and finally...


Beware the bias that undermines news


We could learn from the Commons speaker, says Chris Proctor T


he taxi driver in the front of my cab the other day had a deep well of knowledge about speakers of the


House of Commons. He was thrilled that he’d had Betty Boothroyd in my seat once, which astonished me. I wasn’t amazed that she’d been in my seat but that he, a man in his 40s, should have recognised her. It seems a strange job to attract attention. He said she had pig’s bladder in her heart. I tensed, awaiting some anti- Labour diatribe. But no, he says she had undergone open heart surgery and this was the method used by the doctors to restore her to health. Then he added that he supposed


she’d ‘gone private’. For a second time, I braced myself, anticipating a tirade about hypocrisy and privilege; but no, he was entirely sympathetic. “If you’ve got a job like that, you deserve the best,” he said. “What exactly is the job?” I asked. “Speaker,” he told me. “They do fairness.”


This reminded me how last year –


overnight – the media transformed the job of speaker from a saddish figure slumped in a green armchair like Billy No-Mates into a flamboyant political titan. I thought of that character in John DeLillo’s Underworld who said: “Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.” It’s not just the speaker, of course.


In November, we were all metamorphosed into rugby experts. The most unlikely people developed strong views about rucking tactics, speedy backs and forward passes. Come


summer, we’ll take to discussing Rafa, Djoker and ReRe as if we’d heard of them before. And, of course, everyone is an expert on general elections. But are the days of ‘the media’ setting the agenda coming to an end? Social media might be ensuring that they are. Reporters looking for a story used to go to the wires, the locals or the business press to see if a story could be amplified; they’d ring a few people to see if anything was happening; or maybe follow up a story they’d heard the previous evening; or simply go to the pub and see if anything turned up. Our hugely lamented former colleague Roy Rogers, who worked for the Glasgow Herald, would frequently call contacts to ask: “Have you got a story with a kilt on it?” Now, as often as not, a reporter’s day begins with a survey of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat or Reddit. That way, you find out what people are talking about so, if you talk about it as well, you’re in the swim. You’re the man with his finger on the pulse.


This sounds quite exciting. The


people are leading the news, choosing the subject and reasserting their right to their eyeballs. They are empowered. They choose the agenda rather than some apparatchik of Rupert Murdoch or toady of Downing Street. And, yes, it is a start. But only that.


Social media is excellent for expounding prejudices but not reporting news. Usually, it’s somewhere between rant and lunacy. So our job as journalists is to take the subject, rather than the content, and present a reasoned assessment.


ITN’s Alastair Stewart suggests this is


not what we’re doing. He said recently, “I grow increasingly concerned about the bias of some of my TV news ‘competitors’.” He quotes, not the NUJ which he could have, but similar Ofcom guidelines, saying the media’s job is to “ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”. Now this is a long way from the


26 | theJournalist


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Now, a reporter’s day begins with a survey of social media. You find out what people are talking. You’re the man with his finger on the pulse


garbage on social media: the fake pictures of Jeremy Corbyn with an ‘I love the IRA’ slogan superimposed on his jumper; the bizarre posts saying, ‘Give pensioners enough money to live on. Immigrants get more money than we do,’ (how on earth did he become a Facebook ‘friend’?); or calls to scrap the generous overseas aid we give to Johnny Foreigner. Someone – us – needs to put the balance right. We need to say the first one’s a scam, the second’s a lie and the third is 0.7 per cent of our income. We need someone who, professionally, is politically neutral, as Stewart says, and who makes sure the facts are available so that there can be informed debates, aka democracy. We need to make sure all views are presented objectively and… Hang on! This is what my mate the


taxi driver says the speaker does. Impartial. Tick. Fair to all views. Tick. No personal interference in what’s going on. Tick. Dammit. We should have all applied before that new chap was elected to Hoyle the wheels of Commons debate. Yes, I know most of us are already on £156,676 a year and live in rent-free, four-bedroom flats in Westminster – but it would be worth pitching for it just for the private chaplain.


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