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| Why was the BBC discussing its coverage of spending cuts with No 10? | Aditya Chakrabortty The BBC is helping convince viewers that spending cuts are inevitable. It's a large-scale version of peer pressureLast Thursday was a great day for conspiracy theorists. The story goes like this: the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, went into Downing Street to meet one of David Cameron's top lieutenants, Steve Hilton.Walking in, he was snapped with a briefing note from the BBC's head of news, which suggested lines defending the Corporation's coverage of the government's spending cuts.For members of the grassy-knoll brigade, this little sequence of events had it all: an unpublicised meeting between two of the men who run Britain, a snatched photo of an internal email, and the suggestion that BBC staffers would now have to tone down their Spending Review season that begins this week. Cue arched eyebrows and indignant tweets all round.And it's true that the episode raises some questions. Why on earth was a BBC manager discussing its coverage of spending cuts with Number 10?How much pressure has the BBC been put under already by the Conservative-led coalition? And why doesn't Mark Thompson get himself a nice satchel to keep his private notes private?After that point, though, I part company from the X-Files gang. For one thing, conspiracies surely come better than this. More importantly, Cameron surely couldn't ask for a bigger favour from the BBC than the one it's already doing him – by running a six-week long series of programmes softening up the public for his government's spending cuts.On 20 October, George Osborne will stand up in parliament and lay out the most savage spending cuts in more than 60 years. The typical government department will have a third of its budget lopped off. Some will be cut by as much as 40%. Whole areas of public service will either be axed or handed over to big private firms to run at a profit. The austerity will be on a scale similar to that which the Greeks have had imposed on them; except here it has been enthusiastically adopted by the government. And when the cuts are finally made, they are likely to arouse more domestic discontent than Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq. There is nothing consensual, let alone inevitable about these actions – they amount to an extreme political choice and a massive gamble to boot.So what is the BBC doing? Why, running a series on TV, radio and the web between now and the big day called The Spending Review: Making it Clear. This strand was dreamed up by Thompson's deputy, Mark Byford, and in a blog published this weekend he promises: "We'll look at where and at what level the cuts may be made and why they are happening now, ask what the key issues are, how the government is dealing with them and what the implications of the cuts could be." In other words: through special debates, big-number editions of Newsnight and the Today programme, we'll treat these cuts as a fact of life, and show you how much this will hurt.Which is not to say that the entire strand will be credulous. The BBC has too many good journalists to allow that to happen, and in any case its management will be far too anxious not to cover the subject from all angles. There will be due consideration given to the wisdom of cutting so deep and so fast; there will probably also be case studies of other countries that managed their debt crises rather differently.But, these will inevitably be presented as caveats to the main argument, which is that the spending cuts are coming. And by doing that, the BBC will help convince watchers and voters that they are inevitable. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as social proof – where people are won round to a point of view not so much by stats and facts as by the fact that lots of others are doing or talking about a particular thing.It's a large-scale version of peer pressure and there's decades of evidence that shows it works. Nor is the evidence just in the academic journals: when the advertising folk proclaimed that "eight out of 10 owners" said their cats preferred one particular catfood, they were using social proof.The same trick is used in politics too. When, in 2008, Gordon Brown pointed to how the rest of the G20 group of leading economies were copying his economic rescue plans, he was using a classic social-proof argument: all these world leaders are following my policy, so it can't be wrong.But you don't always need lots of people in your corner to persuade others; sometimes, one institution will do. The BBC is so important a part of public life in Britain that in this instance it can very well act as the social proof. That is certainly the risk it is running here.As you might have guessed, I am not in favour of the sort of public-spending cuts that Osborne is proposing. But I am not arguing that the BBC should broadcast my particular politics, any more than I expect Radio 1 to play The Fall all day and night. No, it simply shouldn't be taking sides at all. When the results of the spending review are announced on 20 October, that would be the ideal time to begin a six-week long series covering the fallout. The question is, will we get one?PsychologyEconomic policyBBCGeorge OsborneLiberal-Conservative coalitionRecessionAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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