A quick post which will be more topical than usual, but which is relevant to the overall drift of this blog. Specifically, it is on the current ‘scandal’ surrounding the BBC Panorama edit of Donald Trump’s Jan 6th speech, which conflated two parts of the speech from 50 minutes apart. Of course, in creating the impression that Trump was more direct in calling for violence at the Capitol than was actually implied, a grave and stupid editorial errors was made. This is an especially serious mistake for the BBC which is built on an in reality extremely difficult to actually achieve ideal of impartiality. More so, for the now departed Director General Tim Davie, who had staked his tenure at the top of the BBC on achieving an impeccable reputation on bias —  or the lack of it.

I remember thinking that at the time Davie made this his mission, it was a both laudable aim — we need this kind of reporting-based fact-centred aspiration in a time of such media polarisation and information medation — and fool-hardy. Bias in an age of information war — which after all is what we are now in — is both weapon and its fatal consequence. Bias is a weapon to use against the other side and how they present ‘their’ information; and to be accused of bias is to have ones information rendered false, untrue, untreatable. In the current media environment, any connection to verifiable, testable reality is irrelevant to the context, positionally, power of the address or interlocutor.

We are, to be clear, in a war over who gets to say what, who gets to authorise the boundaries of speech, and crucially, its consequences, or lack of them: social. legal, institutional, cultural and so on. (For instance, the argument over free speech is in fact over the claim to be free from social/legal consequences of speech, especially exclusionary speech. This right is codified formally in institutions and informally in social codes — thus, speech and its consequences, is part of how a society is instituted.)

And this brings me back to the connection between this story and the themes of this blog: that institutional aspirations and even possibilities, such as those of the BBC and of a source of truth, are under serious threat and transformation through the massive infrastructuralisation of information, mediation, social-interaction via the tech industry and its grip on social media as the cultural platform of the early C21st. That is, we are in an information war not only concerned with what is said or seen, but how it is validated, authorised, and made public. It is a war the right of politics, and the new-conservatives, are winning in part because they are the only ones (with some exceptions, Novara e.g.,) fighting and more importantly, infrastructuring and instituting. The BBC and those who believe in its model of the truth continue to operate a sense of the truth based on a model of the civic sphere based on the nation, the academy, the civil service and judiciary, international law, and so on — the post-war social contract. They continue to hold to institutions as though the aforementioned complex continues as the infrastructure of information and knowledge distribution and mediation. While this may still be in existence, and may still be operable, and may be reformable; another, much more impactful infrastructural layer has been built on top, and literally in the way of this complex. That is, the tech-new right information infrastructure-assemblage of social media, blog/podcast/vlog influencer-ecosystem, always there smart phone interfaces and the cloud/logistics/service/enterprise/data industries on which power and resources are built and enclosed which provide the container and source of wealth, power, proximity to politics on which the new right is consolidating its world view as the world.

Those not on the side of the tech-right are simply not fighting this battle — seeing only its surface, the so-called culture war — as its only terrain and only about symbolic/representational questions. (This is somewhat unfair, as the debasement of climate politics, DEI and Critical Race Theory shows: there are real structural fights going on, which is why these initiatives needed to be killed off.) Arguments around the BBC are had on the surface, on the possibility, or specific failures of impartiality; not on how to establish a truth or authority within the context of an information war such as those initiated by the new online right.