Don’t trust the BBC on America

Others have already written about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, and the growing controversy around the apparent refusal of major international news outlets to cover the story. The race of the perpetrator, the refugee status of the victim, and the complete lack of any provocation or justification for the perpetrator’s behavior mean that the story is effectively untouchable for any prestige outlet in the United States. 

At the time of writing (Monday, just before lunch BST), the BBC News website has not published a single word about the story. It is very difficult to be certain, because the BBC News website publishes so much, every single day, that it is almost impossible to say for sure which issues they have and have not addressed. But search results for Iryna Zarutska’s name, for North Carolina and for “Charlotte”, the location of the murder, do not return any relevant results. I suspect they will have been forced to publish something by close-of-business today, but they avoided doing so as the matter of non-coverage became subject to increasing controversy all through the weekend. 

We can rule out a lack of journalistic capacity, here. Multiple pieces had been published over the previous 48 hours about Australia’s “mushroom murderer”, and a single raid by US immigration enforcement on a Hyundai plant. Given the morbid fascination the BBC usually holds for any killing which includes an angle on American race politics, and its obsession with the United States generally, we can assume that this is a conscious omission. 

The subject of BBC bias is a perennial one in British politics, and indeed, the sense that it is constantly being monitored for signs of impartiality informs a lot of its editorial positions. In terms of its website, it does often seem that quantity is prized over quality, occasionally resulting in odd things being published, especially when it effectively reproduces the publicity material of campaign groups. But whatever else one may accuse them of, I do not believe for one moment they would even think of engaging in such jaw-dropping selective omission about a similar story if it took place in this country, or for that matter anywhere other than in America. 

Certainly, one can imagine the BBC attempting to “de-toxify” the story, by downplaying aspects of it that reflected poorly on the prevailing political consensus. They would not wish to inflame community tensions, after all. If the Rape Gang scandal tells us anything, meanwhile, it’s that their local reporters would not go out hunting for such stories. But a case like this, which has well and truly escaped containment, amplified by one of the most famous men on earth on his own social platform, and in which the suppression of the story had already become a story in its own right — there is not a chance they would think that just ignoring it entirely were a reasonable or credible way to proceed. 

So, why do they think that is acceptable in America? Especially given the huge importance the BBC normally places on American affairs.  

In truth, I suspect they know that this is not sustainable, but they feel that they are left with very little option given the position they aspire to occupy in American public life, and the way that the media now operates in that country. The extent to which the American information environment has fractured into two completely distinct moral dimensions is almost beyond comprehension, even in a country with as confrontational a political tradition as Britain’s. In fact, it is this confrontation that has almost been abandoned in America, with the two opposing camps simply reporting their own facts to their own siloed consumers. This means that reporters can get away with startling dishonesty, especially in what they don’t report; they can simply ignore it when hostile media point it out, as their readers or viewers don’t pay the other side any attention.  

Both sides of the American culture wars are guilty of this kind of thing, but there is something about the degree of institutional authority that American progressives have grown accustomed to wielding that makes them more liable than their opponents to behave in this way. We saw this with the steady deterioration of President Biden’s cognitive status during his presidency, in which something that everyone in the world could see happening quite obviously was rendered unnoticeable in polite circles. As a demonstration of brute political force it was impressive, even though it was always going to backfire as horrendously as it did. Though they are losing political and institutional control, they are still the tribe that has the power to just make things go away. 

In most countries, foreign media wouldn’t feel the need to join with this charade, and would report what was going on free of the tribal blinkers or self-censorship of the domestic press.  Though in most countries, the foreign press would be writing for a foreign audience. America is different, though, and the BBC in particular guards its own status in the US media hierarchy jealously. In particular, well educated, Blue-state America still regards the BBC as the platonic ideal of impartial, prestige reporting.  And the BBC wouldn’t want to do anything to damage its reputation for impartiality, especially among their peers in liberal-leaning US broadcast media, by reporting anything those people didn’t want to hear.  

As far as this story goes, the dam is going to break soon, and the BBC I am sure will publish suitably hand-wringing features about the non-coverage of the case — with the appropriate framing about how everyone was worried about not playing into the divisive rhetoric of Elon Musk or Donald Trump. 

Media of all ideological stripes in Britain are kept relatively honest by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the public wants to be told something roughly approximating the truth. Perhaps we may want it sugar-coated to fit our priors, and we are receptive to analysis that reinforces our pre-conceived view of the world. But no normal person in this country yet wants the basic facts of a story to be completely hidden from them, and they will react very poorly toward any outlet that tries to do that, even if it’s exposed by their ideological antagonists. 

In America, enough people have concluded that the other side just lies, and that their own side must be allowed to get away with the same if they are to remain politically competitive. 

American partisanship seems to have contrived itself into the old Russian distinction between pravda and istina

Much has been made of the role of Russia in the “disinformation” wars, but modern American partisanship seems to have contrived itself into the old Russian distinction between pravda and istina — the distinction between “truth” as a normative value judgement and “truth” as epistemological reality. This is a view of the world in which a “fact” exists only insofar as it serves the interests of one side of an argument or another, and in which objective reality is at best a naive irrelevance, and at worst a sign of ideological deficiency. 

The BBC ought to be the most critical national institution holding together the sense of a shared, bipartisan information space in Britain. Instead, the Corporation seems to place its network of relationships with American colleagues above its duty to impartiality, and appears ready to guide British journalism down the path toward US-style polarisation.