Messenger of the Gods

As an astonishing scandal in Canada shows, journalists who should be challenging power work instead on its behalf.



By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21st January 2015

When someone says they have no politics, it means that their politics align with the status quo. None of us are unbiased, none removed from the question of power. We are social creatures, who absorb the outlook and opinions of those with whom we associate, and unconciously echo them. Objectivity is impossible.

The illusion of neutrality is one of the reasons for the rotten state of journalism, as those who might have been expected to hold power to account drift thoughtlessly into its arms. But until I came across the scandal now erupting in Canada, I hadn’t understood just how quickly standards are falling.

In 2013, reporters at CBC, Canada’s equivalent of the BBC, broke a major story. They discovered that the Royal Bank of Canada had done something cruel and unusual even by banking standards. It was obliging its junior staff to train a group of temporary foreign workers who would then be given their jobs(1). Just after the first report was aired, according to the website Canadaland, something odd happened. Journalists preparing to expand on the investigation were summoned to a conference call with Amanda Lang, the senior business correspondent and a star presenter. The reporters she spoke to say she repeatedly attempted to scuttle the story, dismissing it as trivial and dull(2).

They were astonished. But not half as astonished as they were when they discovered the following, unpublished facts. First, that Amanda Lang had spoken at a series of events run or sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada, for which she appears to have been paid in some cases around Can$15,000(3). Second, that she was booked to speak at an event sponsored by the outsourcing company the bank had hired to implement the cruel practice exposed by her colleagues(4). Third, that her partner is a board member at the Royal Bank of Canada(5).

Amanda Lang then interviewed the chief executive of the bank on her own show. When he dismissed the story as unfair and misleading, she did not challenge him(5). That evening, she uncritically repeated his talking points on CBC’s main current affairs programme(6). Her interests, again, were not revealed. Then she wrote a comment article for the Globe and Mail newspaper, suggesting that her colleagues’ story arose from an outdated suspicion of business, was dangerous to Canada’s interests and was nothing but “a sideshow”(7). Here’s what she said about the bank’s employment practices. “It’s called capitalism, and it isn’t a dirty word.”

The website Canadaland, which exposed Lang’s conflicts last week(8), found that other journalists at the broadcaster were furious, but too frightened to speak on the record. But after CBC tried to dismiss the scandal as “half-truths based on anonymous sources”(9), Kathy Tomlinson, the reporter who had broken the story about the bank, bravely spoke publicly to the website(10). The following morning, staff in her office arrived to find this message spelt out in magnets on their fridge. “Jesse Brown snitches get stitches”(11). Jesse Brown is Canadaland’s founder.

CBC refused to answer my questions, and I have not had a response from Amanda Lang. It amazes me that she remains employed by CBC, which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics.

It’s grotesque. But it’s symptomatic of a much wider problem in journalism: those who are supposed to scrutinise the financial and political elite are embedded within it. Many belong to a service sector aristocracy, wedded metaphorically (sometimes literally) to finance. Often unwittingly, they amplify the voices of the elite, while muffling those raised against it.

A study by academics at the Cardiff school of journalism examined the BBC Today programme’s reporting of the bank bailouts in 2008(12). It discovered that the contributers it chose were “almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.” The financiers who had caused the crisis were asked to interpret it.

The same goes for discussions about the deficit and the perceived need for austerity. The debate has been dominated by political and economic elites, while alternative voices – arguing that the crisis has been exaggerated, or that instead of cuts, the government should respond with Keynesian spending programmes or taxes on financial transactions, wealth or land – have scarcely been heard. Those priorities have changed your life: the BBC helped to shape the political consensus under which so many are now suffering.

The BBC’s business reporting breaks its editorial guidelines every day, by failing to provide alternative viewpoints. Every weekday morning, the Today programme grovels to business leaders for 10 minutes. It might occasionally challenge them on the value or viability of their companies, but hardly ever on their ethics. Corporate critics are shut out of its business coverage – and almost all the rest. On BBC News at Six, the Cardiff researchers found, business representatives outnumbered trade union representatives by 19 to one(13). “The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world”. This, remember, is where people turn when they don’t trust the corporate press.

While the way in which the media handle the stories that are covered is bad enough, the absence of coverage is even worse. If an issue does not divide the main political parties, it vanishes from view, though the parties now disagree on hardly anything. Another study reveals a near total collapse of environmental coverage on ITV and BBC news: it declined from 2.5% (ITV) and 1.6% (BBC) of total airtime in 2007 to 0.2% and 0.3% in 2014(14). There were as many news stories on these outlets about Madeline McCann in 2014 – seven years after her disappearance – as there were about all environmental issues put together(15).

Those entrusted to challenge power are the loyalists of power. They rage against the social media and people like Russell Brand, without seeing that the popularity of alternatives is a response to their own failures: their failure to expose the claims of the haut monde, their failure to enlist a diversity of opinion, their failure to permit the audience to see that another world is possible. If even the public sector broadcasters parrot the talking points of the elite, what hope is there for informed democratic choice?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rbc-replaces-canadian-staff-with-foreign-workers-1.1315008

2. http://canadalandshow.com/article/amanda-lang-tried-sabotage-cbc-story-scandalized-rbc-who-paid-her

3. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/01/13/amanda_lang_some_of_cbc_hosts_rbcinvolved_speaking_engagements_unpaid.html

4. http://creekside1.blogspot.ca/2013/04/boycott-royal-bank-and-amanda-lang-part.html

5. http://canadalandshow.com/article/update-amanda-lang-%E2%80%9Cserious-relationship%E2%80%9D-rbc-board-member-while-reporting-rbc

6. http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/TV%20Shows/The%20National/About%20the%20Show/Amanda%20Lang/ID/2374657195/

7. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/lets-worry-about-skills-not-outsourcing/article11084876/

8. http://canadalandshow.com/article/amanda-lang-tried-sabotage-cbc-story-scandalized-rbc-who-paid-her

9. http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/community/editorsblog/2015/01/setting-the-record-straight-about-cbc-news-coverage-of-the-foreign-worker-program.html

10. http://canadalandshow.com/article/cbcs-kathy-tomlinson-speaks-record-about-amanda-lang

11. http://canadalandshow.com/article/cbc-newsroom-threat-snitches-get-stitches

12. http://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-bbc-17028

13. http://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-bbc-17028

14. http://theconversation.com/cycle-of-silence-the-strange-case-of-disappearing-environmental-issues-36306

15. http://theconversation.com/cycle-of-silence-the-strange-case-of-disappearing-environmental-issues-36306