THE BBC had its Unionist bias questioned and the power behind the Better Together campaign was examined as Paul Mason was interviewed by Alex Salmond in Edinburgh yesterday.
Former BBC Newsnight economics editor and current Channel Four news journalist Mason claimed the BBC are an inherently “Unionist institution”, and again compared the broadcaster’s coverage of the referendum to its reporting of the Iraq War.
Speaking to Mason about the journalist's recently published book PostCapitalism, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Salmond compared Secretary to the Treasury Sir Nicholas Macpherson with a Bond villain, and claimed that the department’s impartiality during the referendum was fatally flawed.
Salmond said: "When establishing the people who are stroking the black cats we need to get the right target... and for me, it's Sir Nicholas who has the cat."
Mason stopped short of agreeing with the Bond villain analogy, but compared the Bank of England’s actions in the referendum to that of the ECB’s during the ongoing financial crisis in Greece.
The former First Minister also highlighted a passage where the journalist wrote that he had been in three “trouble spots” last year: Gaza, Scotland and Greece.
In each of the places mentioned, Mason said he was glad he was not still working for the BBC, as he feared he would not have had the freedom to report the situation fully.
The journalist also said that “self-defence of the elite system” had shocked him in each of these places, but said that due to the referendum process, Scotland is now ten years ahead of where it was previously.
“From somewhere there has come this amazing, radical, renaissance of culture that underpins everything that happened last year, and makes this a very different country,” Mason said.
Talking about the BBC in detail, Mason backed Salmond’s claims that the public broadcaster had failed to report impartially, claiming that the BBC will “nearly always be Unionist, nearly always be of a neoliberal point of view”.
“I have this theory about the BBC, that what most people don’t like about it is to do with the social group from which its managers and senior people are recruited. I don’t even mean politics, I think it’s an outlook on life,” Mason said. “I’m absolutely sure that the BBC believes it is a Unionist institution... It thinks if Scotland becomes independent there is no provision for a Scottish independent BBC so in its DNA it’s a product of this polity.”
Salmond added that he had never previously worried about the reporting of the BBC, saying that the broadcaster was his “blind spot” as he had not factored it into his independence strategy.
“The Treasury didn’t surprise me. The chief executives of a number of companies didn’t surprise me in the slightest,” Salmond said.
“But the BBC did surprise me, and that’s because my experience of elections, and again in the elections held this year, is that while politicians complained about this and that, by and large, on the whole the television coverage in this country is pretty fair and square.
“It wasn’t like that during the referendum, and that I confess did surprise me and that was a blind spot which perhaps I should have seen but didn’t see. I thought the coverage of the referendum would be like the coverage of an election.”
The talks came as the Edinburgh Book Festival winded to a close yesterday, culminating in a mass firework display last night. with organisers at the Charlotte Square site in Edinburgh said that this year was their biggest to date, estimating that over 225,000 people had visited the site to see one of the nearly 800 events over the 17 days.
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