BBC bias stories drive many people wild because it is a taxpayer-funded organisation, and also because we have a long-held reverence towards what people used to call ‘Auntie’. But in the long run, the issue of fairness and freedom in news-reporting and opinion-forming is going to focus far more around information giants such as Google and Facebook than it is for the national broadcaster, its best days already behind it.

Viewing figures for Newsnight — to pluck an example at random — are currently at under 300,000. In contrast an endless number of podcasts and online-only content providers get far larger viewing figures; Joe Rogan gets 6 million downloads a day. So while Emily Maitlis’s monologues are of great concern to small clusters of people in Britain, the overall impact is limited; Google and Facebook, in contrast, have the sort of power media barons of the newspaper age could only dream of.

And just as the tech platforms have allowed a great flowering of online debate, discussion and information-sharing, so the power of these companies to shut off that debate, by de-platforming or muting content they do not approve of, is an issue which becomes more troubling by the month.

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The issue recently hit particularly close to home. Earlier this month, an UnHerd interview with respected oncologist Professor Karol Sikora was, bizarrely, taken down by YouTube. According to the tech giant’s website, the interview was found to have ‘violated guidelines’ because the high-profile immunity specialist was critical of the lockdown policy (which, he believes, may end up killing many people due to missed cancer screenings).

YouTube has said in the past that it would delete any videos critical of WHO coronavirus guidance, the same World Health Organisation that has been heavily criticised for its links to the People’s Republic of China, (and its lack of links to the Republic of China).

But this in itself is not a simple public safety issue, because there is still much expert disagreement about how to fight the coronavirus pandemic; WHO, for example, has advised against mask-wearing in public, while some governments and states encourage or even enforce it.

After a certain amount of press attention, YouTube allowed the interview to go back online — which is entirely normal YouTube policy.

For years, the company has been hiding or removing content it didn’t approve of, and whenever public attention was brought to the matter YouTube would simply blame error or oversight. What it looks like, more often than not, is that the site acts as censor up until the moment that it is caught, at which point it’s one of those unfortunate errors again. If the unexplained disappearance of bad thinkers on the platform is not noticed, the error mysteriously remains in place.

Similar censorship happens at an astonishingly micro level. Just this week YouTube was accused of automatically removing below-the-line comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party. According to The Verge, statements containing certain words critical of the Chinese government have been regularly deleted from YouTube since at least October last year; statements that include ‘communist bandit’, for instance, have been being automatically erased in around 15 seconds.

When this was brought to YouTube’s attention, with all the attendant publicity and embarrassment, the company once again claimed that this censorship had been happening in error and that they were working on fixing the issue. Those damn gremlins in the machine, once again.

The problem for YouTube and other platforms is that over the last decade the goodwill that users initially had for these dynamic young tech start-ups has perceptibly faded, for a number of reasons. Some of the most high-profile include the revelations about Facebook data-harvesting and Google’s extraordinary desire to be seen to stand up to all governments apart from the authoritarian ones. 

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But equally significant is simply the growing number of individuals with their own experience of the tech platforms instituting forms of censorship, censorship which the companies first deny and then implement.

Twitter is perhaps the most pernicious case in point. For years, users of the addictive social media site — myself included — have noticed strange patterns on the platform. Certain tweets, or tweets containing particular words or relating to certain themes, would land as though into a great silence. They would go out and be liked by tiny numbers of people or none at all; or there would be nothing and then a sudden surge, as though in acknowledgement that the zero figure was unsustainable. Or people would find that the ‘likes’ for a particular tweet did not only remain static but would suddenly go down, as though Twitter had decided that a particular tweet needed to look less popular than it was.

I have experienced a certain amount of this myself, with readers regularly having to ‘re-like’ tweets promoting certain of my books. They had liked it, and Twitter had mysteriously ‘unliked’ it for them and they had then had to come back again to say that, no, they really did like it. I don’t think it is paranoia to observe that these shenanigans have a particular political bent.

It is well known that Silicon Valley is perhaps the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) place in the world. The people who work at the tech companies are almost uniformly left-leaning progressives, if not something stronger, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted in the past that the corporation’s few conservatives don’t feel safe to voice their opinion. Similarly a former Facebook employee has accused the site of ‘curating’ feeds to screen out conservative content.

At the higher end, these companies have strong links with progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The flood of former officials from the Obama administration into Silicon Valley after he left office, and Hillary Clinton failed to reach the White House in 2016, is well recorded. In recent times there has been a certain British flavour added to this, with reports that since Nick Clegg joined the top ranks of Facebook, that company has seen a marked influx of otherwise unemployed, perhaps otherwise unemployable, Liberal Democrats, swelling the ranks.

All of this and much more means that the tech companies swim in a bubble within a bubble. Their awareness of where the political or moral centre skews consistently left. When they do manage to take down terrorist material from their platforms, for instance, they placate the criticism they expect by stressing that they are opposed to ‘extremism’ in general; or ‘hateful content’, to give just one of the fabulously flatulent terms currently in vogue.

It is the reason why Twitter and all the other platforms acted so swiftly against Milo Yiannopoulos even as Dorsey’s site continued to allow Lashkar-e-Taiba (which carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008) to keep active Twitter accounts.

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It is the same with YouTube, which even before you get to the issue of banning has the subtle art of ‘demonetisation’, by which the media giant signals whom it favours and whom it does not. For years it has become clear that conservative-leaning content in particular is having its ability to monetise (that is, make money from advertising revenue raised by views) removed because the site disapproves of the politics.

Regrettably, again, I find myself to have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of this, as has almost everybody I know who has questioned not just regular political orthodoxies, but specific Silicon Valley orthodoxies, such as anything to do with trans issues.

The kicker in all of this is that as the various platforms are caught out in various forms of censorship, their final move is to confirm in their terms of service that they are allowed to do the things that, up till that point, they denied doing. So having spent years denying that they engaged in ‘shadow-banning’, in January the new terms of service agreement that all Twitter users were requested to agree to included having the right to refuse to distribute certain content and to “limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service”. Otherwise known as shadow-banning.

Now that much of this is out in the open, perhaps it is inevitable that there is a surge in people volunteering to make themselves the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable material to publish online. In recent weeks there have once again been calls to either ban Donald Trump from Twitter or insist that his tweets are in some way fact-checked into irrelevancy by the company. Well, good luck to anybody auditioning for that job.

The debate around this political curating, as with the scandal over these companies’ China policies, returns us to the simultaneous recognition of two deeply troubling facts: that the social media companies have an awesome responsibility, greater than perhaps any comparable information-wielding power in history; and that this is a power that the platforms in question are utterly unfit to wield.

BBC rows will come and go. But the inadequacies and malignancies of the social media platforms are here to stay.

They may well be right – it does feel somehow different out there – but whatever else this crisis has in common with that period, one wartime comparison that certainly rings true is that the BBC is once again a vital, unifing force.

The BBC is having a good crisis; in fact the coronavirus emergency could have been custom-made in one of the management suites of New Broadcasting House, the better to display the merits of our national broadcaster.

Back in January things were looking pretty bleak for the Corporation. There were threatening noises coming out of government circles about a forthcoming reckoning; the licence fee was said to be under unsympathetic scrutiny and to some the BBC’s very future seemed in doubt. Some commentators believed a “punishment beating” was in the offing in retaliation for the perceived slights of the previous three years.

That period was dominated by the frustrations of the Brexit debate, during which a long-brewing crisis in relations between Leavers and the BBC reached its peak. In the BBC’s latest annual report Tony Hall, the Director General, claims he was “extremely proud” of how his news teams had covered “this vitally important national story”, but this was not how many Leave voters viewed things, and to them it displayed a tin ear about the BBC’s one-sidedness.

But two months on and the landscape has been transformed by events, events that give the corporation time to do some repair work on its tarnished image as a trustworthy guide. That image is itself partly a legacy of the BBC’s wartime role as an honest truth-teller at a time of national crisis, for the years 1939-45 were when the foundation stones of the BBC’s reputation were laid, and explain why so many people have a strong emotional attachment to it.

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In Auntie’s War, Ed Stourton’s book about the BBC during the period, he talks about “a golden thread of truth-telling” which ran through its output; and in some ways the Corporation has ever since been living off the moral capital it acquired during those perilous years. But 1945 is a long time ago and in recent years that capital has been draining away. And the Brexit debate nearly emptied the well.

The problem Brexit posed for the BBC was that its own deepest instincts, which were to remain firmly ensconced in the European bosom, coincided exactly with the strong preference of the Establishment. In the course of the long debate the BBC became the trusted cheerleader for those who opposed leaving. But the “national broadcaster” was broadcasting to a divided nation in which a slight majority had taken the opposite view and the Corporation never found a way of speaking for them. Rather than bring people together its reporting caused resentment and further division.

But Covid-19 is a very different proposition. For the past few weeks the BBC’s output has effortlessly found a tone which suits the national mood: it is clearly “on our side” because, unlike Brexit, this is a crisis which puts us all on one side against an invisible and frightening enemy. There is no deep political divide over the virus and, so far at least, the opposition parties have been supportive of the government’s action. And this makes the BBC’s job much easier; it gives it an opportunity to demonstrate its core values in a politics-free zone.

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“Public service broadcasting” is a phrase that embodies a noble ideal, a promise of a fair, non-partisan, and truthful news service which everybody can rely on. This is particularly important when, as now, there is a genuine threat to national well-being. And the BBC — particularly Radio Four — has risen to the challenge.

The coverage of the spread of the virus, the containment measures proposed and the practical steps that individuals should take to minimise risk to themselves has been exemplary. All the news programmes have done well, but I would single out PM and Evan Davies in particular; Davies, with his non-confrontational, intelligent and probing style, is ideally suited to this particular crisis. Covid-19 has allowed us a glimpse of what authentic public service broadcasting looks and sounds like.

One small sign of how things have changed is the way in which government ministers are once again being heard on the BBC. The edict that ministers would no longer automatically offer themselves for a daily grilling on Today apparently came from Dominic Cummings, who saw little political profit in allowing ministers to be savaged by BBC journalists, always on the look-out for minor discrepancies to turn into a “divisions in government” story.

Throughout January and February the flagship programmes were minister-free zones, a policy which undeniably diminished them. Today has always prided itself on “setting the agenda” and the amount of “pick-up” by other media outlets was partly the measure by which it judged the success of its output; without any agenda-setting government interviews a vital ingredient was missing.

I always assumed that at some point in the political cycle this embargo would end; the time would arrive, I calculated, when the Government needed the BBC again. But I had not anticipated that time would arrive so quickly; of course, no one did.

As it is, health and business ministers now need to get on to the airwaves to reassure us all that the Government knows what it’s doing and is feeling our pain. One senses that BBC presenters are pleased that the old relationship has been, at least partly, restored; programmes top-heavy with Opposition spokesmen feel lopsided and incomplete.

This is not to say that the antagonism between the BBC and the Government is now a thing entirely of the past; the Beeb’s underlying political instincts have not changed and are still largely antithetical to conservatism. In Right-wing circles deep suspicion of the Corporation’s bias will remain, and it will not be a question of just letting “bygones be bygone”.

It is likely that when the epidemic has run its course hostilities will be resumed, if only because towards the end of the year the nation’s focus will turn again to Brexit as the negotiations between the EU and Britain reach their climax. But for now Covid-19 has entirely eclipsed Brexit and this gives both the BBC and the Government an opportunity to re-set the relationship.

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It is in this context that the choice of replacement for Tony Hall in the summer is so important. The next D-G’s first and most important task will be to build on this truce and conciliate those elements of the Tory party who feel the Corporation is firmly in the enemy camp. Failure to do so might mean that the threat to abolish the licence fee (which has been and remains a hugely valuable privilege) translates into a reality.

But when the two sides begin to talk about these things the BBC will now be able to point to its performance during this health emergency: there they will be able to say “that is what good public service broadcasting means”.

In the coming weeks, with people marooned in their homes for long periods, the BBC will for many become a vital service keeping them informed and diverted at a difficult time. When “the war is over”, as it were, the Corporation is likely to emerge having earned renewed gratitude. Its stock will be high and it will thus be in a much stronger position to repel any political challenge.

If the BBC is wise it will also understand why this has happened and draw the right lesson from it. Because of the virus “public service broadcasting” has become more than just a phrase; it has real meaning which is allowing the Corporation to speak to, and for, the whole nation. What the BBC will then need to re-discover how to do that when times are normal again and ordinary politics come back into play.

This was on my mind while watching the BBC’s beautifully-acted, directed and produced moral disaster Noughts + Crosses, based on the series of novels by Malorie Blackman.

Presented as a race-reversal work, it is set in Britain at a time when Africa has colonised Europe, where politicians are in hoc to African leaders and where, as a result, black people find themselves at the top of society while whites form a racial underclass.

Many teenagers or parents with teenage children will have encountered the book, and ever since its publication in 2001 Noughts and Crosses and its sequels have haunted not just bestseller lists but also classroom reading lists. Various aspects of the work are meant to make it perfect fodder for teenagers, most significantly the fact that it is seen as a work of anti-racism.

The plot centres around two star-cross’d lovers who break this racial divide, and away from this central plotline the heavy-handed racial role-reversal is presented everywhere. In Blackman’s fictional world white people are known as noughts and black people are known as crosses; the black characters even occasionally use the term ‘blankers’ of the white people, which is obviously an analogy to the N-word.

At the opening of the series a group of young white men are hanging around on the streets when some black police officers decide to come over and break them up, eventually arbitrarily arresting and mistreating them. One of their victims is hospitalised, leading to increased tensions in the country at large and as a result the black politicians who lead the country discuss stop-and-search powers being increased on white youths. The daughter of one of these politicians will, provoked by these events, soon cross the racial divide.

The BBC adaptation presents all this and more in a lush and expensive six-part series, and it is possible that some people will take a lot away from it. Certainly the programme’s makers and actors are hoping as much. In interviews ahead of the series Masali Baduza, who plays the leader character Sephy Hadley, said that she hopes that the series will “kick-start a conversation about racism”.

Meantime Paterson Joseph, who plays Sephy’s ruthless politician father Kamal Hadley, has said of the themes of the drama: “I don’t think it’s a zeitgeist, because I think this issue is always there, but I think we’re particularly living in a time where the volume has been turned up on all that. When you’re shooting, you know it’s significant because you know it’s going to upset some people, maybe a lot of people, on both sides of the ethnic lines.”

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Take a moment to reflect on what is so wrong about that statement and you will get a sense of what is so wrong with this drama. “Both sides of the ethnic lines.” When did any British reader last hear such a phrase used? What are these ‘sides’ and why are there just two of them and where are they so clearly delineated?

For the programme-makers, the answers are clear. They have said that they hope that their series will “open people’s eyes” to prejudice. The author of the original novels has also chimed in, judging her own work to have never been more relevant, because as she puts it “Unfortunately the facts show there is more hate crime in Britain and people being judged on skin colour or religion or sexual orientation”.

Among everyone involved in this programme a common theme stands out above all: this drama is needed because it is relevant to our times. Allow me to make a counter case.

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While watching the first episode it seemed to me that there was only one term to describe what the programme makers had created: Powell-ite. And not just Powell-ite but derivative of the worst part of Powell-ism.

What the BBC have done is to make a drama in which the worst quotation Enoch Powell gave in his “Rivers of Blood” speech is fulfilled, in which black people do indeed have “the whip hand” over white people in Britain. As such, I couldn’t help thinking throughout that the programme would end up being used by ‘identitarian’ types across Britain and further afield. Small though such people may be in number, Noughts + Crosses would be a very fine recruiting tool for their cause. The most dystopian of their warnings can now be shared with the widest possible audience in the most lavish licence fee-funded way imaginable.

Indeed the programme illustrates a paradox in this contentious subject, which is that a certain type of racist and a certain type of anti-racist can end up meeting at certain points of mutual convenience. For both have a desire to exaggerate tensions and exacerbate divides, each in the name of their own allegedly contrary viewpoints.

But the greatest flaw with this dystopian vision is the deeply-dated nature of the society that Blackman and the BBC imagine themselves to be holding up a mirror to. Everything in Noughts + Crosses reeks of a racial debate in Britain which is not just decades old but decades out of date. There is something deeply embarrassing in imagining that British racism and anti-racism are stuck in this Broadwater riots era, when even then the attitudes towards race in Britain were not remotely as simplistic and delineated as Blackman and co present them as being.

If that was the case in the 1970s or ‘80s then how much more is it the case today? The programme makers want people to imagine that Britain today has especial need of this drama, as though we need more “national teaching moments” over racism. A belief which, as the publicity quotes have shown, is intimately tied up with a specific liberal chattering classes view of what has happened in Britain in recent years.

That narrative is our old favourite one, in which the British people voted Brexit and then celebrated their victory with an orgy of hate crime. A narrative that comes along with its own fake news, fake statistics and faked, highly politicised, outrage. It is a deep insult to the British people, who have borne this assault on their right to vote with considerable stoicism. Yet still the insults come.

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Now, once again, the insults come at the hands of the BBC, which imagines that this racist country of ours needs its national broadcaster to go some way to correcting its licence fee-payers’ outrageous racial prejudice. So it is worth remembering where we are in the UK. Not where the BBC and its favourite authors imagine us to be – but where we actually are.

We live in a country in which the Home Secretary is the daughter of immigrants. Where the Chancellor of the Exchequer and numerous other members of the government are what is now known as a “persons of colour”. A country where the Royal Family has black members. Where the highest offices of state and all the major professions have celebrated black leaders. Racism is so absent from British society that all of this has happened with zero negative comment; nobody in any position of any prominence has said that any of this is bad or wrong.

So absent is racism from our society that when the country does want to hound somebody for being racist they have to search and find some elderly broadcaster or disc jockey who has said something on social media which could be interpreted by a dishonest and ungenerous person as potentially being seen as racist.

A truly racist society would have no difficulty locating racism in its public life. An actually racist country would not allow people of different ethnic backgrounds to make their way to the top of society (just look at numerous second and third-world countries and you can see that fact in operation). And of course an actually racist country would not have people of every racial group in the world trying to come into it, legally or otherwise.

Noughts and Crosses may be beautifully made, but it is an ugly piece of work. A social lesson stuck in the past about an imaginary society that is an insult to a real one.