BBC Radio 4 “The Cannabis Trade” – an example of media bias

The BBC is the best broadcasting organisation in the world and Radio 4 is the best radio station in the world. This has been a well earned reputation born of the duties imposed on it by its Royal charter.

Now of course, when times get tough the charge has always been that the BBC backs the government and claims of bias have never been that far below the surface, but on the whole we can trust Aunty Beeb to tell us the truth, to keep us informed and to educate us. Can’t we? The broadcast media, perhaps more than newspapers, is very influential in forming public opinion after all.

Well, it seems the BBC has no overall duty to ensure proper objectivity on the part of its factual programme output apparently. Nowhere is this distortion more apparent than in the debate about drugs and cannabis in particular.

Now, it’s important to understand something about this “truth” thing. “The truth” is a difficult concept because there rarely is a single “truth” for any situation. It is thus easy to misrepresent “the truth” not by telling a lie, but by not telling all of the story – as some government official famously put it a few years ago “being economical with the truth”.

Back in December 2007 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a series of two investigative “factual” reports titled “The Cannabis Trade” which looked at the growth of the large scale cannabis farms, involvement of organised crime, claims of increased strength and so on. It did this against the background of a lot of misreporting in the press and Gordon Brown’s stated desire to return it to class B. Cannabis was very much in the
news. It was also at a time when Mori was canvassing public opinion on behalf of the government in order to gauge the public perception of the cannabis situation. It was, in short, just the time when a good, honest, factual programme on the mass media was needed, but it wasn’t what we got.

Essentially, the programme looked at all the bad things that are happening with the illegal cannabis trade such as the growth of organised crime gangs, the rise of the cannabis “grow ops”, the claim of increase danger from the supposedly stronger strains now and so on. There was much to criticise about the programme for the shallowness of some of its reporting and to that end UKCIA ran a critique of the
series which is online here. The programme had one very important failing which seriously misrepresented the situation however; it avoided any reference to the cause of all the problems, which of course is the workings of prohibition. UKCIA thus made a complaint to the BBC to this effect.

Now, this is important: The complaint was not that the programme should have presented the case for legalisation, that was made utterly clear, simply that the reason for the growth in organised crime is well understood as being a result of the prohibition regime and that by not drawing attention to this essential fact the programme presented a distorted view of the true situation.

Absolutely no reference to the workings of prohibition was made at any point in the series, it wasn’t mentioned at all. Indeed, the impression given was that all of these developments were something utterly new, something society has never seen before, which is of course, not the case. We have a well documented example of the exact same thing happening in 1920’s USA with alcohol prohibition. This historical
example of the economic workings of prohibition was never drawn on, it was airbrushed out of existence.

What happened next is a good illustration of all that’s bad about the BBC.

Now – remember: The complaint is not that the programme should have presented a case for legalisation, simply that it should have explained the workings of prohibition in the creation of the situation we see today. It was a sin of omission, of not telling the entire story and thus of creating a false impression. This apparently needs emphasising because the BBC seems utterly incapable of understanding the distinction. It is, of course, theoretically possible to make a programme that does not call for legalisation, but does explain the workings of prohibition.

Strangely, all the responses to this complaint from the BBC have come on a Friday, or immediately before a bank holiday, which seems designed to limit any response. However, we’ll let that pass.

The first response came as a personal reply from the programme producer, Sue Mitchell, who made it clear:

This response is going to you on a private basis and I do not give my permission for it to be added to your website.

So we’ll respect the wish to keep her private thoughts off of UKCIA, which means we can also ignore the totally irrelevant comments Sue made in her defence. A reply was bashed off to this with the clear instruction that a reply from and on behalf of the BBC was required.

Time passed and eventually a second answer came, again from Sue Mitchell but now on behalf of the BBC, and this time it said:

… this response comes from the BBC and it is not appropriate that it is displayed on any website which provides ordering services for seeds, equipment or information aimed at assisting in the cultivation of an illegal substance.

With respect Sue doesn’t have the authority to make such a demand, but in any case UKCIA doesn’t do anything like that anymore, our listing of headshops and the like is long gone and we certainly never encouraged anyone to break any laws and still don’t. But in any case the subject of an official complaint and the reply to it is something the public has a right to know and the BBC – and especially the producer – has no right to prevent being published.

It’s clear from her writing that Sue Mitchell is no fan of cannabis law reform campaigning.

However the reply from Sue Mitchell continued:

The series did not set out to address the question of whether cannabis should be legalised. That is not to say that there isn’t a valid debate in the issues you raise but it does not form part of a series on the Cannabis Trade. Unfortunately the issue of decriminalising cannabis does not enjoy much public support: The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the independent body of experts examining cannabis
classification, commissioned a MORI poll which shows that fewer than 10 per cent of the 1,000 people questioned thought Cannabis should be legalised. The overwhelming response is that Cannabis is rightly criminalised and penalties should remain inforce. Obviously this does not accord with your own view but the Home Office invites comments from all of those in society and if you feel the law is wrong then
there are routes for trying to change it. Drug laws will always involve some of problems you refer to – the prohibition of alcohol caused problems, but also brought health benefits and those issues are debated long and hard by those studying the prohibition years. You could say that with 4,000 British people dying each year through alcohol related liver disease there is a very valid question over its use in society but again, this was not the focus of our series.

As is clear I think, the actual complaint was simply not addressed. It was interesting to see that Sue Mitchell mentioned the results of the MORI poll, which her programme could well have affected the result of. But in any case, what has public opinion got to do with whether the truth should be told or not?

The response was ended with a statement that if I wanted to take then issue further, then I had to write – using paper and snail mail only – to the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU). In this age of electronic communication, they apparently insist on bits of paper! However, a phone call to the BBC complaints unit provided an e-mail address and so the ECU was written to and another complaint made.

Nothing happened for months.

Eventually on the 9th of May – a Friday as usual – a reply to my complaint to the ECU arrived close to 5.00pm from Sean Moss of BBC complaints:

I can advise that our Editorial Complaints Unit have handed your complaint back to BBC Information to handle, for the particular reason that the explanation provided by Sue Williams as the programme producer explained the premise of ‘The Cannabis Trade’ and the reasons for not including the arguments for the legalisation of the drug.

I wonder it this is deliberate? Are the BBC deliberately misrepresenting the complaint? If so for what reason? To recap, the complaint was not that the programme should have put the case for legalisation, simply that it should have explained the cause of the situation it was reporting on – i.e. prohibition. Sorry if this is getting repetitive but it’s getting to be a real head banging on the wall job.

However, perhaps the next thing Sean Moss wrote explains this lack of honesty from the BBC and why the statement above that “the BBC has no overall duty to ensure proper objectivity on the part of its factual programme output” is justified:

Complaints Manager Allison Wilson also made particular reference to the fact that just as news editors are responsible for making decisions about what is or is not included in their bulletins, so producers of factual programmes such as this one must use their editorial discretion to decide the approach that programmes take to the subjects they examine.

In other words, producers like Sue Mitchell are free to present their own biased viewpoints without any checks or balances or a duty to be truly objective because the BBC has no role in ensuring objectivity in it’s “factual” output.

If that’s right – and as the BBC has said it’s the case then it probably is – then it’s hard to see how the BBC can ever be trusted to tell the truth again and “news and current affairs” is now no more than someone’s opinion.

A reply has been sent to the BBC complaints unit, don’t expect anything to happen quickly. In the meantime don’t believe anything you hear on the radio or see on TV, along with stuff you read in the newspapers seems the best advice.