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Nation•Cymru A news service by the people of Wales, for the people of Wales.

Opinion

Nick Robinson is wrong – alternative news sites have an important role to play

By NationCymru
Nick Robinson. Picture by Tom Page (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Ifan Morgan Jones

BBC Radio 4 presenter Nick Robinson is quoted in the Guardian today bemoaning alternative media such as Wings Over Scotland, the Canary and Westmonster.

These alternative news sites are waging a “guerrilla war” against the BBC and undermining the public’s faith in their national broadcaster, he says.

Perhaps Nation.Cymru would also make it onto the list of ‘alternative news sites’. Last month the BBC’s Welsh Affairs editor indicated that he considered this site and Wings Over Scotland to be birds of a feather.

I agree with some of Nick Robinson’s criticism of these sites. They are overtly political in many ways and often go to much greater lengths than the BBC to bend the truth to serve their agenda.

The Canary’s ongoing war against BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg is a good example of this.

However, if the public is becoming more critical in their analysis on news from the ‘mainstream’ media, that’s no bad thing.

The problem is when they begin to swallow news provided by other alternative news sources, be they the Canary, Wings Over Scotland or Breitbart news, with the same credulity.

Nation.Cymru exists to provide a perspective which is currently lacking in English language online news – a national Welsh perspective.

However, the aim is to expand the Welsh public sphere, not to raise an army of blinkered followers who get all their opinions from Nation.Cymru.

In the age of digital journalism, most news sites are inevitably going to cater for niche tastes. To get all your news from any one narrow perspective is unhealthy.

As it is, sites like the Canary and Wings Over Scotland play an important role, which is to point out that there is nothing inevitable about the political status quo.

The BBC is deeply embedded within the British nation-state because it’s dependent on the institutions of that nation-state for its information.

It’s ‘biased’ insofar as one of the most centralised nation-states in Europe has created a national public service broadcaster that is just as centralised.

The BBC can’t help but reinforce the status quo because it's largely dependent on those in charge to shape the daily narrative.

Inevitable

‘Impartiality’ and ‘bias’ are worthless concepts when what you’re dealing with are systems that are man-made.

‘Impartiality’ just means looking at what those in power are saying and presenting a case that’s somewhere in the middle.

For instance, Brexit was largely presented as an argument between old Bullingdon Club mates David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

What the BBC generally doesn’t do is ask the question ‘why are these people in power and why are we listening to them and not others?’

What alternative news sites do is say ‘hang on, there’s nothing actually inevitable about the current political order’.

Accident of history

The conflict between Wings Over Scotland and the BBC is a good example of this dynamic at work.

The BBC were ‘biased’ during the Independence Referendum campaign, but not because the organisation had an implicit agenda.

They were biased because journalists amass like insects drawn to by light around institutions that produce news – even if they’re mostly soap-opera-like pseudo-events.

Most of the BBC's top political journalists are inevitably London-based because that's where the news is. As a result, their analysis is inevitably skewed by a small collection of London-based politicians.

Sites like Wings Over Scotland point out that there’s no good reason why Britain’s political firmament is the way it is. It’s just like that because it’s like that, an accident of history, and there’s no good reason not to change it.

This brings it into inevitable conflict with the BBC because while WoS points out that the Emperor has no Clothes, the BBC’s first instinct is to ask the Emperor’s tailor for comment.

Fact-check

I’m in Brussels today and will be speaking later at a conference at the European Parliament on stateless nations and the media.

There is a big contingent of Catalonian journalists here and one explained to me that his primary job every day is to write an op-ed column for the main Catalan paper fact-checking the Spanish press.

It’s interesting to see that, even in a country that is at the cusp of independence, with a very well-developed media, that journalists play a very similar role to Wings Over Scotland and Nation.Cymru.

That is, to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. And, on top of that, why is he Emperor in the first place?

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14 comments

marcvjones

The BBC isn't very good at accepting it isn't the font of all wisdom. What was notable in Robinson's list was the omission of any of the right-wing sites that have consistently attacked the BBC for left-wing bias. Guido Fawkes being the most obvious example. My problem with the likes of The Canary is just poor journalism - the latest cock-up re its Laura Kuennsberg story being a good example.

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kim erswell

I've always found, Robinson to be smug superior journalist and its because of people like him millions of people worldwide are turning to alt-media. But more than that the advent of the internet and alternative voices has allowed people to access information for themselves. No longer do we have to have it filtered, interpreted by gatekeepers like the BBC, Sky, or print MSM, etc. Absolutely not: We can now source material ourselves and come to our own conclusions. Infact, we can hear from myriads of indepenent journalists, citizen journalists, in fact anyone with a voice can speak , unshackled by government interference or political ideoligies, from every corner of the globe. For instance, I don't have to have the BBC telling me what's going on in, Catalonia or elsewhere, through their news reports or experts because I can speak to individuals, friends for instance via Skype and ask them myself. I can come to conclusions based on information formed by my own understanding...Good Lord, I can even hop on a cheap flight to, Barcelona today and ask people face to face "Ola, que pasa!" . Sites, like Nation Cymru, Breitbart, The Drudge Report, The Daily Caller - the list goes on for ever - are revolutionizing our window to this planet. Non of which we have to follow with credulity. Just like we don't have to read the, Sun, Times, Express, Guardian, Mail... God, no! Others, like the Beeb are dinosours who aren't adapting to the electronic evolutionary change engulfing them and in my opinion will fail in their laughable attempt to put the cork back in the bottle. Fat chance...millions of people have tasted freedom and are turning away from the fossils.

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Dafis

Robinson is ultra-smug and this kind of outburst from him only serves to confirm his immense belief in his own superiority and the institution that employs him. He may buzz off back to ITV for bigger bucks in due course, though I doubt it, as he epitomises that institutional elitism that enjoys telling us how things should be. There are plenty of others like him, Ms Kuensberg being not far off the pace in irritating both interviewees and viewers, and many others aspiring their way up the league table of persons that make you want to chuck a brick at the TV !!!. Many of these creeps come out of the same incestuous community as our politicians - all professional sound bite manufacturers all trying to outdo each other in displays of clever word play while the real issues get ignored.

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Dafydd ap Gwilym

Robinson is a right wing activist who started with the young concervatives and worked his way, with a leg up into a position of influencing the BBC News in favour of the right! Simple as that, if you see him you have shoes!!!

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The Bellwether

Sorry but I don't think attacking the BBC is a worthwhile activity as on the whole they do and can afford to do a very good job no matter how irritating some of their content, bias, presenters and editors are. A more productive campaign would be to get sufficient funding for sites like this and others to be able to function better and to pay for professional (alternative?) news gathering. Media and journalism costs money. Perhaps a more co-operative approach needs to be taken as many of these so-called alternative news sites are often at loggerheads with each other as well as the msm. Perhaps more use needs to be made of news agencies like Reuters and Bloomberg but again that costs alot of money. The key seems to be to have a good editorial team, excellent columnists and an informed and influential commentariat. This is what attracts users.

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nosuchthingasthemarket

The sheer wrongness of this article is astonishing. Let's start with the links. Even though the discussion is supposedly about alternative media, the only links provided are to sites and journalists who unquestionably represent mainstream media. The Guardian, the New Statesman and Twitter provide your entire evidence base. It's almost as if you don't consider alternative sources of information quite legitimate. And all three journalists who you invite your reader to link to are employed, prominently, by the BBC. Perhaps failing to give links to anyone except high-ranking BBC journalists was a careless oversight. We'll move on. Laura Kuenssberg. The evidence you provide as to the Canary's bias and motivation is a commentary in the New Statesman published yesterday, about a story that started - at the latest - the night before. The New Statesman story attempts to wash away the fact that Kuenssberg has, according to the BBC Trust, deliberately misled the public in a way which is biased against Jeremy Corbyn. (Apparently the BBC gets complaints all the time, and that's only to be expected because so very many people listen to it). And that the BBC itself failed to act upon the judgements of the BBC Trust except to defend Laura Kuenssberg. But this isn't just any complaint. A BBC journalist in a prominent position knowingly sought to manufacture a falsehood about the leader of the opposition relating to terrorism. And the BBC backed her in doing so. The Canary article which the New Statesman uses as the pretext for yesterday's attack piece was founded on a piece of genuine information - that Laura Kuenssberg was an 'invited speaker' at a Conservative Conference fringe event, along with Iain Duncan Smith. Actually, this does indicate an uncomfortable closeness, contrary to what we are invited to believe by Nick Robinson or his co-workers. Organisations that publish 'invited speaker' lists usually have a reasonable expectation that the invitee could turn up, and would at least want to. And the casual interplay between 'establishment' journalists and the largest political parties is a serious cause for complaint, which alternative media sites are entirely right to flag. Helen Lewis breezily suggests that: "left-wing journalists speak at Tory Party conference - and vice versa". As someone on the left, I'd like that to stop happening. And as a Welsh nationalist, I'd like it if there were other dimensions to the "vice versa" in the BBC / Guardian / New Statesman universe than just left and Tory. Talking of which... You assert, without links or evidence, that the BBC's 'bias' during the Scottish referendum campaign was solely due to the culture of political journalists, and their tendency to move in herds to wherever 'the news is'. It's not their fault, you tell us, despite having just demonstrated that their definition of 'news' is bizarrely narrow. But there's been enough evidence - over an entire generation - to keep the Glasgow Media Group producing regular and solid quantitative data about right-wing, Conservative and employer-representative dominance of the media. This gives the lie to your contention about reporting being shaped around a 'small contingent of London-based politicians' - the same biases can be observed in outside broadcasts in the context of the miners' strikes, in coverage of Hillsborough, and in BBC Scotland's broadcasts from Pacific Quays. These are not dumb journalists acting unconsciously within constraints they are too stupid to be aware of, they are intelligent political actors working knowingly to further a particular set of interests. And getting paid well for it. The broad awareness of this explains much of the venal hatred felt by many small-nation nationalists and many socialists towards the BBC - and especially to the person in charge of its political coverage. You equate the Canary and Wings Over Scotland with Breitbart. That's a bit sick. Really. You claim 'impartiality' and bias' are worthless concepts. Yet you conclude by suggesting that fact-checking is a worthwhile exercise, and may be the entire point of an 'independent media'. That's daft. If facts are regularly manipulated, falsified or suppressed in line with a given viewpoint, then there is bias. If a consistent bias is disguised as 'impartiality', that's bias of a more egregious sort. More worrying, however, is that you seem content - even in imagining the very eve of Welsh independence, for alternative media outlets such as nation.cymru to serve as little more than an unpaid fact-checking service for the BBC. That is a serious poverty of ambition.

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Ken Barker

A focus on Welsh news and opinion, both English and Welsh language, would help address the media deficit in Wales.

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Tame Frontiersman

“The Media Show”, episode “What’s wrong with the BBC”, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 16:30-17:00, Wednesday 27th September 2017” is worth a listen. Mr. Robinson is a contributor. Something Piers Morgan said on the programme about clauses in employment contracts for journalist struck me as significant. This relates to an expectation by employers that journalist will develop and maintain a social media presence. The purpose of this is to feed followers into MSM. One assumes that in a competitive market place, the journalists most in demand will be those with the biggest following –and that may have absolutely nothing to do with high journalistic standards. Has anyone else picked up on reports that columnist and broadcaster Katie Hopkins, someone who has gained a following courting controversy, is being booked to give talks to young people in Welsh schools? Will celebrities like Piers Morgan and Katie Hopkins be the successors of MSM? Can alternative news sites compete with celebrity? Is the very proliferation of alternative news sites in itself problematic? Nation Cymru is trying to fill a gap, and a very large gap at that, in Welsh media. I admire Ifan Morgan Jones’ initiative. But essentially this website and the many like it follow the same format as print newspapers: news items and opinion pieces, letters to the editor. What is necessary for informed engagement of citizens with the increasingly complex issues that face Wales and the world are smart, adaptive sites that can provide threads and slices by meta- analysis of news feeds, stuff on other sites, on-line reports and studies, data, legislation, criticism and analysis etc. without either the need to browse or suffer overload. But that requires money!

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Dafydd Thomas

Excellent, thank goodness there is an outlet to take news programmes such as Newsnight to task for their bad journalism, as it was called by Huw Edwards re the programme on the Welsh language after the narrow English nationalist propoganda.

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Trailerboy

This is unusually thought provoking and that's to be welcomed - thanks. History has documented the agricultural and industrial revolutions and ever since we have been trying to make up new ones, that haven't really stuck - technology revolutions, that history may regard as mere steps towards what may be about to happen. Something is changing, changing globally and I can't quite put my finger on it.

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CapM

From the Guardian article - "In the talk he [Nick Robinson] will call on the BBC to do more to engage with people disillusioned with news bulletins and who instead get their news from social media." I'm not sure how the BBC is going to lure back the "disillusioned" unless it includes in it's broadcasts news stories carried by social media and invites comment from those running those sites. The BBC is forever bringing the public's attention to stories that are carried by the Daily Mail, Guardian et al and gives a platform to editors and journalists working for these papers on everything from its flagship political programmes to comedy productions. The BBC cannot seriously claim that it considers the Daily Mail, Guardian et al to be unbiased and have no agenda. Therefore it can't claim that it has to exclude social media news sources because it thinks they do. To be at all honest the BBC either has to include input from social media, in addition to what it gets from the traditional press or exclude input from both.

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Roger Harris

Yeh ex President of the Oxford Conservative Association. I wonder why he says this.

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Rob

Yeah. He used to be a political activist. The BBC should commit to only employing as senior political correspondents those that have shown no previous interest in politics.

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nosuchthingasthemarket

Obviously Rob, that's intended ironically. But there's the germ of a very good idea in it. The BBC, as a high-profile employer with a vast pool of potential recruits, has the means to weed out and reject journalism applicants who have shown a clear and career-building interest in party politics. In fact, it has the power to demand that all its potential political journalists have made, and keep making, a lifetime commitment to seek truth and objectivity ahead of party, organisation or personal interests. If it wants to regain the reputation it once held (I think undeservedly, but that's another discussion) then it needs to look for untouchables, rather than apparatchiks. No, I don't think they'll do that either. That's the point.

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The sheer wrongness of this article is astonishing. Let's start with the links. Even though the discussion is supposedly about alternative media, the only links provided are to sites and journalists who unquestionably represent mainstre...

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