Reading Quentin de la Bédoyère’s manual on “how to win an argument about abortion” in these pages last month took me back to a time when I tried to do just that in the hostile surroundings of a BBC newsroom.
For 25 years I was a BBC reporter. I worked for many different outlets – The Money Programme, Breakfast News, general news output – but I ended my career on the Today programme. And it was there that my attempts to reconcile the needs of conscience with my professional duties reached some sort of climax.
I say “the needs of conscience”, by which I mean that as a journalist and a Catholic, I wanted to “tell the truth”. The BBC claims to do that every day – and in many ways it generally succeeds – but the corporation’s underlying “truth” rarely accords with Catholic teaching.
One area where the deviation is glaring is on the issue of abortion. I had been aware of the BBC’s entrenched bias on the subject for years, but it was only at Today that I had an opportunity to do some small thing to redress the balance. I had come to Today by invitation of the then editor Rod Liddle. Nowadays he is feted as an acerbic columnist on the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Back then (this was the early Noughties) he was unknown to the public, though making considerable waves within the BBC.
There are many things one could say about Rod, not all of them complimentary, but he was an excellent editor. Working as a BBC reporter, I had over the years become accustomed to working for a succession of risk-averse ciphers. The clammy fog of liberal political correctness enveloped most of the programmes I worked on and I became thoroughly disenchanted with it. Uncharitably, I used to complain that the BBC had a secret breeding programme for invertebrate editors – editors, that is, without backbone.
The consequences of this were (and are) greatly to be deplored. By corralling its news coverage within a tightly defined range of permissible opinions the BBC excludes and marginalises other points of view. This means that a full and truthful debate is often prevented and led, in my case, to an eventual break with the corporation. It is also, of course, explicitly not what the BBC is supposed to do according to its Royal Charter.
Nowhere is the boundary of what one is permitted to say more tightly policed than on any subject which touches on feminist issues – and the most sacred of all is abortion. Which brings me back to Rod Liddle, because my good opinion of him as an editor was based on his absolute belief that no story, view or opinion should be out of bounds.
He worked on the principle that if a story was good enough it could and should be aired – even (sometimes especially) if it offended against the liberal group-think that pervades the BBC. Which is why I badgered him to let me do some stories about the abortion debate in America.
He wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea – I remember him mocking me for my interest in the rights of the unborn – but under him mockery was par for the course. If you made a strong case, you could – almost always – bring him round to letting you pursue an idea as long as the journalism was sound.
So it was that I packed my bags and went off and did a series of pieces – three in all – about the then state of the abortion debate in the US. I ranged far and wide: I interviewed groups which almost certainly had never graced the BBC’s airwaves before (or since), such as Democrats for Life. I interviewed the original Jane Roe (real name Norma McCorvey) down in Texas – the woman whose case became the landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that established the legality of abortion in the US in the infamous Roe v Wade ruling. As is well known, she now bitterly regrets her original decision to have an abortion, has converted to Catholicism and is active in the pro-life movement. I devoted one piece to the medical consequences of abortion – a topic which is particularly neuralgic for feminists.
I like to think they were decent pieces of journalism. They were “balanced” according to BBC guidelines in that the pro-abortion people had their say too. But for me the point was that the pro-life arguments got a proper hearing.
There was some listener reaction (I got a letter from a GP in the North West who said many of her female patients had suffered adverse psychological and physical side-effects after abortions). I also had a fierce argument with two very angry women colleagues who were outraged that dissident viewpoints on the subject should be aired at all. And after that? Nothing much really.
Which brings me to my point: what the Church faces in the abortion debate is the adamantine refusal of the liberal media to engage. The long campaign to legalise abortion, which culminated in the 1967 Act, effectively ended the debate in the UK (unlike in the US, where Roe v Wade is still hotly discussed). After that date the liberals simply pocketed the gain and moved on to fight other battles in the Kulturkampf.
Effectively, the BBC closed down the debate on the substantive moral issue raised by abortion. Now you are only likely to hear the subject mentioned in relation to the restriction of access to abortion either in Northern Ireland, some American states or some Catholic countries.
What is true of the BBC is true also of the rest of the mainstream media. The Murdoch press, the Guardian and the rest of them have all made “abortion rights” a sacrosanct issue. Abortion on demand has been cemented into the bedrock of liberal dogma. There is no real debate on the issue, and that is the problem the pro-life movement faces. One can engage in private, one-to-one debates and that, of course, is valuable and necessary, but in truth no public debate exists.
Meanwhile, BBC liberals have moved the battle on to other ground – there is, for instance, the ongoing campaign to allow euthanasia, whose proponents always seem to get a sympathetic hearing from editors and interviewers.
So how, without vigorous public debate, can the argument on abortion be won?
First, as Catholics, I suggest we have to be clear-eyed about the BBC and understand that it is actively hostile to many Church teachings. When I got my pieces on the US abortion debate aired, I wasn’t naive enough to think that would change anything fundamental. Journalism – especially radio journalism – is ephemeral. Yes, I think I won a small battle, but from today’s vantage point it looks as though the wider war has been lost.
But I don’t think we should give up all hope that one day the BBC – and other media – can be forced to engage with the moral issue of abortion again. A serious moral issue doesn’t cease to be so just because people choose to ignore it: the question goes on nagging away.
The fact that the BBC and others determinedly prevent debate I take as evidence of an underlying nervousness on their part. They won’t let the issue become topical again because the status quo is entirely to their liking: they could only lose by opening up the moral debate again.
But even the BBC can sometimes be forced to change tack and be made to act more in accordance with its much-trumpeted claim to be even-handed. An example is the European question. Back in the 1980s, throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, Euroscepticism got a raw deal from the corporation. The sceptics were ruthlessly marginalised, their arguments misrepresented, their champions openly mocked. That changed because of a determined campaign led by Lord Pearson of Rannoch (one of Ukip’s few peers) who devoted considerable time, energy and money to research which proved that the BBC’s coverage was, indeed, biased against the sceptics.
It took time but eventually the BBC was forced to concede the point and coverage of the issue became gradually more balanced. The culmination was this year’s referendum coverage, which I thought was exemplary in its balance and fairness. So, you see, it can be done.
What is needed is a consistent, co-ordinated campaign which forces the BBC to recognise its failure to deliver a fair debate on abortion. It would need some money and a lot of determination, but if, for instance, every time the BBC transgressed its own rules on fairness relating to the abortion debate it received well-researched complaints the liberal supertanker might begin to alter course.
The BBC hates complaints. It tries to ignore them, but if they are persisted with an internal investigation is triggered. This is time-consuming and vexatious for editors and programme makers and might, at the least, make them think twice. The actual mechanics of such a campaign would be quite simple – but also quite onerous. It would require careful monitoring of BBC output and each broadcast item would then be held up to close scrutiny: were both sides fairly represented? Did they get equal time? Were interviewees treated even-handedly? If not – and in my experience the BBC usually fails all these tests when it comes to abortion – there would be the basis for a properly documented complaint.
And so, returning to the original question of how to win the argument about abortion, the first thing to say is that we cannot win a non-existent debate. The first objective must be to try to re-open the national debate. The BBC is in a unique position here. Not only is it the gatekeeper of any national debate (if the BBC isn’t talking about a subject it isn’t on “the agenda”), but it is also vulnerable in a way that other media are not, because of its statutory duty to be fair and even-handed.
The task, then, is simply stated but immensely difficult: it is to confront the BBC with compelling evidence that it is failing in its duty of fairness on the question of abortion. If that could be achieved, a renewed debate would give us the opportunity to remind the nation that the moral issues raised by mass abortion have not gone away simply because liberals don’t want to talk about it.
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Britain’s Abortion Act: the best way of marking that doleful anniversary would be to force abortion back on to the nation’s agenda.
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