On Friday Donald Trump takes office as the 45th President of the United States. His election has been a pretty important story – not just for Americans but also the rest of the world, and the UK’s state broadcaster, the BBC, certainly can’t be accused of ignoring it. On the contrary, extent of its coverage of the campaign, the result and the implications has been gargantuan.
Yet despite that torrent, those who relied on the Corporation’s coverage could be forgiven for feeling a bit baffled. Before the election it was made pretty clear to us that Trump would lose. The only votes he would get would come from old white men on low incomes who were angry, bitter and twisted. We were assured that he would only get the votes of the sexists and racists.
When Hillary Clinton called them the “basket of deplorables” it was regarded as a gaffe in the United States but by contrast the BBC seemed to feel the phrase was a pithy and accurate piece of electoral analysis.
Speaking of Hillary, it would be puzzling for BBC viewers to understand why she should be unpopular. The narrative was of an experienced, decent candidate who was destined to break the glass ceiling. The BBC North America editor Jon Sopel is clearly a fan. So is Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. The same goes for Julie Etchingham of ITV. But then there are so many others among the “expert” pundits of British TV that it would take too long to list them all. The bias was not about specific lapses, it was constant.
This didn’t just mean that the professional standard of due impartiality was ditched. It also left the chattering classes incapable of explaining the result. So how come Trump persuaded 29 percent of Latinos to vote for him? And 42 percent of women? His share of the black vote was a modest eight per cent – but that was higher than Mitt Romney managed as the Republican Party candidate four years
earlier.
Were all these millions of Americans consumed with self-loathing? To the extent that the BBC managed any explanation, that was the nearest it got. When Trump supporters were given airtime, they were usually divided into two. If they were ordinary Americans being nabbed for a vox pop they were treated as simpletons to be pitied and patronised. (The data indicating that 43 percent of College graduates vote Trump was generally ignored as inconvenient to the smug narrative that only
the stupid were swayed by him.) The more senior Trump supporters were bemused to be cast in the role of a defendant in the witness box facing an unusually hostile prosecuting barrister.
Any false claims by Trump will be given great attention – even a typo in one of his tweets. Yet when he is the victim of fake news, the BBC is desperate to give the claims as much credence as possible. It aches to believe them, notably, of course, with regards to the dossier claiming that Russian intelligence operatives have compromising information on him which fell to pieces when the details were
examined.
There will also by a willingness by the pundits to predict disaster – some of the claims from election night have already proved wrong. For instance that the Republican Party would fall apart, or that news of his election would spark a crash in the Dow Jones Index.
Even the BBC World Service – which traditionally took great care to be balanced – has been unrestrained in its message of contempt for the President-elect.
Such is the skewed mentality that the Conservative MP Michael Gove was attacked for his questions when interviewing Trump for The Times of London. Gove’s questions were pretty straightforward, broadly neutral and covered the main issues that would be of concern to a British readership. But Jo Coburn of the BBC Daily Politics programme felt that Gove should have taken the chance to go on the attack. He was effectively taken to task for not having done so.
All of this does far more harm to the BBC than to Trump. Most people are fair-minded and whatever criticisms and concerns they might have feel that the election is over and he should be given a chance. Then he can gradually be judged on his record. That is the natural rhythm in the relationship between politics and the media and it is a reasonable one.
Trump has assembled a serious team with a serious programme of policies to implement. The BBC should stop emoting and instead offer some sober, rigorous and balanced considerations about the prospects for the free world with its new leader. After all, those of us who are forced to pay the BBC licence fee do so having been promised repeatedly that the BBC will offer objective coverage, not bias or propaganda.