Mediatised fascism

Over a week ago the BBC announced that it would host Nick Griffin (leader of the BNP, British National Party) on its program Question Time. The reason for doing this, according to a BBC spokesman, is that:

"the BBC is obliged to treat all political parties registered with the Electoral Commission and operating within the law with due impartiality. By winning representation in the European parliament, the BNP has demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level. This will be reflected in the amount of coverage it receives on BBC programmes such as Question Time."

This, however, should not be accepted. The BBC has already given the BNP coverage way beyond any arguable obligations, and it started doing so long before the BNP had demonstrated any 'national support' (it should be noted that actually the number of votes they received this time went down). There is absolutely no obligation on them to host Griffin on Question Time. This is not about the law, representative coverage, free speech or anything of that kind - although if the BBC wants to cite those points, the BNP is lawless, opposed to free speech and doesn't believe in representation of any group its Nazi ideology deems fit for persecution. The legality of such a political party is actually quite debatable. It does not permit non-white people to join the party and therefore practices racial discrimination. Griffin, in a carefully coded statement evoking the famous 'fourteen words' of white supremacist ideology, has suggested that the BNP may have to adapt to the law but will still seek "to secure a future for the true children of our islands".

On the other hand, part of the BBC's normative rationale for hosting fascist propaganda is that it must be fair and impartial, and must faithfully represent all points of view. Few readers of this blog will believe for a second that the BBC is non-biased, or that it represents all points of view fairly. The BBC has an institutional bias toward power, as we have seen demonstrated in surveys concerning its coverage of Iraq and Israel-Palestine. It has a similar bias over class issues, and is instinctively hostile to strikers, protesters, environmentalists, anticapitalists, the left, etc. That hostility also extends to antifascists. Take for example the coverage of the massive Welling protest in 1993, which was brutally attacked by police. The BBC in this case sought to vilify the protesters and to imply that they were violent and disruptive.

So, to put it plainly, what the BBC is doing is offering fascism a great opportunity to advertise itself, which is certainly in agreement with its policy of being against any left-wing movement. Furthermore, I'm sure Griffin is delighted by the amount of expectation that his appearance on QT has managed to create and how he has managed to attract not only the general public's attention, but also the government's. Gordon Brown has suggested the justice secretary, Jack Straw, or the communities secretary, John Denham, to appear alongside the BNP leader on Question Time. The Conservatives have also said they will put up a senior figure for the programme and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said he would be likely to field its home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, to take part.

To conclude, this is a further example of how the media behaves in our modern society. What the BBC is doing with the BNP is done everyday on a smaller basis by other mainstream media worldwide, perhaps not so blatantly. If you look closely enough, you can notice how the press choose very carefully what they tell and how they tell it and that, in the end, is another form of mediatised fascism.