By Callum MacRae
After an auspicious start in Manchester and Bristol, the Real Media Tour hit Glasgow last week for a discussion on Media Bias and Big Political Events. Angela Haggerty of Common Space, Adam Ramsay of Open Democracy, Greg Philo of Glasgow University, and Real Media’s own Tom Barlow were on hand to offer their takes on the issue.
Unsurprisingly, a recurring theme throughout the evening’s discussion was the undeniable existence of considerable bias in the UK’s main media outlets. As Angela Haggerty pointed out, in the run up to the referendum on Scottish Independence only one weekly newspaper and not a single daily came out in open support of the independence movement, with the vast majority openly supporting the no campaign, and a small number declining to declare an allegiance. Similarly, Tom Barlow pointed out that despite near unanimous agreement in the polls that the NHS and the economy were the two major concerns of voters in the run up to the 2015 General Election, the economy (on which the Tories polled strongly) received more than triple the amount of coverage afforded to the NHS (on which Labour polled strongly) in major media platforms.
Examples of such media bias towards a broadly right-wing, pro-business agenda proliferated throughout the evening. However, as was noted by many of our panelists, bias in itself is not necessarily the problem. Open Democracy’s co-editor Adam Ramsay explained ‘there are some things I think are important and there other things I don’t think are important, it’s impossible for me to write and cover every potential story, so I bring my bias to the website, that’s true of every journalist with everything.’ When this becomes a problem is when systematic imbalances arise in which biases are given voice in major news outlets.
This idea of imbalance linked into another of the evening’s main themes – the perennial problem of funding in contemporary journalism and broadcasting. Two key problems emerged – a lack of funding, leading to a diminution in the quality of existing journalism, and the problem of the provenance of that funding which is available. Adam Ramsay spoke of two recent alarming examples. The first was Peter Oborne’s resignation from The Telegraph on the grounds that they had obstructed his investigative reporting on HSBC, with whom the Telegraph held a lucrative advertising contract, and thereby committed ‘a fraud on their readers’. The second was the repeated recurrence of an unfounded and unevidenced story alleging the likelihood of power outages as a result of the use of renewable energy. After some investigation, it was revealed that the story was produced and promoted by the right-wing think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, who refuse to disclose the source of their own funding. With the existence of these opaque and unaccountable funding systems whereby big businesses and the think tanks who represent them can influence media, and with 80% of the press owned by just five billionaires, it is no surprise that we see a systematic skewing of media bias towards a pro-business, neo-liberal agenda.
Finally, the room was left with some cause for hope amidst the numerous demonstrations of the abject failure of the UK’s major news platforms to present a fair and accurate spread of perspectives. Greg Philo spoke of the independence campaign as a prime example of the power of lateral organisation and new media technologies to circumvent the stranglehold of the mainstream media – a campaign which saw support climb dramatically despite a wave of hostile attacks from the traditional big players in the Scottish media. Similarly Angela Haggerty spoke of the success of Common Space in creating a means by which investigative journalism can be independently and ethically funded, and Tom Barlow pointed to the imminent release of the Real Media App and the soon-to-be-launched National Media Fund as examples of how alternative media can continue to develop into the future. Our video from Glasgow is out this week – in the meantime, you can catch up on the videos from Manchester and Bristol.
