There are exactly two ways of looking at the scandal which has led to the resignation of the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
One one hand, Tim Davie resigned his position as head of the BBC because the BBC was caught engaged in the most egregious kind of fake news and misrepresentation: Editing a politicians’ words (in this case, those of Donald Trump) to make it sound as if that politician had incited violence when he did not. It is a simple, open and shut case.
Or on the other hand, the now-unlikely ever to be Sir Tim resigned because meanie right wingers in the Daily Telegraph and other publications are looking for any opportunity to “pounce” on “errors” in order to de-legitimise “public service broadcasting”.
I could let you guess in which direction the Irish media went. Or I could just quote the sole opinion-editorial published by The Irish Times on the matter, which was borrowed, as is that paper’s way, from the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom:
“Prescott accused the corporation of “serious and systemic” bias in its editorial coverage. Perhaps predictably, parts of the right immediately leapt on the report.
Boris Johnson told the Telegraph that Davie “must either explain or resign”. The Tory party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said “heads should roll”.
The story was picked up in the US, where the White House described the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.
Senior BBC insiders were dismayed.
Aware of the crucial role the corporation plays in national life, they have admitted to genuine concern about the proclivity for big editorial errors. But they have also had deeper fears: that the attacks are part of an ongoing political and ideological campaign by those who want to undermine the organisation.”
It’s amazing how this works, isn’t it? When journalists “hold politicians to account” the theory is that by doing so, they are serving the public by making bad behaviour less likely. Yet when media organisations are exposed for their own acts of unaccountable wrongdoing, it is “part of an ongoing political and ideological campaign” to undermine journalism.
Anyway, back to first principles: Why did the BBC edit Donald Trump in the way that they did? The answer is that they wanted to tell a particular story (Donald Trump caused the January 6th riots) and in order to tell that story they needed the facts to fit the story, so they changed the facts. That is what happened.
Of course, the people who did this firmly believed that they were serving truth. This is a really important point: To their minds, Donald Trump did cause the January 6th riots, and therefore simply changing his words was not so much “dishonest” as it was a case of simplifying the facts in order to tell the story better. This is a narrative technique used in fiction – “based on a true story” movies do it all the time. The idea is to tell the story in a way that is easiest for the audience to follow, by changing around some of the facts. So long as it is declared (in fictionalised “based on” movies and shows) it is generally regarded as sound.
This is the thing that separates the mainstream media from the rest of us: When the mainstream media lies to us, it is because they believe they are telling us a “larger truth”. So in the case of the BBC, it manipulates facts to present Donald Trump as the author of the January 6th rioting because to their mind he was the author of the January 6th rioting. And when the media downplays crimes from a certain demographic, it is to present us with the larger truth that all demographics commit crimes, and so on.
That this is the dictionary definition of misinformation when it comes from anybody else is besides the point: The point is not what the truth is, it is who the arbiters of truth are. The mainstream media consider themselves to be the final deciders of what is true and what is not true, and therefore get very angry when anyone else does it. Once you understand “misinformation and disinformation” not as concerns about truth and more about concerns about social hierarchy, the whole thing makes much more sense.
This is because in a world where the media are no longer the sole arbiters of truth, there is not much need for a media at all. And this is an industry already in peril: There’s no such thing as “independent media” in Ireland any more because every last one of them (bar Gript) is actually “dependent” media, entirely dependent on Government subsidy to survive.
How do they justify those subsidies? By pretending that their societal function – arbitrating truth – cannot be farmed out to anyone else, most especially not the general public. And so we must all abide by the myth that the BBC and the Irish Times are better people and more qualified to discern truth than the rest of us.
Of course, they are not: They are organisations staffed by flawed and partisan human beings who in some cases think it is all right to lie about Donald Trump to convey a larger truth about Donald Trump. They are no different, these people, to the worst partisan slop-merchants on social media.
The misinformation is coming from inside the house.