The BBC’s fixation on ‘balance’ skews the truth

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian

As any young Earth creationist will confirm, the BBC occasionally fails in its objective of due impartiality. Only last week, it reported on a fossil find in Greenland, without bothering to balance this with a contribution from a fundamentalist Christian, such as Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence.

If the US might seem like a long way to go for comment, the BBC’s referendum coverage demonstrated that, when balance is at stake, a contributor’s passion can be quite as compelling a qualification as his or her expertise, reputation or, even, connection with the subject under discussion. Moreover, Pence has a long acquaintance with creationism.

It was never clear, at least to this listener, why Steve Hilton, a US resident who once fell out with the last prime minister, became one of the anti-EU stars of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, to the point of assisting with analysis on referendum night. But in line with BBC impartiality guidelines that are enforced, arguably to the point of misrepresentation, when the corporation feels threatened, he was no doubt balanced by a yet more embittered – but pro-Remain – ex-Cameron adviser with a similarly touristic stake in the outcome.

To be fair to Mr Hilton, he could hardly be blamed for embracing a dazzling career in EU punditry when the BBC pressed it upon him, nor was his inexplicable prominence the most bizarre or regrettable aspect of the coverage which, according to polling by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), played the biggest part in the referendum in keeping the British public informed. Throughout a debate the ERS describes as “dire”, the BBC was the source of information most commonly cited as important. The final level of public understanding, after a four-month campaign, is well illustrated, says its new report, by the great spike on 24 June in the number of people googling “What is the EU?” “We would argue,” say the authors, “that the levels of knowledge reported by members of the public were too low throughout.” This, despite demonstrably high levels of public interest and lavish airtime for the individuals they describe as “big beasts”.

Among their recommendations for better informed plebiscites, as referendums become more commonplace, are longer campaign periods and an independent body empowered to correct misleading statements such as the untruth – holy writ according to Gisela Stuart, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – that Britain sends a weekly £350m to the EU. Further public understanding might be achieved, it says, if broadcasters attempted more “deliberative” as opposed to tit-for-tat coverage of the type that infuriated complainants to the BBC’s Feedback programme long before they could be written off as sore losers.

If there are pointed lessons here for some BBC programme-makers, who must bear partial responsibility for the final level of public bafflement, maybe they shouldn’t be blamed for submitting to management orders, issued when the now forgotten escort fan and culture secretary, John Whittingdale, was emitting worrying noises. The EU referendum guidelines effectively ordained that BBC coverage would adhere, in the aim of impartiality, to traditional, binary practices, despite this being a non-party political debate to which any number of non-affiliated, non big beasts might have more insights to contribute than Westminster’s in-fighters. In Johnson’s case, these amounted to: “We export French knickers to France... Are the French really going to put tariffs on our French knickers when we buy so much of their cheese and their champagne? Of course they’re not!”

Questioned about the many, normally respected authorities whose research indicated more problematic economic outcomes, Johnson’s ally, Gove, urged voters to shun the Nobel laureates’ paperwork. “We have to be careful about historical comparisons, but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong and Einstein said, ‘Look, if I was wrong, one would have been enough.’”

“For me,” writes Professor John van Reenen, formerly of the LSE, now at MIT and one of the economists thus likened by Gove to an antisemitic, government-owned Nazi, “it simply capped off a frankly disgusting campaign, one where the Leave side simply impugned the motives of ‘the experts’ rather than seriously engaging with the substance of the economic debate.”

But the Leave side might not have got away with this ugliness, nor Remain with prattling about imminent apocalypse, had not the BBC, as well as enabling an often asinine level of argument, allowed its obsession with balance to dictate that any carefully argued observation on Brexit, deserving of analysis, be promptly followed by its formal opponent’s unsubstantiated bluster.

Similarly, no more attention would be devoted to a striking near-consensus of economic opinion than to its negation by a speaker representing a groupuscule of eight. Admittedly, this was tough on the eight. Professor Patrick Minford was working hours to which no elderly economist should be subjected. But that’s just one of the costs of the BBC’s “regulated equivocation”, as its critics call a habit that has previously embarrassed the corporation when applied to climate change and the MMR. Until recently, it considered the climate change denier Nigel Lawson as fine a match for peer-reviewed research as it now believes him a trusted guarantor of post-Brexit glories, possibly forgetting his earlier history of shadowing the deutschmark.

In his 2011 report on BBC science coverage, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones criticised the “over-rigid” insistence on due impartiality that could give “undue attention to marginal opinion”. But once again, in referendum coverage, the corporation actively required its journalists to supply this phony balance, even when that meant, as Jones put it on science, allowing rhetoric – say Gove’s “hostages” in a car – “to give the appearance of debate”.

As with climate change, implicit in extreme BBC impartiality is a distinctly un-BBC like, post-truth proposal that, since all opinions merit equal coverage, the public might as well give up on evidence-based argument. So much was plainly stated by Today’s Nick Robinson when he assured voters who were, in huge numbers, seeking information from the BBC that the debate was all “claims and counterclaims”, “guesswork”. “No journalist,” he declared, “no pundit, no expert can resolve these questions for you.” Whether the imaginary £350m claimed by Johnson and Gove would ever be imaginarily spent on the NHS was not, it presumably followed, a lie for the BBC to repeatedly expose, but “a matter of judgment”.

Whichever side you were on, the BBC’s coverage was not, as the ERS is not the first to point out, such as to create unalloyed confidence in the outcome. Even the winners would discover, shortly after voting, that one big beast (Gove) had never meant it about the NHS’s £350m; that another (Hannan) saw no connection with reduced immigration. That ERS idea, the official fact checker, has already been derided as a “stuck-up quango”. But would the ERS be asking if the BBC had done its job?

The trouble with philanthropy is that money can't buy equality

Courtney Martin in The Guardian

I spent Saturday morning at the public library with my 2.5-year-old daughter. She sat in the centre of a multi-racial, multi-lingual group of toddlers, spread her arms out as wide as they would go, and screamed: “He turned into a beautiful butterfly!” at the end of the consummate classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The parents and grandparents giggled at the collective exuberance of little ones. The kids’ insanely spongy brains soaked up the sea of words surrounding them.

This may sound like a mundane scene, but it’s a surprising triumph for philanthropic equity – one of the few that exists at a meaningful, functional scale in our increasingly unequal country. At a time when early childhood has exploded as a lucrative market opportunity, no money is exchanged at the nation’s public libraries.

Why? Because in the 1850s, a wealthy guy invited a poor, 13-year-old immigrant boy to spend Saturday afternoons at his private library in Pittsburgh.

That boy grew up to be steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie rememberedthat, as a child, “I resolved, if wealth ever came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries.” True to his word, Carnegie’s funding built about half of the 3,500 public libraries that existed by 1920.

Philanthropy has come a long way since the “Patron Saint of Libraries” took a childhood experience and turned it into a national legacy. Too often, it feels like we’ve lost our core wisdom about how change actually happens.

As they say, money can’t buy love. It can’t, ultimately, buy equity either. Both start with the seed of relationship.

There would be no three-year-old black kid in Oakland screaming hungry caterpillar exuberance without Andrew Carnegie. And there would no Andrew Carnegie without that Pittsburgh bibliophile.

So what does this mean for philanthropy? It means that the only philanthropy worth engaging in – both ethically and strategically speaking – is the kind that honours the wisdom of relationships and the power of money.

In what organiser and human rights activist Ella Baker deemed the “foundation complex” in 1963, those with money usually call the shots. Typically, a foundation positions itself as the expert and judges the merits of a nonprofit to solve a particular problem, whether it’s childhood hunger, or deforestation, or homelessness.

A girl stamping her own book at the old Aberystwyth Carnegie-funded public library, Wales. Photograph: Keith Morris/Alamy

I’ve been on the phone myself, scrambling to feel worthy of a foundation officer’s attention and money; nothing has inflicted me with a more toxic form of impostor syndrome. The questions foundation representatives ask, like those little bubbles on a standardised test, seem to pop up one after the other. With each one, I feel my breath get shallow. I’m feverishly tap-dancing when what I want to be doing is have good faith, meaningful conversation.

With individual donors, the hierarchy is often softened with social graces – a cup of coffee, a chat about shared passions, the scent of camaraderie – but ultimately the power dynamic is no different. One of us has the means and therefore is in the position of judging the other’s “good works”. In some ways, these interactions can be even more demoralising because they are deeply confusing; sometimes it can feel like you are performing friendship.

In the midst of particularly demoralising experiences with wealthy philanthropists, I have often reminded myself of my own privilege – a white woman from an upper-middle-class background with an Ivy League degree. If these interactions make me feel this way, imagine how confusing and alienating they likely are for people even further afield of the social class of most philanthropists.

A note about philanthropists’ demographics: three-fourths of foundations’ full-time staff are white and nearly 90% are over 30. Women flourish at smaller foundations – about three of four fundraisers are female – but at those with assets of more than $750m, women comprise only 28.9% of CEOs and CGOs (chief growth officers).

Board leadership is even more demographically starved. “Fully 85% of foundation board members are white, while just 7% are African American and only 4% are Hispanic,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance. “Nearly three-quarters of foundations have no written policy on board diversity, and fewer than 10% of board members are under 40.”

This means a lot of people who are not white, male and older are hustling their asses off to understand the sensibility of those who are. They are spending energy being tactical about how they talk about their work and build relationships, however transactional or tokenising. I admire their commitment and acuity, but even if some get good at translating and tap-dancing for dollars, that should not comfort the philanthropic world about its own inclusivity or transparency.

It only means that some people are willing to put in the work to get good at the game, not that the game isn’t profoundly rigged or that it doesn’t distract from getting real work done.

And the truth is, I imagine it’s a disconcerting experience for most philanthropists, too. On some level, they must know that they’re not the wisest authorities on the issues they’re seeking to effect. Money doesn’t make you an expert on poverty alleviation; in fact, it can make you dumber with distance. And yet, traditional philanthropy is set up to put you – the one with financial wealth – in the position of playing god with something you deeply care about. Even if it strokes your ego to be the decider, it’s got to erode your sense of integrity.

How can we reinvent philanthropy with an eye toward true equity? How can we create new cultures and structures that allow resources – financial, experiential, energetic – to flow in ways that feel dignifying? How do we create paradigm-shifting shit together, not just send LinkedIn requests and push money and paper around?

One obvious thing we can do is work to change the demographics of those giving away money and sitting on boards. But even that isn’t a fix; it’s a good bet to slowly shift culture, but not a promise of radical restructuring. There has been a slight uptick in black executives at foundations, for example, but as soon as they arrive, many are looking for an out, according to the Association of Black Foundation Executives. They overwhelmingly cite as their reason for fleeing that they want to be “more directly engaged in creating community change.” Duh.

If we really want to reinvent philanthropy then we are going to have to look at the underlying historic and structural causes of poverty and work to dismantle them and put new systems in their place. It’s also about culture – intentionally creating boundary-bashing friendships, learning to ask better, more generous questions, taking up less space.

It’s about what we are willing to acknowledge about the origins of our own wealth and privilege. It’s about reclaiming values that privilege often robs us of: first and foremost, humility. But also trust in the ingenuity and goodness of other people, particularly those without financial wealth. And a more accurate sense of proportion – where and how are philanthropists really most crucial in the fight for a more just society?

Several groups are working to show us what this kind of giving might look like. An example: a group of trust fund kids, calling themselves the Gulf South Allied Funders, took their own inheritances, raised even more money from their own networks and then donated the sum to the Twenty-First Century Foundation, which has a long-standing presence in New Orleans. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they acknowledged their unfamiliarity with the community, and decided to funnel their resources to someone who could make a bigger difference.

Emergency response team volunteers clean up debris from a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Another: poor families in Boston and Detroit and Fresno track data about their own strengths and goals and then come together on a regular basis to talk about what they’re learning and the kinds of support they need. The families provide the moral support, while Family Independence Initiative provides the financial support in the form of scholarships, small business grants and other capital, on an as-needed basis.

And another: Self-Help, a family of nonprofit credit unions in North Carolina, California, and Florida, counter predatory lenders and high-fee check cashers in underserved communities by providing low-interest banking and loan services, financing community development projects and rehabilitating historic buildings with local partners. They celebrate the ways in which their current banking structure is significantly imprinted with the historic intelligence of African-American credit unions so critical during the Jim Crow era.

What makes these different than the average “foundation complex” experience? They have authentic, trusting relationships at the centre. They acknowledge history and local context. They walk their talk – moving beyond radical theory to radical practice.

To their credit, many of the world’s most powerful donors have begun to question the ethical underpinnings and best practicesof status quo philanthropy. In 2013,Peter Buffett, chairman of the NoVo Foundation, wrote a manifesto that, at its essence, was a call for more structural consciousness and less cognitive dissonance among wealthy altruists: “Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.”

More recently, Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation, has called fora “new ‘gospel of wealth’ for the 21st century” – one that addresses “the underlying causes that perpetuate human suffering. In other words, philanthropy can no longer grapple simply with what is happening in the world, but also withhow and why.”

The shift in zeitgeist is promising. A critical mass of people working within philanthropy is hungry to do work with more ethical rigor; more systemic, cultural, and emotional intelligence; less bureaucracy and hubris. There is a growing conversation about these shifts. On paper, the will is there.

But philanthropists need more than “big ideas” about how their profession could and should change. They need radically new habits or these ideas just become bold in theory.

As Vu Le, the Executive Director of Rainier Valley Corps, points out: “True Equity takes time, energy, and thoughtfulness. It requires us to reexamine everything we know and change systems and practices that we have been using for hundreds of years. This is often painful and uncomfortable.”

In part, this is about scale. Philanthropists must push themselves to give more, and in particular, give more to address American poverty. Only 12% of total giving in 2015 went to “human services,” according to Giving USA. Wealthy donors are more likely to support the arts and higher education and less likely to give to social service charities, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. And they’re not as generous as those with less income: “The wealthiest Americans – those who earned $200,000 or more – reduced the share of income they gave to charity by 4.6% from 2006 to 2012. Meanwhile, Americans who earned less than $100,000 chipped in 4.5% more of their income during the same time period.”

In 2014, the poverty rate in the US reached 15%. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images



How and where do you meet potential grantees?

If you don’t have genuine relationships with those outside of your racial or class category, you’re going to have a hell of a time finding out about the most interesting, powerful work going on to tackle poverty.

How do you approach general operating funds or capital campaigns?

Have you ever noticed that foundations feel justified in spending millions on beautifully designed headquarters, but frown on nonprofits using money to spend a fraction of that on dignifying spaces of their own? Poor people, and those that partner with them, deserve fair salaries and beauty, too.

How can grant reporting be redesigned so it doesn’t create such huge frustration and a misuse of time and energy on the part of grantee organisations?

Human-centered design is so often heralded by foundations these days, but too often their own bureaucracies are filled with soul-deadening detail that is anything but humanising.

Do you build relationships for the long, systemic haul?


Funding also shapes and dictates our work by forcing us to conceptualise our communities as victimsAdjoa Florência Jones de Almeida, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Gara LaMarche takes his peers to task for talking big game about sustainability, but then essentially treating grantees like “the right wing would treat single mothers on welfare, imposing strict time limits and cutoffs – the fact is that most sustainability strategies are aimed at helping grantees move from dependency on one foundation to another.”

This may all seem “in the weeds”, but it has a huge impact of the daily lives of those tackling poverty on the ground. How we treat one another every day, as cliched as it may sound, becomes the nature of our relationships, and the nature of our relationships, becomes the nature of our institutions and, ultimately, systems.

Perhaps the most profound question that philanthropists can ask themselves at this ripe time for reinvention is this: what stories do you want or expect grantees to tell you? What stories do you tell about yourself?

Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida of the Sista II Sista Collective in Brooklyn, NY,wrote in the groundbreaking anthology, The Revolution will not be Funded:

In theory, foundation funding provides us with the ability to do the work – it is supposed to facilitate what we do. But funding also shapes and dictates our work by forcing us to conceptualise our communities as victims. We are forced to talk about our members as being “disadvantaged” and “at risk”, and to highlight what we are doing to prevent them from getting pregnant or taking drugs – even when this is not, in essence, how we see them or the priority for our work.

Six years later, organiser and activist Mia Birdsong, took the TED stage and furthered the paradigm-shifting narrative: “The quarter-truths and limited plot lines have us convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing. What if we recognised that what’s working is the people and what’s broken is our approach?”

The story we’ve told about the poor in America, the story that we continue to ask them to tell in order to get funding, is that they’re broken. In fact, we are.

The ultimate irony of the way the philanthropic sector is structured is that it is actually the recipients – people of colour, the working class, women – that may be the most masterful at creating and maintaining long-lasting, catalytic relationships. They are disproportionately poor in terms of dollars and cents, but rich with experience of making a way out of no way and persevering in the face of huge, intractable, sometimes downright exploitative systems. This usually involves relying on friends and extended family, nurturing people’s gifts for the betterment of whole communities and having grace through challenge.

We have an ethical imperative to acknowledge and build new systems around that intelligence. Carnegie’s one ask of the public libraries that he funded, to be built in communities across the country, was that they each be engraved with an image of a rising sun and the words: “Let there be light.”

That light, for him, was present in books, but in truth, it was sparked by an unlikely relationship. Long-lasting change so often is.

What could train company owner Richard Branson possibly have to gain by attacking pro-nationalisation Jeremy Corbyn?

Holly Baxter in The Independent

Watching the absurdity that is TrainGate unfold last night, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a real David and Goliath moment. Isn’t it nice when a billionaire tax-avoiding business magnate with a knighthood takes on a cruel and calculating powerhouse like Labour’s autocratically-minded leader of the opposition and wins? Isn’t it heartening to see the mainstream media take Richard Branson’s side for once, rather than deferring to the statements of a political figure who probably has lots to gain financially from the renationalisation of the railways? After all, it’s not like Branson, the owner of a private company that operates trains, would be affected by things like that. So I think we can all agree that, at the very least, his motives are pure and driven by a rigorous pursuit of objective justice and truth. As for Corbyn, who knows what devious schemes he could have up his sleeve once he’s allowed to hand control of some public transport back to the taxpayer? Isn’t that how Nazi Germany started?

As a born-and-bred Geordie who moved to London for university and stayed for work, I’ve taken the same Newcastle-bound train from London that Jeremy Corbyn sat on the floor of more times than I could count. In case anyone’s actually interested, I can categorically state that it was a lot more pleasant affair when East Coast Trains – the last nationalised arm of British railways – was running the show. The first thing that happened when it was sold off to Virgin was that prices went up and the loyalty scheme which allowed you to accrue points and use them to buy future journeys was stopped (it was replaced with a Nectar Points collaboration and a scheme that encourages you to collect Flying Club miles – two laughable air miles per £1 spent – which, you guessed it, can only be used on Virgin Atlantic planes).

Virgin might have released a press release (yes, for real) about Jeremy Corbyn’s journey this week, claiming that he’d find brilliantly cheap rail fares on their trains in future if he booked in advance, but the £120 return ticket to Durham that I bought weeks in advance for a friend’s wedding this weekend isn’t an anomaly. London to Durham is a journey of two and a half hours. The ridiculous fact that £90 is the cheapest I’ve ever seen a return ticket for it since Virgin took over speaks for itself.

Whether Corbyn sat on the floor to make a point, or because he didn’t look properly in all of the coaches for free seats, or because there were a couple of seats dotted about but he needed a few together for his team is immaterial to me. I’ve spent more than one Christmas Eve sitting curled up inside the luggage rack on the four-hour slow service back to my hometown because even the corridors are too packed to fit into, and I’ve paid extortionate amounts for the privilege. I know what Virgin Trains’ service on the east coast lines are like, even at their least crowded and their very best. A chirpy press release is, of course, going to talk up the “excellent offerings” available from London to Newcastle – but those people have never tried to eat one of their microwaved paninis or operate their on-board wifi, which, to put it kindly, exists more in the conceptual than the physical plane.

Privatised railways are a win for big businesses for obvious reasons: you can’t operate more than one train on one part of a railway line at one time; it’s not like selling a number of competing products together in a shop. Since new lines are hardly ever built, all a business really has to do is have enough money to buy up a monopoly on people’s journeys through whichever part of Britain it chooses. Then – hey presto! – guaranteed sky-high prices with the potential to increase exponentially, since your customer base has very little choice in the matter but to pay up or not travel at all. It’s a naturally uncompetitive business, which makes it a very good candidate for nationalisation and a very good profit-maker for companies with their eyes on the prize. Rail ticket prices, after all, go up like clockwork every year.

Astounded as I am by the fact that people have leapt on what is essentially one of the most boring political stories to have ever hit the headlines, I do support Corbyn’s policy of rail nationalisation in theory. Whether he sat on the floor and announced to camera that ram-packed trains are “a problem that many passengers face every day” as a publicity stunt or after only a half-hearted poke around for seats doesn’t concern me; the simple fact is that the statement is true.

What does concern me, however, is the way in which a discussion about one man sitting on the floor of a packed train has escalated into something which people are now referring to as TrainGate by anti-Corbyn factions, as if accidentally walking past a couple of unreserved seats on a train is genuinely comparable to one of modern America’s most controversial political scandals. I know this has been said a lot in the last few weeks, but really, Labour, have you lost your mind?

How tricksters make you see what they want you to see

By David Robson in the BBC

 Could you be fooled into “seeing” something that doesn’t exist?

Matthew Tompkins, a magician-turned-psychologist at the University of Oxford, has been investigating the ways that tricksters implant thoughts in people’s minds. With a masterful sleight of hand, he can make a poker chip disappear right in front of your eyes, or conjure a crayon out of thin air.

And finally, let’s watch the “phantom vanish trick”, which was the focus of his latest experiment:

What did he tuck into his fist? A red ball? A handkerchief?

Although interesting in themselves, the first three videos are really a warm-up for this more ambitious illusion, in which Tompkins tries to plant an image in the participant’s minds using the power of suggestion alone.

Around a third of his participants believed they had seen Tompkins take an object from the pot and tuck it into his hand – only to make it disappear later on. In fact, his fingers were always empty, but his clever pantomiming created an illusion of a real, visible object.

How is that possible? Psychologists have long known that the brain acts like an expert art restorer, touching up the rough images hitting our retina according to context and expectation. This “top-down processing” allows us to build a clear picture from the barest of details (such as this famous picture of the “Dalmatian in the snow”). It’s the reason we can make out a face in the dark, for instance. But occasionally, the brain may fill in too many of the gaps, allowing expectation to warp a picture so that it no longer reflects reality. In some ways, we really do see what we want to see.
This “top-down processing” is reflected in measures of brain activity, and it could easily explain the phantom vanish trick. The warm-up videos, the direction of his gaze, and his deft hand gestures all primed the participants’ brains to see the object between his fingers, and for some participants, this expectation overrode the reality in front of their eyes.