 Hello and welcome to this evening's edition of Tiskey's Sour. It's a new year. The Tories have a new majority. But my name is Thelan Bistani. There were many things that troubled us about the general election last year. I think first and foremost for me in particular was the extent to which the media undermined and disempowered Labour's message. Baking the question, is it possible for the Left to gain power in Britain through the democratic process given media ownership as it's presently constituted and perhaps more surprisingly will the BBC ever give the Left a fair shake? Joining me tonight is Tom Mills at TA underscore Mills on Twitter. Is that right Tom? Yeah, that's right. Great to have you on. Good to be on. We've had you on several times now, video, audio. Have you ever written anything for us? All the mediums, yeah I did back in the day. I think I wrote something, I was reminded of it a while back. It was a few years ago and I think it was called something like we need to talk about the BBC and we are now, which is a good thing. And we read that because I think it was James Butler who tweeted like we need to talk about the BBC and oh that rings a bell. And yeah I did write something along those lines. We'll get to the end and thinking about what would happen if we don't talk about the BBC. And I'm sort of concluding that there will be nothing of the BBC left to save if we don't start to go on the front foot and start to develop an agenda and start to think about these questions, which I guess is sort of the question we want to discuss now. It's like where are we with the BBC? I mean at least we're talking about it I suppose. But I think we're talking about it from a pretty dismal point now in terms of how the BBC looks from the left. Well for people who aren't already familiar with Tom's work, he is a sociologist. You lecture at Aston University. And he's the author of a fantastic book BBC myth of a public service with Verso books. Maybe getting a second edition. Sorry I shouldn't say that. No it's fine. You've already signed the contract. No we haven't even had any discussions but there's some interest in revising the books for paperback. So it's looking like that's going to be in the pipeline when that will arrive on shelves who knows. I just want to say I think the books are classic. There's a few books that I really think are critical if you want to understand what's going on right now at the intersection of politics and media. One is Emma's for Murdoch. Looking at the 2011 phone hacking scandal. Another is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. But I think you're up there. Which is good. It's kind. I think you're up there. So I must read five books on the state of the UK media. I think it's the outstanding contribution on the BBC anyway. I mean I would say that because I perhaps I know you. Maybe I'm not read all the other ones but I think it deserves to be with those other titles for sure. So yeah you're leading. I said in the notes historian you said that's wrong. Let's say analyst of the BBC and that context I guess is going to inform the nature of today's show. We want to say look this isn't just about the political inclinations of various senior editors. This is not a new phenomenon. There's a broader historic context here for the BBC. There are big structural challenges for the media beyond the BBC too. Which perhaps partly explain its shortcomings. But before we do any of that. I just want to bring to the attention of our audience some of the highlights. That's just how bad the BBC were in this general election. You might be watching this and somehow not familiar with what happened late last year. That's always have a significant majority. And that was after a lamentable campaign for the British broadcast and corporations. So we're going to start that with the number one. I think it's my most tweeted tweet ever. 15,000 retweets 1.5 million views. This was the BBC editing out laughter Boris Johnson. So let's go to that. Hello Prime Minister. I'd just like to ask you how important is it for someone in your position of power to always tell the truth. I think it's absolutely right. While the Prime Minister faced questions on trust. How important is it for someone in your position of power to always tell the truth. I think it's absolutely vital. We've got a tweet here from Ronan Burtinshaw. He's highlighting an article on the BBC. Forget this up. Basically the BBC's title here, general election 2019, ads are indecent, honest and untruthful. So the BBC here was the third tweet and Mr Burtinshaw's tweet there, sort of third picture rather. Basically the BBC title was both parties are complicit in dishonest, deceptive Facebook adverts. Turns out that didn't include Labour. Labour weren't responsible for a single one according to this study. Yet 88% of Tory Facebook ads were dishonest and untruthful. And yet the BBC presented that as a bipartisan problem, afflicting both parties when it was just the Tories. Then we've got here the political editor of the BBC, Laura Koonsberg. Kelly Ann Koonsberg is that's cooler. Spreading an outright lie briefed to them by a Tory source. We can get the tweet up by Richard Seymour, which was, of course, if you're not familiar with this, Laura Koonsberg, Robert Peston, Tom Newton Dunn, all inaccurately stated that a Labour activist had assaulted a Tory party. Spared fourth. Sorry, this might get boring, but we really want to bring home how extensive this was. Here is the Electoral Commission subtweeting Laura Koonsberg after she broke the law because she illegally spoke about the returns of electoral ballots before those votes were public. That is illegal as the Electoral Commission highlighted, the Electoral Commission there, subtweeting the political editor of the BBC. There was more in that. I could go on, I won't, but the last one actually really was quite disturbing. I don't know if you saw this. Charlie Brookeron, have I got news for you? Making probably the most distasteful joke I've ever seen on British television. If we can go to that, that'd be great. That was obviously just after the general election. According to many commentators, the Labour Party is in a state of denial. Well, at least it's not about the Holocaust. Of course the response, oh my god, here we go. Of course the response that was predictable. We had the director general calling criticism of the BBC conspiracy theories. We've had various Twitter threads from Anchorman, Hugh Edwards saying similar as we've seen as well from producer extraordinaire Rob Burley. Very close, of course, to Tom Mills. But regardless of what they say, and that was a joke, by the way, before Rob Burley says I'm close to Tom Mills, which I really wouldn't be that surprised about. Regardless of that, however, the data is very clear. We're going to see this polling here recently, I believe from YouGov, tweeted by BritainLX. Question was, how much do you trust BBC news journalists to tell the truth? A great deal. 8% down one. A fair amount. 36% down six. Not much. 28% up one. Not at all. 20% up six. So 48% of the public don't really trust the BBC. 44% do. That's obviously not good. It's just tip the balance away from a general disposition to believing the BBC. Tom, did the BBC have a bad election? No, it was an absolute triumph for the BBC, of course. It had a very bad election. I need to be a little bit careful what I say about this, because usually when people ask me about impartiality and balance and bias and the rest of it, I usually try and stick my comments to research and what we know on the base of published research, which by the way, people who work at the BBC, the managers and the senior editors never return the favour that they completely ignore all the evidence. So I try and look at the evidence. Now, we can obviously point to particular patterns of reporting which were questionable, and because we're on the left, we would tend to notice them, and obviously other people on the right will be making counterclaims. The BBC, in some of its responses to criticism, I mean, it was interesting that you didn't mention it, but Fran Unsworth, who's head of news, wrote a piece for the Guardian where she said explicitly she didn't accept this sort of both sides defence, right? And then later, when Tony Hall made a statement, he actually used this argument. This is one of these sort of trite arguments that the BBC wheels out again and again. Now, the point about this is that, yes, the BBC will be attacked from both sides. What is the case that the BBC has to answer? You've mentioned some things there. I thought one of the most serious ones that you didn't mention was the failure to, was the debacle over the appearance on the Andrew Neil interviews. Now, that essentially adds to, I think, what looks to me like a pattern of behaviour at the BBC, where they take, they're much better at holding the opposition to account than they are the government. And I think that what we see is a series of editorial failings, which are described as being mistakes, which are then, when the BBC is criticised, then the response tends to be, oh, you're conspiracy theorists, right? Okay, well, let's stick to what we actually know. Yes, there have been a series of errors, which are described as mistakes by the BBC. We also know from like a very small amount of research that has been done, because it takes a bit of a long time to actually produce research on media content. So we don't know yet. We don't have a definitive answer to this question. Justin Schloesberg at Birkbeck did look at some of the patterns of reporting, which were evident in the early period of the campaign. I'll give you an example of this that I think is important, right? When the electoral manifestos came out, in the two weeks after the launch, sorry, the two days after the launch, the Labour manifesto was mentioned, I think it was 12 times in television reporting. The Conservative manifesto was mentioned once in terms of the IFS's assessment of both, so that is an example, a very concrete example of a pattern of reporting by the BBC of high levels of scrutiny of opposition than the government. Now, another thing to add, there was a lot of reporting during the election period on Brexit, reporting of Brexit, right? Essentially, what the Conservatives had done was they willed out a manifesto, which was more or less lacking in any substantive policy content. There wasn't much discussion about it. The reason was that they wanted it to be the Brexit manifesto, did you see on the BBC any substantive assessment of the fiscal or economic implications of Brexit being central to the debate? No, it wasn't really. It was all about 50% of the coverage was on Brexit and electoral process, right? Small discussions of policy. Now, what Justin Schuiesberg did was he looked at the IFS assessment of those manifestos. He also looked at two paired reports which came out during the election. Now, these were two Conservative Councillors who stood accused of anti-Semitism, right? Exactly the same time as two Labour politicians were accused of anti-Semitism compared to two coverages. What would we expect from an impartial broadcaster? We would expect balance to be maintained, right? What else did we see during the election? We saw a complaint by the Chief Rabbi, a statement, a very strong statement on anti-Semitism against Labour coming from the Chief Rabbi. We saw a similar statement coming from the Muslim Council of Britain against the Conservative Party. How did these play out in terms of media coverage? Well, we know the answer to that. We can see an imbalance in coverage on these narrow issues. Now, I think as more research is done, things are going to get more substantiated. We can look into the particular issues, the ways in which they were framed, the attention that was given to different parties. But at the moment, I would say this as a scholar, the BBC has a case to answer. Now, what I find infuriating is the BBC's attitude to criticism that is coming from quite legitimate sources. Now, you've named a few people at the BBC, right? Tony Hall, Fran Unsworth, Rob Burley, and we could add to them people like Nick Robinson, who when Hugh Edwards was putting his, like, blog out that appeared on LinkedIn, was being retweeted by these people. They're using the phrase again and again, a conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory. Now, quite a part of what we think about how the BBC reports, the BBC has a duty to take these criticisms seriously. And what I see from the BBC isn't just like these, what appear to me, and I have my own particular perspectives, and I'm very clear about them, I wear my politics on my sleeve as a scholar, right? What I expect from the BBC is not to take people's word of it, I expect them to take people's claims and people's criticism seriously. And I think what is undeniable that we've seen from the BBC is just this breathtaking complacency that's coming straight from the top. Now, we were talking earlier about whether I'm a sociologist or an historian, right? Now, the reason this is important is I think when we talk about history, right, we can establish, a historian can establish exactly what happened during the last election campaign by like going over the documents, who said who to what, what happened when, what were the causal factors in play, right? In sociology, you're more interested in things that tend to happen as a result of norms, social structures, so there's a slight difference there. The reason I mentioned this is that when these people talk about conspiracy theory, it shows the most, like, I don't even know how to describe it, like, this sort of blasé indifference towards social science. To me, it's just on another level. And the thing I would add to that, by the way, and I wrote about this for Jacobin, is that the idea that an accusation of bias, I don't particularly like that word, but an accusation of bias must be a conspiracy theory, that is simply the flip side of the claim that gets made by people like Nick Robinson, that the BBC is completely impartial, right? If you accept that the BBC as an institution can uphold an editorial standard across the board an output of its diverse programming, that is a claim about collective culture that leads to particular kind of outcomes and towards a particular kind of political purpose. The claim that's being made from the left, and people will make all kinds of claims, right? You can't just pick out the claim that you like the sound of and you want to deal with. The claim from the left is that there's a particular type of structure and culture at the BBC that leads it to treat the left in a certain fashion. Now, you can agree with that and you can disagree with that, and I'm perfectly happy to have that debate with people on the basis of the evidence. What I do not want to see from public broadcast, and you can tell I'm quite annoyed about this, is this sort of haughty dismissal of all criticism as if it's conspiracy theory, because where do you even go with that debate? It just completely shuts everything down. That's the thing you said. They're just dismissing basic social science, but also it's a reasonable claim. You don't have to agree with it. It's a plausible claim. Yeah, that's what I mean. And there are certain assertions one can submit forms of evidence, like, for instance, the edited video. We don't need to talk about intentions behind it, whether it was an accident, whether it was honest mistakes or editorial decisions elsewhere. But the fact that a journalist would just dismiss a reasonable claim of such a magnitude, do you think it also says, I think it does, says something about just how they view the role of journalism in society generally? And I think, you know, for me, their dismissal of this really speaks to the fact that in the last 30 years, and this isn't just about politics, and it's not even necessarily about work and culture, journalism as a profession has been gutted by technological change, by the increased centrality of wires, press association, et cetera, Reuters, the fact you don't have much fact-checking journalism, then you've got cuts in the BBC, particularly since 2010, where they can't do these things as well as they potentially could. And so there's such a broad range of reasons as to why they have failed, I think, to accurately cover the election and to give both parties a fair crack of the whip. You don't need to go into personality and asserting the political inclinations of editors, we can do that as well. I'm very happy to say, yeah, this is really a really important thing to talk about. Look, on this question of personal bias, most of us aren't friends with Rob Burley and we don't go around his house for dinner, so we don't know what he thinks about X, Y and Z, and we can assume from his hair car or his tweets or what football team he supports, loads of personal things about him, it's not going to get us anywhere. There are some things that we do know and we can measure, and Rob Burley isn't one of them, and frankly, I don't think he's somebody we necessarily are even able to focus on. I'd like to interview him, I would like to speak to him, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't like to speak to me, but the point I'm making is that we can't actually make those, we can't actually know anything about what Rob Burley thinks about the world. It's not that it doesn't matter what his political opinions are, but as you say, there's a lot of other things going on that we do actually empirically know about. One actually is the changing culture at the BBC, you know, I've written about it in LEMF and I'm drawing on the, you know, work with lots of other people. We do know a fair amount about the BBC, about its culture, we know quite a lot about the political economy of news, we know about the relationships between the people who do the political reporting and the people at Westminster, we know about Westminster culture, we know how much the people who are at the top of the BBC earn, we know what their jobs are. So we don't need to go into personal prejudice because the type of organisation that the BBC is, we don't know that. I mean, we know about the people who write The Guardian because we know what they think about Corbyn because they say so. We don't know that about the BBC, there's no need for us to go there and I've also generally thought it's not necessary to go there because I think it's basically a political dead end because you can just say, oh, you know, I don't like Laura Goonsburg or whatever. Well, you know, if she left and somebody else would be appointed and they'd be on, you know, maybe they'd be better, maybe they'd be worse, but like we'd be left basically with the same sort of underlying structural problems. Now, they are the ones that you mentioned to do with like the shifting political economy of news. That's also the fact that if you look at the appointments for the sort of people who are like defining the tones of the coverage and the BBC is a very hierarchical organisation, you know, they're brought in almost like a fast track for politically well-connected people or sometimes their BBC staffers, but what they're not usually doing is working their way up, you know, from local to national. You know, you get people with a particular type of expertise, right? There is this thing called political reporting, which isn't the sort of political reporting that someone like Adita Chutka Basi is doing, for example. It's the kind of political reporting that Laura Koonsberg and Nick Robinson and Robert Pestin do. And actually, we do know about that because they write about it, right? Nick Robinson has written about where he sees himself and he sees himself to quote him as a cog in the Westminster machine. Like when Robert Pestin was criticised by Peter O'Born for his reporting of anonymous claims by government sources, he said more or less the same thing. That Nick Robinson was on the record was saying about 10 years before, which was, I see it as my job to make public the conversations that are going on in private, to lift the veil. Now, my friend Dan Hind, when we were discussing about this, used a different sort of phrase to describe this. He talked about lifting the curtain, somebody at the theatre pulling up the curtain and showing the façade of the Westminster politics. You know, that's the real, and this brings us to that particular scandal around the reporting of the, you know, this alleged assault that took place. What is going on here where you have somebody like Peter O'Born. I mean, maybe viewers aren't familiar with Peter O'Born. So he's, he, one stage he worked for the telegraph. He left the telegraph because of the pressure that he was put under over reporting on HSBC, which was a major advertiser, then went to the Daily Mail, and he wrote a very good piece for Open Democracy, which was on reporting of government sources. And he, it was basically the argument he was making was that the political reporters were not holding the Johnson government to account. Now, where do we end up? After that, the angry response to O'Born's claims, right? He was interviewed by Amal Rajan, the BBC's media editor in the most confrontational manner, like he was a government minister. And what happens? Like, you know, weeks later, we have, it seems like a government minister texting the political editor of the BBC, making a claim that was just patently false. And as I think, a remark that you made, if the video hadn't emerged, we know how that would have been reported. It would have been reported. A government minister says this, but this is denied by Labour. You know, we've seen it again and again and again. And that's what, can I say, that also touches on the issue of neutrality versus objectivity and truth-seeking. So, like, rather than say what's the, what actually happened here, which is obviously, you'd think that would be imperative in the mind of any self-respecting journalist. Actually, they say, well, this side claims this and this side denies this. The great analogy is, okay, you send two people into a meadow and you say, cut the grass. One comes back and says, I cut the grass. One says they didn't. Rather than actually ascertaining which one is telling you the truth, you say, well, what we know is that one person said it happened and the other said it didn't. You know, I'm none the wiser. Thank you very much. I don't know when that started passing for reasonable journalism. The BBC has his, you know, really good policy documents on what imparts genotypes and what it means. It's just never actually implemented them. So, they, you know, they had this report out, I don't know what they called it, Sea Sort of Wagon Wheel. And it's quite old now. It's like 10 years old or something. And, and there was actually, there was a good article which was written by, I forget the guy's name. I think it, I think it was Kevin Marsh. And he's a former today program editor. And he wrote quite a good thoughtful piece on what impartiality meant. I forget, I forget what the piece was called. But he describes how if you're a journalist, judging what impartiality means, it doesn't mean objectivity. Because it means, I mean, to speak slightly metaphorically, you go into society, you interrogate claims, and you, you assess what the important, like, substantive arguments are and the points of difference are. And then you present that. You don't just take claims at face value and say, this is one side of the argument, this is the other. And the other thing that the BBC said in that report, like from Sea Sort of Wagon Wheel, which is all very, but Where can we find this? Sea Sort of Wagon Wheel? It was published by the BBC Trust. So all of that stuff is like archives. Right. Kevin Marsh. No, that was another article, which I thought, I forget where it was published, but if you, if you Google Kevin Marsh, like impartiality, I'm sure you'll find it. But anyway, the point I'm making is that in theory, and, and he was working at the BBC College of Journalism, such as where they teach you, you know, to how you do journalism, theoretically, the BBC was trying to move away from one side says this, one side says that, and an acknowledgement, number one, the complexity of like contemporary society and political issues. Number two, the fact that you need to interrogate the veracity of particular claims and then present them to the public, right? So, you know, we don't even have to use like analogies of, you know, is it raining or is the grass being cut? The BBC acknowledged it on climate change, you know, they acknowledged that they got this wrong because they were trying to balance think tanks funded by the fossil fuel, fossil fuel capital with, with the scientific consensus, right? The BBC's acknowledged that. Now, we see that an issue after issue. And as you say, this is wrapped up with the, with a certain conception that the BBC has a political reporting, which I in my view has just proved wanting in this election. And I think the, the issue there is, well, what are they going to do about it? I mean, that's why I'm most concerned about the response from the BBC, because I mean, it seems to me like just a unique institution where there's just no, it doesn't seem to be publicly anyway, any capacity to engage with criticism, unless it comes from the right, in which case that, you know, they show seems to me like a quite strong willingness to engage and to argue and so on. But have you ever seen anyone at the BBC seriously engaging with, with criticism of their work? I mean, you're very forthright about these things. Do you ever get a good response from the BBC? Never. Never. Although, you know, in their defence, you know, I am occasionally still invited on despite being incredibly critical. So there is that. But what I would say is, and there are some people in the comments saying, well, I'm on the right, I couldn't disagree more. You know, yes, the BBC is biased to the left. I would say, we're right. And you're also right. How is that? Because the social norms that many BBC staff have much of the sort of work and culture there. Yeah, it does tend towards social liberalism. Probably many of them were Romaine voters because it's an organisation which is generally speaking embodied in major metropolitan areas, draws upon graduates, etc. But at the same time, all these things we're talking about, I think are pervasive. And so it's not an either or here to say that the BBC's kind of social moors tend towards this, which that's debatable, by the way, if you ever listen to Moral Maze or something. Moral Maze, I think is probably the most reactionary show on the BBC. But I agree. I mean, look, when you're faced with like apparently contradictory claims or perspectives, the immediate response isn't to say, well, I'm right, because two people who disagree with each other say that I'm wrong. You know, just logically, it just doesn't make any sense. Right. So what a responsible or intelligent person would do is you try to look at the different perspectives, you try to make sense to them and you try to say, okay, is where does my picture of myself or the organisation I work with, what rings true about that? What am I doing which might make people perceive me one way or the other? And you also need to be open to the fact that some people may be closer to the truth than others. I mean, these are complex questions, right? Number one, the BBC is a very large institution. Number two, there's very different cultures and different programmes, different sections of the BBC. You know, like news is much more conservative than documentary making. A lot of their programmes get produced by private companies. So it's a complex organisation and these are complex questions. So when you have two, yes, seemingly simple claims, what an intelligent person does is they try to disaggregate those claims and they also try and find ways that you might actually assess or judge those things. You know, so you, I mean, just the starting point to me for anybody who works at the BBC should be, okay, fine, people are making different claims. Let's go and see if we can find some actual evidence. And they can't pretend they don't know about this because they pay, they commission research. Like, so the book that I did, which you mentioned at the beginning, you know, I didn't do any content research from my research. I was doing like a set of interviews and archival work and then drawing on secondary sources and drawing a lot of the content that's been produced by other scholars, a lot of which was commissioned by the BBC Trust. You know, so it's not like they're not aware of this work. And that's all they need to do. They just need to go and look at the research and try and make sense of is there an institutional culture at this organisation? Are there any problems there in terms of us delivering our constitutional remit, our requirements under law and under the charter, and to ask those questions seriously? And that's all that, I think that's all that they need to do. And of course there are people who make claims which are just completely lacking any, any substance. Like, but you know, you can't just take to Twitter, find someone who's obviously a little bit angry or ill-informed and say, look at these idiots. That's what Rob Burley, how do you feel about Rob Burley's sort of, this is a very unimportant question, so give me a brief answer. But the fact that a guy who's meant to be a, you know, what is he? He's a producer. He's head of life political programmes. Westminster programmes or whatever, right? Why is he doing the public relations for the BBC and responding to people like this on Twitter? I mean, it just seems supremely unprofessional. This is an organisation, it's a news organisation with hundreds of millions of pounds. You're not paid to do that. It just seems, it seems really ramshackling, odd. Well, I think it's, I think it's the sort of personal or it must be motivated by a personal attempt to sort of engage with the public, you know, but I mean, it's not a job. It's not a job. Well, I don't ask Rob Burley, I don't know. To quote, tweak people. No, but I just find it weird. You know, I just find it weird. And so I'm wondering. I find it strange, but I don't think that technological thing, right? You know, is Twitter undermining perhaps the capacity of these people, Laura Koonsbow, Robert Peston, are they trapped in that same technology, the Twittering machine that Richard Seymour talks about? Is that part of the explanation as well as political bias? Well, you know, I mean, the BBC is a strange organisation, right? Because the first major study of the BBC was by a guy called Tom Burns, and it was called Public Institution Private World. And one of the things that he noted about that was how extraordinary it is that you had this institution with a huge number of employees, very, you know, very significant for British politics, but also British culture and even more so at that time, right? So we're talking about the late sixties and early seventies. But he remarked how insular and cagey and paranoid the BBC is about criticism that come from the outside. They even tried to stop his study being published. And then later on, Georgina Bourne, who wrote a very good book on the BBC in looking at during the Burt era, in particular, looking at how John Burt was director general of the BBC in the late eighties and the 1990s. I talk about it quite a lot in the book, but part of the reason why the BBC is like it is today, why it's so neoliberal and it's culture so like orientated towards business is that's Burt's legacy. He basically marketized the BBC, made a much more hierarchical, much more authoritarian. I lost my train of thought. Now where was I? Yeah, so it's always been an institution which is very cagey and you saw it during the election, like nobody's breaking ranks. I mean, you've got Rob Burley on Twitter, but the reason that feels odd actually is that most people at the BBC don't have that kind of engagement with members of the public. So you do have a few people who seem to be given a certain amount of editorial leeway to do this kind of stuff. It reputedly that BBC journalists were told around 2010, tweet or be sacked. I mean, I think this was sort of humorous remark, but it was trying to get these guys onto social media to engage in the new technology. And my sense is that and by the way, everything they do on there does fall within the BBC's editorial guidelines. So they're supposed to conduct themselves impartially on Twitter as well. It's a curious question. I don't know the answer. I mean, maybe Rob can call in. We'll get him on. Before we go any further, we've got 1,500 people watching this, which is great for January the 2nd. We've got a big year ahead on Avara Media, four nights a week on Siski's Cell, all the way through to January 31st, 31 days in January, I think so. It's a bit of an experiment. We want to bring you the very latest analysis, comment, reporting, and the stories you often are not hearing from elsewhere. So if you want to help us do that, building a new media for different politics, go to support.navaramedia.com, make a one-off donation or make a subscription, an ongoing payment. We recommend what you would earn in an hour, as long as it's more than the living wage. So if you earn £15 an hour, we would very much welcome a £15 a month subscription, or as I've said, a one-off payment. If you can't do that, very simple thing you can do is just hit the thumbs up button. We've got 1,500 people watching, only 298 thumbs. Just do that. Doesn't cost a penny. Hit the subscribe button. If you're on Twitter, follow us there. If you're on Facebook, follow us there. If you're on Instagram, follow us there. Right. Final question about this stuff, because it's not just the politics, it's the technology, it's the parameters within which all media is done, which has transformed in the last 30 years, more so with press and the print media, newspapers, etc., but it's also there with broadcast. Do you think that that can be overstated? Because obviously your book, Myth of a Public Service, looks at the BBC in historic context. It looks at it when it had, relatively speaking, more resources, was less subject to explicit political control from the government of the day, although that's always been a problem in general. That's kind of intensified in the last 25-30 years. Do you think the BBC has always had the kinds of problems we're talking about now? Yeah, I think so. But I think it's been intensified. I mean, that's all we're seeing. Like, the BBC, I mean, this is more or less, you know, the argument of the book in a nutshell, is that the BBC is always operating this kind of gray area between being, you know, government broadcaster or a state broadcaster, and a genuinely independent media organization. And, you know, the story of the BBC has been a sort of push-and-pull from governments and periods of relative autonomy and creativity, and periods where that gets locked down, like, quite strongly, particularly where its funding gets caught, particularly when it gets pulled to the right by right-wing governments, by a combination of, you know, pressure about its future and tax and flack from the government. So you saw it under factorism and into the 1990s, and particularly where the BBC became a much more risk-averse organization. Now, I think the other thing is the wider social context, because there are periods where the BBC comes up under particular stress because of political polarization. You know, the BBC is obviously embedded within the political establishment. It sees itself as having an important role in sort of facilitating political conversations. I mean, the fact is it's much easier to do that in periods of relative political stability and low conflict than it is to do it in periods of social crisis. So I think we're seeing a few things, like, which has sort of created a kind of perfect storm around the BBC leading up to this election, right? Number one is this sort of slow-burning social crisis, which we've been in for some time now, and the BBC, just to my mind, seems it's just not up to the task of really coming to turns with what we are facing as a society. I mean, and it's easy for us to forget it. What do you mean here by social crisis? I mean, well, even before we got to the financial crisis, right, there was very clear that we had a height in political disendament engagement and declining trust in institutions, rising kind of right-wing populism, as it's called now. That actually preceded the financial crisis. I think the less sometimes forgets this. Then with the financial crisis, then you have this increased polarization when the government basically doubles down on the neoliberal growth model and decides it's going to, you know, but push the people of the Boston society into the most brutal conditions in order to maintain wealth at the top. So that's the Osborn austerity project, right? And then that plays out via parliamentary offensive scandal and then the Brexit crisis and a crisis basically in the breakup of the UK. You know, so we are, you know, I don't sound melodramatic, but we've got all of that and then we've got the basic undermining of our planetary life support systems. Now, in that context, what do you, do you, does anybody think that the BBC's reporting has really been up up to facing the scale of the social crisis we're in? No, I don't think so. But that's not even the point that I'm making. The point I'm making is that when you have this period of turmoil in contestation, it's very difficult for the BBC to to find its moors, right? Which basically it's principle of impartiality outside of the sort of on paper has been practically you reflect the diversity of elite opinion in society and that's, that's your, your moors basically. What, what do people in what's the range of conflict within Westminster and within the associated sort of circle? So that's where the BBC's focus is. It's very difficult to do that when you're in a period of, period of political crisis. So their response to Covidism needs to be put in that context. Number two, the BBC will tend to lean to the right during periods of right-wing government. So there's some polling which was done through the 80s and 1990s by the then regulator of independent television, which was asking people about like, you know, is the BBC more biased towards the government or the opposition or labour or conservatives or whatever. And people generally thought that the BBC was biased towards government and this is this actually correct and but during periods of conservative government they perceived the BBC to be more right-wing than they thought it to be left-wing under, under labour. Again, this is substantially correct. If you look at the research that academics at Cardiff has done, it supports that just simply by looking at what are the preponderance of different right-wing and left-wing voices under, under blairism, late blairism that is, and, and Cameronism. The dominance of the conservative government in new sources, I mean because it's the government and, and the political leads that drive output, is more marked during periods of right-wing government. Why is that? It's because the government themselves have an enormous command over the community of infrastructure. So governments anyway pour the BBC in that direction on top of the political relationship they have with the government. But also the government, right-wing governments, are more in step with the establishment. They're supported by the press. So they're pulling political culture in that direction. So that's number two. Number one, social crisis. Number two, a right-wing government pulls the BBC to the right. Number three is basically a combination, is, is related to that, which is the rise of, of the left. Now the, with the left sort of reviving under what we were then calling commonism and as now I guess we're not really sure what to call it, the BBC found itself in a very difficult situation where it had to sort of balance and find its moorings in a political system that was collapsing. Now the way I thought about this at the time that the commonism was starting to take off was the BBC trying to balance two basic constituencies, right? Number one is kind of the establishment, the political elite, whatever term you want to use. Number two is the public and the public obviously don't agree on everything and it's very difficult for them to satisfy all these constituencies at once. And that's where the BBC found itself going into this election. And ultimately, I think the BBC is more comfortable being accountable to the establishment and to the government than it is to the public. But their basic stress that they were under is a combination I think of those three interrelated kind of element. And there's also I think the sort of broader historical changes which is, you know, you've seen the number of, the absolute number of journalists decline sharply since the 80s in local papers, in national papers, in local broadcasts, in national broadcasts and you've simultaneously seen a massive expansion in public relations. Massive. The number of people who are working in public relations for the government today is far and that's not a Blair right thing. You know, Blair loved it but it's actually starts really in the late 70s, early 80s. Okay, so I mean there are lots of variables like that and one thing I'm one very mundane everyday way through which what you're talking about is sort of reproduced is if a government or an army, if an army or press officer or a Metropolitan Police Service Press Officer says something and you say something because it's a member of Joe Public, they're automatically going to be believed over you. Now we can we can argue whether or not that's correct but given huge cuts to journalistic budgets for your reporters less facts checking and also greater amounts of resources going to public relations it's clear you're going to get inferior journalism. It's clear that you're going to get the BBC regardless of the intentions of its journalists which I would I would sort of imply aren't particularly good anyway, often you know regardless of that it's clear you're going to get deteriorating outcomes and you're going to get inferior journalism. Well this is why you know if you look at the media you have to think of the an organization like the BBC is embedded within wider networks of you know communicative practices infrastructure whatever you want to call it. I mean Stuart Hall referred to this as like the political journalists like the secondary definers right so the primary definers are the people who actually produce the information. They're the people who like message Laurel Coonsburg. Laurel Coonsburg is the secondary definer she takes that message and she delivers it on the BBC. The context of that was an argument about where you know media bias or whatever you want to call it media ideology gets produced and the argument that Hall and his colleagues were making was that no the ideas get produced elsewhere they get produced in society and then they get relayed on the BBC. Now I think this is very useful model and it fits into the things that you've been saying about the so in terms of the rise of PR also you know what that really flattered news is about is the instrumentalization the commercialization of information where the information that we see on the BBC and elsewhere is actually being produced by vested interests and again so that that means interests within the state that means corporations it means the PR people and also what journalism does is it adapts so that it develops new business models and do new models of interdependency. Now they existed earlier on right that the journalists have particularly senior journalists have always been embedded in sourcing networks for example but you're right what happens is when you get declining funding is an inability to actually go out number one is an inability to go out and create stories right so you know reporting becomes less of a thing when I mean what was the last major story the BBC broke yeah well they've actually sort of publicly said at various points in their life we're not we're not interested in breaking breaking news but I've done before I mean Robert Peston Northern Rock for instance that was the last big one I can remember yeah so Robert Peston was brought in from the newspapers in more or less to do that role and then another person who sort of came in with a big who Harbors Andrew Gilligan who got into hot water over reporting on weapons and mass destruction around Iraq but then they've done that occasionally and but usually the reason for that is is that they want someone to sort of shape things up a little bit and bring something new sort of expanded approach to the BBC which goes back to it it's you know it's early origins was that the BBC would be relaying news that comes from elsewhere that comes from the British state it comes from Reuters it comes from the the private media right now that's problematic in itself but one thing we haven't mentioned is the the the ways in which those private media companies have also changed significantly you know from the social democratic period through the neoliberal period there's a there's a story about the restructuring of Britain Britain and the world's communicative infrastructure but the BBC plays a central it's sort it's like a sort of central hub of all that so making sense of the BBC of course means making sense of all those changes I mean if you look at you know people talk about I mean LMAs come on the show and said look I don't like to moan about the media because you have to it's just a given that they're going to attack the left that's partly true I mean it's true it's certainly true now but it's not historically the case 1945 the daily worker which is today's morning star had a bigger leadership than the financial times in this country you know the two biggest papers or two of the biggest papers the daily Herald and the Daily Mirror were left-wing the counterweights were the Daily Mail and the Express so actually the media kind of broke quite evenly both ways Howard Wilson wins four general elections in the 60s and 70s throughout that time the Daily Mirror is the most read newspaper in the country they're back labor every time the Sun even under Rupert Murdoch the first time round back labor they're back Wilson why because they know that their average reader is a working man in a trade union they can't not back labor I think that's a really really important point to make which is that if the BBC looks at itself as merely you know detaching these other guys and then clearly it's constants going to change as they change around it's been a really central thing at the BBC you know I didn't talk about it much in the book but when I was doing archival research on the 1970s which is none of that's in the book I mean half of my research from my PhD was looking at what happened at the BBC during the social crisis of the 1970s and that culminated in the winter of discontent and that's coming to power and all the rest of it and you know the labor movement were really you know fat agreed that the way the BBC was reporting these things and this goes on to the minor strike as well and eventually you know the figures at the BBC do show some regret about the way that these things were being reported but at the time when the labor movement figures from the labor movement conservative figures from the labor movement you know the sort of what the the press called the union barons or whatever they were approaching the BBC you know well you need to you need to report these things accurately you know this isn't happening this isn't happening you know we're getting this incredibly ferocious attacks on us from this right wing press which then was you know this was a new thing that they were being attacked so what if that should do she her advisers you know they went to the Daily Mail and they went to the Sun and they formed a class alliance against the left and against the labor movement and the labor movement one expected the BBC to report more fairly now the BBC's response was more or less it's not our job to make you look good we're just going to report the news as it happens and I think that is the underlying naivety that you see even in very good journalists that some sense that some things are a story and some things aren't and I said when we started I didn't want to name names too much but it just came to mind was like Laura Kuhnsberg sort of reflecting on the labor antisemitism crisis and claims of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party just sort of musing on Twitter that what's going on in labor just feels like it's in a different on a different scale right even though statistically yeah even though statistically it's not true but also you know research showed how how uninformed the public are in terms of the scale of the crisis right so there was some work that they did at Glasgow and they did some polling and they did some focus groups and they found that the public the average figure that people thought were labor members have been disciplined for alleged antisemitism was was 30% right and the actual figure was 0.08% now that that's a level of disjuncture between public understanding and and the reality of the situation which has to be to do with the media I mean I I just think if you don't accept that you're just why don't the BBC take any responsibility for that I mean because it clearly according to you know Reith first director general in 1927 he says we're here to inform educate entertain in that order that kind of finding would suggest the British public when it comes to this particular issue is very poorly informed and you don't need to and you don't see the BBC often taking responsibility for that Reith because like the BBC is still obliged to report accurately it's still its constitutional duty to educate people on contemporary issues and the more contentious or important politically an issue is the more serious it is for the BBC to be show accuracy and by the way Coonsburg herself was disciplined for the BBC trust and an early report where it was found to have been misleading on Corbyn's attitude to shoot to kill I don't know if you remember this I think it was in 2015 the original report as a trust ruling in early 2016 what they said was that level of inaccuracy violates impartiality because it's on a seriously serious contentious political issue like this has been a longstanding principle at the BBC that if something is of political or industrial controversy then impartiality becomes all the more important and accuracy becomes all the more important I honestly don't know but my feeling is that there's a strong sense amongst people who work in the media that something being a story or not or having legs to use the sort of cliched language that they use is somehow a politically neutral thing right and the reason I mentioned that Laura Coonsburg tweet was it's just a feeling you know a gut feeling that these are two these are things of a different scale now we all have gut feelings but we all have to examine them and try and figure out whether they're actually whether they're right or wrong I mean it's a great great sort of anecdote about you know precisely this there was polling I think it was you going in the mid-naughties the mid-2000s most people thought the House of Lords had more political power invested in it than the House of Commons right that's a profound misunderstanding of how British politics works very much you're literally voting for one group of people the House of Commons you're not voting for the House of Lords and by the way the House of Commons is invested with a lot more political power thankfully because we're you know we resemble a democracy and yet most people don't know that and the sort of the way that the BBC would report this well that's the impression people have therefore it must be true you know and I think but it comes a bit back to this question of bias as well earlier I mean when we started talking it was like okay this amount of people don't trust the BBC anymore well you know some of them will be on the left and some of them will be on the right and that gives the BBC an opportunity to make that sort of middle-of-the-road argument but this is why I mean I don't you know I don't think you can simply say okay let's see what people's perceptions are and then we'll just make a judgment on that basis you know that's the language of post-truth right we need to actually try and find ways to actually reach accurate understandings of the world there's this article by Dominic Cummings which you published today and if you saw this on his blog and he talks about you know I've had enough of media execs who discuss Lacan and talk about fake news while spreading fake news and I thought that's kind of well not the Lacan bit but the the fake news about fake news is kind of slot on the thing is with this yeah I mean again like the BBC has been very big on this whole thing of like you know fighting the fighting fake news and the rest of it and it's partly because you know it shores up the kind of values which the BBC claims for itself you know and some of which are good so like the BBC generally as a rule doesn't report things which are just flat out completely inaccurate you know so that's why things like you know some of the ways that it conducted itself during the election were quite shocking I mean even for me but you know that is a principle worth protecting and defending I think in public service broadcasting and the reason why by the way if you ask people whether they trust the BBC or not the BBC can usually produce some quite good poll polling on this it's because people naturally compare the BBC to like the sun or the Daily Mail or whatever and rightly think that the BBC is a better way of getting their information on the world if you you know if I want to know what's going on in such and such a situation or place I will usually go to the BBC over like the times or even the Guardian because they will usually report accurately because of the regulatory structure which they operate under if I want to know what's going on in the Labour Party the last place I would go to would be the BBC right so there are certain issues if I want to know what the British state is doing in the Middle East I don't go to the BBC right if I want to know something about that's relatively a political yeah the BBC is a very good organisation though the weaknesses with the BBC are over key areas unfortunately some of them really do touch on you know they're very much the heart of its kind of public remit so we're going to take some questions in two minutes I've got one more question to ask you which I think very politically pertinent after that we want to take questions from you so if you just put your questions in the comments section were the rocket emojis that right Fox that's how we do things here now we'll take them and we'll take them to Tom and we'll probably wrap up I guess about five no probably 10 pass nine if that's all right but the question I have really is given given what we know as to how the BBC treated the most left-wing leader the Labour Party has had probably ever arguably since the 30s you're advising the next leader of the Labour Party they could be right-wing they could be left-wing they could be you could be Gisdarm and Jess Phillips Rebecca Longmealy whoever what would your advice be as to how they engage with the BBC what can they do to win a general election forget the reforms that you'd want to implement afterwards I'm not really a strategic commons person so I don't really sort of feel qualified to answer that question but I mean my own sort of feeling on it would be that you need to be a bit more forthright about the politics of the media I mean I think part of the problem with Corbyn and McDonald's approach to this was they were very sort of softly softly you know they were early sort of indication I mean it's very clear that they understand like the media and the sort of limitations on the project and but there was very little for them really being forthright about the nature of these institutions now my instincts at the moment and it might just be that sort of mood I'm in about these things is that you should be a bit more forthright in describing these institutions as for what they are you know which is part of the establishment they're part of the political elite they're part of the power structures of this country so that's how I would approach the BBC I think you need to engage with the BBC I think you need to sometimes reject the terms on on which that engagement is set I mean I think Navarra have been you know people on Navarra sorry from Navarra have been quite good at that being able to intervene in debates which is sort of designed to be conducted in one fashion and try to get important points across in another there's limitations to what you can do with that I think you need to recognize the BBC and the other media organizations as basically being weighed against the left but they're also organizations which within the the left needs to operate and I think the best way of doing that to avoid sort of being sort of muzzled by the nature of these institutions is to be a bit more forthright about the political character of them and that doesn't necessarily mean sort of naming journalists or anything like that although I don't particularly see why why the left shouldn't do that but you just saw all these interventions in the last few years like every time you know Corbyn in his own sort of gentle way would make some sort of remark about something you'd have people jumping up and down on Twitter talking about how he was Trumpian or something you know and I just I just think it's kind of absurd it's one of the most kind of you know it seems to be very deeply embedded were in British journalism this sort of article of faith that there's nothing political about the media and somehow we stand you know we stand completely removed from the power structure of this country I mean and it's it's so patently absurd but I think it's a very strong kind of part of the journalistic ideology and it's and it runs quite deep at the BBC as well and I think I don't think you know the labour leadership should should be ignoring that it's a basic social reality yeah yeah here's a good question this is from PLDN is it the full name yeah PLDN asks Tom how can we keep up with academic study of the BBC media in the UK are there any Twitter accounts journals or mailing lists that you'd recommend most of the stuff will get published at like particular set of journals like so following me on Twitter I'll tweet something when that when it becomes available but you know there are journals like journalism journalism studies media and communications European Journal of communications a lot of that stuff comes out you know relatively slowly but so that's not going to be sort of breaking news or anything but is there a mailing list or something like you remember of or there's a mailing list for all the media and communications association you should start mailing list yeah newsletter yeah maybe I'm not sure I have time monthly one yeah you know yeah potentially let me just rather than sort of give you academic mailing list like just make some suggestions right follow me on Twitter you can follow you can keep follow the media reform coalition which of which I'm involved and vice chair of that follow Leo Watkins on on Twitter he's very good he talks a lot about the political economy of the press he's working on a radical agenda for democratizing the media following my friend Dan Hind he's very good as well and I'm sure there'll be lots of others and ask me tomorrow on Twitter and I will come up with some other suggestions you will see a book right I mean your book's got many other books that are sourced in your book which you know it's a great jumping off point I think yeah yeah sure I mean go in the book and follow up references in there but to be honest you can just go on Google Scholar and just search for things that you're interested in you'll find the main literature I mean nothing that I cite is sort of like marginal or anything it's all the basically you know mainstream social scientific research on media content you'll you'll find that stuff Sam D asks will the BBC face any consequences for their election coverage if not how can they be held to account now and in the future no they they're not going to be it's very clear that the BBC is only concerned with what we're negotiating with the conservative government so the question isn't how we're going to hold the BBC to account for its mistakes during the election I mean I think everybody should complain and by the way the BBC receives a much higher volume of official complaints from the right than it does from the left because people on the left tend to either accept it or complain about it online rather than actually complaining to the BBC perhaps because they don't have as much of a sense of ownership I don't know by all means complain to the BBC people should do that but we should demand that the BBC meets its public service obligations and you know read its charter right so if you don't meet those standards then you should call the BBC up on it the bigger question for us isn't how we're going to hold the BBC to account over that the bigger question is how should the liberals and the left engage with the BBC now the BBC is being attacked by the Johnson government and that's a much more difficult question and I don't have any simple answers but I think any defence of the BBC that's made now by the left and I include like liberals in that as well has to be on the basis of a fundamental reform of the organisation I think and this is just my view that the BBC has reached a point where it's simply not fit for purpose and I'm personally not prepared to defend the BBC anymore without making a demand for a different type of BBC I don't think it's defensible in this current form people need to decide how we're going to respond strategically to the BBC being attacked by the government and that's that's the key post-election issue we may not like that but that's where we are I like this question from two more questions this one's from Kittle Potapov or Cyril Potapov Kittle what would it take from an organisation like Navara I would like to hear the answer this time like Navara to catch up on clout to an organisation like The Sun I mean the difference is a billionaire owning one and not the other I presume but maybe you have some it's just money isn't it I mean the thing is like we're in a situation now where you know Navara's been able to do great things but like on relatively small resources the reach is sort of well if you look at something like the Reuters Institute report right where they're asking people who've heard of different news organisations have you used these news organisations like I noticed last time I looked at that like Navara was there like they because it just they have to ask the actual name I don't believe that by the way they say like it gets 1% I think we know the public 4% of the public 3% of the public had heard of us I just don't believe that that's millions of people what's weirder about that is they claim that 1% of the public use Navara or in the last week or something which I mean well anyway that would mean like a quarter of the people who have heard of Navara are users well maybe maybe not but anyway the point I was going to make was there a list of these small organisations which you know do have a certain amount of clout and it's sort of credit of hard work that a lot of people have put in but I mean it's just money and like I think the problem we've had a problem left for a long time that there's a virtue in volunteerism and this is just a huge strategic error and I think it comes out of like all kinds of left culture which was prevalent in the early 1990s where there's a sort of feeling that it's money that corrupts people therefore we don't want resources we can just get to the truth by being being pure well this comes back to your point you were making earlier about communicative resources right where do the ideas materially get produced from in society like we can sit here and we can mouth off about the BBC but the reason I know about the BBC is because I spent a lot of time researching it and that required resources it required access to an academic institution and it required me to then have a job that gives me a certain amount of you know status or whatever you know these are institutional resources you guys have institutional resources thanks to your subscribers until we have that we're not going to have that cloud it's just as simple as that so then it just becomes how can we do things better with a small amount of money and how can we fundraise that's where we are I think for the left my view is that the Labour Party itself has to see itself as being responsible for fostering a stronger media that's going to be I think the serious question which a leadership candidate whoever they all the leadership candidates and whoever the leader becomes is going to face is how are you going to win an election in the media environment that we're in what are you going to do about that and we don't mean how are you going to sound reasonable on the radio or on question time or whatever what is your political strategy for for number one engaging with the mainstream media yes but number two building up an alternative communicative infrastructure you know that's what the left needs to do but we're not going to do that without resources and we're never going to have the resources that the BBC has we can learn from each other and figure out how to do things better with small amount of resources but we need money but I mean yeah and also the thing is it's happened before you know I said earlier on the show financial times used to have a small readership then what is today the morning start you know it's happened before today the sun was you know used to be the Daily Herald that was started by trade unions it was once owned by the TUC you know the Daily Mirror was set up as a effectively a not a feminist newspaper it was marketed as a progressive liberal paper towards women because they were a new you know part of the consumer market so well by the Daily Mail pardon by the Daily Mail by the Daily Mail but my point is you know we've had massive disruptions before in media and they've not always been bad ones you know they've been positive ones actually print benefited progressive causes for 150 years you know we're pamphleteering around the old French and American revolutions and chartism and republicanism and all the way through really to the suddenly in the 80s that media becomes a decisively negative force for politics I think yeah probably more like a play late 70s I think it's the key shift you know like so there's a sort of benchmark in British politics somewhere between 1974 and 1976 where I think you and if you reconstruct that period both in terms of media history and in terms of the rise of neoliberalism it's very clear that that's when the tide turns both in terms of like you know middle class attitudes to the welfare state you know a certain kind of working class conservatism which has always existed but you know was it really gets kind of you know channeled by the likes of Murdoch and the private media and Thatcher you know working together into the 1980s but yeah it's very clear that the media paid quite a central role in that political project you know Murdoch personally but also the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and you can see it now you know people talk about the minor strike talk about whopping you know what happened with regards to you know this change in the media wasn't just oh some people changed ideas and they were persuaded of something there was a you know there was a violent attack on organised labour in the media industry to ensure that neoliberalism and its ideas prevailed like that and it's very and it's analogous to the minor strike in 1986 yeah it was very clear like you know what was going on what stake the different players had and you could see it yeah in whopping but that was like you know after Thatcher of course had waved through the merger of Murdoch buying the Times but also is it 81? yeah I think so I think that was 81 it's definitely a first term wasn't it I think yeah it was and you know we know that that happened now because the files had been declassified we also know that Thatcher literally wrote the headline of the Daily Mail like the day before the 1987 election I mean literally wrote the headline I remember like there's people probably have seen Very British Coup I remember talking to someone about that and someone saying like how crass it was that you have this sort of old guy who's Murdoch calling people up and writing headlines but it turns out it was just worse than that it was even Murdoch writing a headline literally the conservative prime minister you know writing her own press reporting so you know we know about all of this right and the but what we don't know is how in the shifting political economy of digital media how the left can best intervene in that and how we can allocate resources effectively and how the labour party the labour movement and the movements beyond the labour party can work together to foster that I mean I think that has that's a big political question I think we're still trying to work through and I was I've been you know until recently thinking about policy agendas for government and we find ourselves in a slightly different situation now like we don't have the resources of the state in order to restructure some of these organisations so there's a lot of new thinking that needs to be done to get through the next few years before you know the left win the next election yeah yeah yeah on that note thank you very much I guess I want to quickly say it's important to sort of demarcate the BBC's drama documentaries from its news and current affairs I often find that a really good way of starting the conversation you know so I'm not really a big fan of the BBC and then somebody will say well I I think that I think that they're doing good stuff and I said look I think actually look the drama is world-class I don't think anybody looks at the news and current affairs and goes that's world-class do you? and nobody ever says yes I should always preface all my comments with the BBC with that because I mean you know and people from the left always pull me up on it as well and it's partly because like my own research has been very much on like the high politics of the BBC and news and current affairs which is where most of the content analysis is where most of the archival work I did and the interviews that I did were focused on it's not like I don't think culture isn't even politically important although I do think it's totally justified my focus on like the the more capital P politics of the BBC but that's absolutely right there are lots of other bits of the BBC there's a very interesting conversation we can have about how cultural production should be organised in an organisation like the BBC but it's slightly different to the conversation we've been having today so if anybody yeah is a bit upset about that apologies it is an oversight there's a very interesting set of conversations we can have about that I mean Owen Haffley wrote a piece for I think it was for Jacobin or it might yeah I think it was for Jacobin when we were like trying to discuss you know what what would the BBC look like if it with a different model of cultural production and try to reflect on it so I think these are all that's an interesting question as well and one that relates to a broader question about how should the left be thinking about management and large organisations you know what is our answer to that because the neoliberals had an answer to that and the BBC was the answer like it was one of the organisations that the neoliberals remodelled first and we see the effects of that today I still don't think the left has really come up with an answer to that you know how do we run a big organisation on this more democratic egalitarian lines it's an exciting question that Corbyn has never really got its teeth into I don't think well we've got 2020 to address questions like that and more besides thank you again my name is Aaron Mastani this has been Tisgy Sauer I believe we're back tomorrow as of Monday we'll be on four nights a week all the way through to the end of January if that works out and that's what we'll be probably doing long term so like, subscribe, share and go to support.nivoremedia.com if you think that's worth supporting see you tomorrow