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Broadband, ‘big tech’ and the BBC’s consistent bias

Anti-Labour pundits on TV aren’t who the BBC say they are — or fails to say they are, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

WHEN the TV news wants a “talking head” on Labour’s proposals to nationalise broadband and provide it freely, they turn to two organisations: the Conservative Party and to TechUK.

Everybody can figure out what the Conservative Party is — it is led by the big guy with the blond hair who says bad things sprinkled with big words that often don’t make his message any clearer.

So we can take our choice. We can think that Johnson’s verbosity means he is very clever. We can accept the Tories’ view that a free-to-use nationalised communications system is “broadband communism.”

That is, if we are the kind of people who look at roads and, seeing a freely provided communications system that used to be charged for and run by private corporations, regard it as “road communism.” Which is lighted by “streetlight communism” and serviced by “road-sweeper communism.”

But what of TechUK? The BBC described TechUK as a body “which represents many UK tech firms.” Which is true.

But it might be a bit more helpful if it described it as a trade group “which represents many UK tech firms including BT.”

BT’s Openreach division will be nationalised under Labour, so unsurprisingly, it doesn’t like this plan.

Labour says BT and other broadband providers have been inefficient at installing superfast broadband, so we are way behind other nations for providing full-fibre internet connections.

They’ve had subsidies and semi-monopoly positions. The — very imperfect — competition has led to high prices and a weak network. So nationalisation is the answer for the country, but not BT.

It is worth understanding that TechUK is the trade body for “tech” firms, but it is inevitably dominated by “big tech,” including BT.

You can see how important the telecoms giants are from TechUK’s actual name: it is legally called the “Information Technology, Telecommunications and Electronics Association.” TechUK is just the trading name.

Looking at the lobby group, you see two features — the important role of BT and the close links to the government.

So Alex Towers, the director of policy and public affairs for the BT group, has a prominent position on the TechUK board.

Before becoming BT’s top spin doctor and its representative on the TechUK board, Towers was, up to 2008, a senior civil servant at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, including time as private secretary to the secretary of state.

BT has the money to buy people with direct experience of the government department that regulates them.

TechUK’s “director of markets,” Matthew Evans, was one of the lobby groups leading talking heads called on to denounce Labour’s proposal.

Evans’s views on “why Labour’s telecoms proposals would damage the sector” were promoted by TechUK.

Evans has been in the tech lobbying business for some years, but back in 2010-11 he began his career as a parliamentary researcher for Jeremy Hunt.

So again, the lobby group has somebody who is close to the government — and close to the governing party that opposes Labour’s plan.

The BBC could improve public understanding by just adding two words — TechUK is a trade group representing tech firms — including BT.

It could also note that TechUK did not consult its members before making repeated attacks on Labour’s policy, a decision that was made by its executive.

At least one member firm raised this with Evans, asking: “Is it usual for the leader of a membership organisation to make political comments on behalf of that membership organisation without consulting the members?”

It may well be that the majority of TechUK members would object to Labour’s proposal. But there may also be other tech firms — those that rely on, rather than supply broadband — that would welcome it, or could work with it.

This is another area underexplored by the media in commenting on the broadband proposals. They asked the big firms with slick lobbying operations that supply broadband what they think but did little to ask the customers who use it about their attitude.

And there have been some more bizarre misnamings by the BBC around the election. At the end of October Newsnight had a panel of three “pundits” to discuss the election.

One of them, Kulveer Ranger, was introduced as someone who “formerly worked for Boris Johnson.”

However, Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark did not identify Ranger for who he is now: Ranger is “senior vice-president of strategy and communications for Atos.” Ranger was misidentified.

The audience deserved to know he is head spin doctor for Atos, a firm very widely criticised for its disability testing contracts, for profiteering from poor treatment of the disabled.

Ranger attacked Labour on Newsnight for “class warfare, social warfare, economic warfare.” Had viewers known he was an Atos spin doctor, this would have had a completely different context.

Wark also identified the second pundit as “James Morris, former Labour pollster.” This gives the impression he is a sympathetic Labour commentator. A brief screen message gave Morris’s true job: “managing director, Edelman” — but without any further explanation.

Most viewers would have no sense of what this means: viewers deserve to know that Morris is the boss of Edelman and that this is a lobbying firm that represents companies including water privatisers (Water UK, Severn Trent, United Utilities and others), privatisation specialist Amey, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, Coca-Cola and so forth.

So once again the inherent bias of a panel was disguised and the audience misinformed. This seems like the opposite of news reporting, or the BBC’s “mission to explain.”

In a similar fashion, Iain Anderson was a panellist on a recent edition of BBC’s Question Time. He was identified as “businessman and chief executive of the PR group Cicero.” Later in the programme he was identified as simply “businessman.”

But Cicero is not just a PR firm. It is a registered lobbyist, out to change government policy. It specialises in representing banks and City institutions.

Again, just a few more words — “Iain Anderson, chief executive of Ciciero, a firm that lobbies for banks” would have given the audience and viewers a better idea of what was going on.

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