalists to think of even moderately tricky issues as – in John Humphrys’ words – as “all getting a wee bit technical and I’m sure people are fed up to the back teeth of all this talk of stuff most of us don’t clearly understand.” The apotheosis of this is the oft-repeated claim that Labour Brexit policy is unclear because it cannot be explained in a single word.

Of course, all of us have partial points of view. The market is ideas is healthy when these points of view collide. It becomes imperfect when one such partial point of view acquires a near-monopoly position. And this has become the case with political journalists.

2. Inadequate incentives. In theory, people should have good incentives to find best value in the market, because they’ll waste money if they don’t. Even in ordinary everyday markets, such incentives often aren’t sufficient. People waste money even on food shopping – and don’t get me started on fund management. This is especially true in the market for ideas. Because our individual vote doesn’t affect the outcome of elections, people have no incentive to get smart about politics. They are rationally ignorant. This is an environment in which lies can thrive.

3. Unpriced externalities. One reason why we lack incentives to know about politics is that the cost of bad decisions are borne not just by ourselves but by everybody. As Jason Brennan has said:

When a democratic majority picks a policy, this is not akin to you picking a sandwich from a menu. When the majority chooses, it chooses not only for itself, but for dissenting voters, children, foreigners, nonvoters and others who have no choice but to bear the consequence.

In this sense, a bad vote is like pollution. It imposes a cost upon everybody. And if people don’t have to pay the cost for such externalities, we’ll get too many of them.

4. Positive feedback. Conventional markets work best when there is negative feedback – when an unwarranted price increase leads to lower demand, thereby discouraging such increases. In the marketplace for ideas, however, we sometimes see the opposite – positive feedback. Barefaced lies do not lead to their teller being disgraced. Instead, they can successfully manipulate the agenda – for example the infamous £350m on the side of the bus encouraged people to think about the cost of EU membership. And they can sometimes stick in the memory. As Tim Harford has written:

Repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick. The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth. The myth, after all, was the thing that kept being repeated. In trying to dispel the falsehood, the endless rebuttals simply make the enchantment stronger…Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth.

In this way, the market does not drive out lies, but actually encourages them.

5. Arms races. This is true in another way. When one party gets away with lying, its opponents also resort to lies, in the same way that an athlete competing against a drugs cheat might take drugs himself simply to avoid being disadvantaged. This leads to an arms race in which both sides lie more and more. Labour is sometimes accused of lying, for example by claiming the Tories will sell off the NHS or that they will save families £6700 a year. But its accusers fail to ask: might they be lying because they’ve learned that it pays to do so?

My point here is a simple one. There are big market failures in the market for ideas – bigger, perhaps, than in most markets. Ordinarily, such market failures would constitute a strong case for government intervention to mitigate them. Except that in this case, the government actually benefits from these failures.  It is, therefore, difficult to see how political discourse can ever become worthwhile again.

The Tories shrinking class base

One of the great changes in public opinion during my adult lifetime has been the collapse in Tory support from younger people and the ABC1s. For example, a recent YouGov poll (pdf) found that whilst the Tories have an overall lead of nine percentage points, they trail Labour by 57%-21% among 18-24 year-olds and lead by only 39%-36% among ABC1s*. By contrast, in 1992 – when their overall lead was very similar - they led 54%-22% among ABC1s and trailed Labour by only three points among 18-24 year-olds.

To see the reason for this, you need only look as far as the universities’ strike. This draws our attention to another great development of recent years – the degradation of erstwhile middle-class work. Academics are protesting about the loss of pension rights, increased workloads, casualization and falling real pay imposed by managerialists.

And they are typical of many professionals. Journalists have suffered a massive loss of real pay and prestige in the last few decades: the best one can now hope for is to become a billionaire’s gimp. Criminal barristers, even with years of experience, make only around £28,000 a year. And doctors are stressed out and overworked in a way that Sir Lancelot Spratt never was.

It’s not just pay and conditions which have deteriorated. Housing is now unaffordable for young graduates even on good jobs. And there is an increasing gulf between what used to be the middle-class and the richest 0.1%.

A few decades ago, a moderately successful professional had much in common with the very rich: the difference in income between them wasn’t huge; both owned property; and both enjoyed autonomy at work. But there was a huge difference between them and the working class who suffered dangerous, dirty and mind-numbing work in factories and mines.

Today, though, the opposite is the case; a 30-something professional has more in common with a contemporary working in a dull job than she does with anybody in the top 0.1%.  

Very many ABC1s, then, are objectively proletarian – suffering from a lack of property, stagnating incomes and oppressive working conditions. And they are voting accordingly. Social grade is, increasingly, a worse way of defining class than the Marxian method of asking: what is this person’s relationship to the means of production?

This also helps explain youngsters’ antipathy towards the Tories. What’s going on here is what Alfred Hirschman called the tunnel effect. If you are stuck in a traffic jam in a road tunnel and then see a line of cars moving you cheer up, thinking that you will soon move. So it was once with young people. Back in the 80s, even poor students could reasonably look forward to a good job and property ownership. So they voted in the interests of the class they expected to join.

Today, things are different. Even bright hard-working students can expect only stressful, oppressive and poorly paid work, and to live in an over-priced hovel. And they are burdened with huge debt. Sure, much of this will be written off – but many young people are cursed by having a moral code which stigmatizes debt. It’s no surprise, therefore, that so many vote Labour.

All this explains why Tory support depends so much upon the legacy vote from older people and upon the populist slogan, “Get Brexit Done”. Their historic client base has shrunk. Sure, this legacy vote and populism might be sufficient to get them over the line next week. But the Tories’ longer-term prospects are surely poor. Like Ramsay Bolton being killed by his own vicious dogs, they are being killed by the neoliberal managerialism they themselves unleashed.

* It’s a common myth that the ABC1s exclude pensioners. They don’t. They only exclude those dependent upon the state pension. Better off pensioners are classified as belonging to the social grade matching their occupation when they were working.