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Economic issues have been visited by Panorama on a number of occasions over the past five years. The choice of topics is telling.  Programmes have focussed exclusively on the downside of free markets - for example, the fact the firms can layoff workers with relative ease, that some firms end up closing, that people get into debt, that people are paid low wages or that some find it difficult to get onto the housing ladder.

The upside of free markets goes unheralded: for example, the increase in the number of people in work, the importance of competitiveness to British industry, the advantages that a relatively deregulated marketplace brings, the increasing prosperity of the UK.

Equally, programmes on problems in highly regulated sectors invariably deploy analysis not from the point of view that they might benefit from a freer play of market forces but from the point of view that they should be less free.  

Example 1 - Closing Down (30 November 1998)

The 1998 programme, Closing Down, provides a prime example of the Panorama approach to free markets. The programme relates to the effect of a downturn in the economy.

The presenter (Vivian White) introduces the programme with a critical reference to globalisation - the bugbear of the liberal left. He refers to 'things they [workers] feel powerless to control, global forces, decisions taken by Ministers and by the Bank of England [which] are hitting them and their confidence in the future personally'.

The programme begins by eliciting our sympathy (quite rightly) for those who have suffered job losses, but White then adds an extraordinary explanation for their plight: Andre [who has lost his job] and a lot of others say they'd like their jobs to be protected, but the government believes in open international markets.' To deploy free markets and high levels of employment as opposites is a piece of remarkably old fashioned socialism. Later, White blames Tony Blair's 'policy of stability' (for which, read a refusal to use interest rates to drive down the pound) for continued job losses. The inflationary danger of any other course of action is ignored.

The voices in the programme are entirely anti-free market, pro-government intervention. White demonstrates an underlying assumption that intervention by the government is the only solution in a remarkable question to workers. He asks: 'What could they [the government] have done? What should they have done about it [the economy and job losses]?  Do you think it's all wrong what has happened? What could they have done?'  It is no surprise when the answer (which goes unanalysed and unquestioned), comes: 'Given us more support, stepped in, show a bit more muscle, just let them [business] know that they cannot do this [layoff workers].'

The Prime Minister's alleged approach - to focus on new industries and to refuse to subsidise old failing industries - is portrayed in the most pejorative light. White comments that: 'The Prime Minister, who's a North East MP delivered a judgement on industries like Gary's [heavy industry]: they belong to the past'. The programme nods in the direction of acknowledging the success of new industries in creating jobs, but chooses, rather unfairly, to focus on a Fujitsu plant which was forced to close due to overseas competition.

White concludes with some open criticism of flexible labour markets (with no acknowledgement of their benefit): 'What’s on offer is a world of uncertainty, jobs that come and go with the work not lasting quite as long as it used to. . . And jobs in new high-tech industries don't guarantee long term security either'. His damning conclusion is that 'experiencing this sort of flexibility can hurt’.

From The Guardian of the Airwaves? Bias and the BBC. by Martin McElwee and Glyn Gaskarth. C-change 2003

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Last modified: November 12, 2006