Back in the 1970s, the BBC tended to report on the economy from two contrasting perspectives: that of producers, which meant the profit/wages contest between employers and trade unions; and that of consumers, which meant a focus on household spending, particularly food and clothing (and with a seasonal sideline in package holidays, replaced in the 90s by home improvements). Economics, in the sense of an explanation of competing academic theories, was rarely broached. Even the specialist media coverage, from the Financial Times to the BBC's Money Programme, tended to focus mainly on the financial markets. That focus was a harbinger of a structural shift that would occur during the 1980s as industrial correspondents were replaced by business editors and the pulse of the economy was taken not through indicators such as unemployment or the trade deficit but in house prices and the balance of payments (handily boosted by financial services).
But while this obviously reflected an ideological watershed - the move from Keynesianism to neoliberalism (and briefly monetarism) - it did not see a lessening in the expertise brought to bear in explaining the economy, merely a shift of the spotlight. City economists might have given the impression that the manufacturing sector was of lesser importance but they clearly understood the financial markets. But there was another shift that occured after 2008. In the face of the failure of academic and City economists to predict, or even initially explain, what was going on as the global banking system seized up, the reporting of economics in the media shifted back towards political journalists. This could be seen as a legitimate recognition of the return of political economy and questions of distributive justice, though the establishment reaction to Thomas Piketty and the pearl-clutching over the revived interest in Marx suggests otherwise. More telling was the implication that this was a judgement on society ("living beyond our means", "maxed out the credit card" etc) that demanded in response a strong political grip and hair-shirts all round. This perspective wouldn't have been out of place in the early 1930s.
Following growing complaints about the poor quality of its coverage of economics since 2010, the BBC has finally got round to addressing the issue in the form of a narrow "thematic" review by "seasoned economics experts and broadcasters" Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. The chaps have been praised for being quite tough with the Corporation, though much of this is just theatre. The review scope is narrow in time (a matter of months), criticism from both left and right is taken as evidence of balance, and the "external interviewees" reflect a spectrum that streches all the way from centre-right to centre-left. Their key conclusion is that "while the risks to impartiality may look political, we think they need a better explanation, which is that they're really journalistic". This allows the BBC to ignore accusations of structural bias and instead agree that it needs to improve the calibre of its journalism, which in practice will mean a shift back to more specialised reporting by economics editors rather than political editors. There may even be less of a City focus.
One thing that the review doesn't explain is why the BBC allowed the coverage of economics to shift from the specialist realm of the City editor to the political editor after 2008. Consequently, there is no historical dimension to the review (what happened between 2007 and 2010?) and only minimal interest in the sociological (the shared milieu of journalists and politicians and their mutually-reinforcing prejudices). The critical responses to the review have also tended to be soft-ball, with eager hopes that the BBC might take economics more seriously (and so widen its pool of invitees onto Newsnight or Today). For James Meadway, the key question is "How different might the last decade of British politics have been if the public had been better informed about economics?" To emphasise the point, he asks "Would a public not spoon-fed mush about the supposed perils of government borrowing have been so ready to accept David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity in the early 2010s? Would Labour’s then leadership have felt so compelled to support spending cuts – a position that helped lay the ground for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity leadership bid? Might the Brexit vote have gone differently?"
This is a progression from the dubious to the implausible. It starts with the presumption that the austerity demanded by the Conservatives after 2008 was an argument about economics, when it's not at all clear that it was. The much derided "household budget" analogy made no sense as an economic argument, but it obviously made sense as a parable of morality: neither a lender nor a borrower be. Likewise, the claim that we could "end up like Greece" was an emotional appeal, not a forecast that the world's 6th largest economy could turn overnight into the 54th. It is even less credible that the Labour leadership between 2010-15 felt "compelled" to support spending cuts because of the quality of such arguments, though they no doubt appreciated their emotional resonance, not least when they were being amplified by the BBC. Labour's qualified support for austerity sprang from the PLP's sincere belief that public spending must play a large part in balancing the books. This was the legacy of the 1990s commitment to prudence, not a sudden conversion to Osbornomics, and you could argue that its roots went all the way back to Jim Callaghan's party conference speech in 1976.
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This is an example of how the review's failure to engage with the history of the Corporation's coverage of economics has allowed its reception to be similarly ahistorical, or at least to have no working memory beyond the last decade. Likewise, the idea that economics was the decisive factor in Brexit comes close to suggesting that euroscepticism was a niche pursuit before 2008. That economics was a key driver of the 2016 referendum has been disproved by both quantitative and qualitative research. We know that votes to leave the EU were heavily correlated by age. What this means is that younger voters more entwined with the economy - in work, with young families and high housing costs etc - tended to vote remain, while older voters with more limited exposure to the economy - notably pensioners and those with their mortgages paid off - tended to vote leave. Brexit was obviously not just down to one thing, but economics came a long way behind immigration and sovereignty as motivating factors, and where it did arise it was usually in the context of decades of punitive industrial policy and growing inequality, not worries over public debt as a percentage of GDP.
The institutional shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism at the BBC can, for emblematic convenience, be isolated to the period 1984-6, between the end of the miners' strike and the "big bang" of market deregulation in the City of London. Similarly, the turn to austerity and the defeat of the short-lived post-Keynesian revival can be isolated to the period 2008-10. Both were marked by a step-change in the BBC's coverage of economics. Given that the Corporation now accepts that a further change is called for, the question must be: what underlying shift does this spectacle of self-criticism and commitment to re-education represent? Is it simply a reflection of the "cost of living crisis", with a return to a 70s-style focus on wages and household bills, or does the reappearance of the "wage-price spiral" in the discourse indicate a renewed political belief that inflation, rather than growth or productivity, is the chief economic challenge?
A major change in finance since the 1970s is the relative clout of banks versus asset managers in defining what is important to the economy and what constitutes economic health. Previously, the banks were dominant and their hatred of inflation (which reduced the cost of debt to borrowers in real terms and so whittled away the lenders' profits) determined policy, notably higher interest rates to offset the falling value of loans. But today it is asset managers who are dominant, or at least the most risky feature in the financial landscape and thus the most indulged (see the Bank of England's intervention to protect pension funds last year after the disastrous Truss/Kwarteng budget, which directly went against their official policy of monetary tightening). For them, it is higher interest rates that are the greater danger because that depresses asset values. Inflation is still a problem, as that can also erode the value of an asset, but after years of freshly-minted speculative capital piling into financial markets, the more immediate worry is that a tight-money regime in response to inflation will reduce liquidity and thus push asset prices down.
There are two other suggestive developments. One is that the state is beginning to push real resources and financial capital towards productive uses and away from speculation. This is most obvious in the US with the COVID stimulus acts and now the Inflation Reduction Act. In the UK, the shift has been modest and much is currently no more than rhetoric, notably around green energy transition and the "foundational economy". The second development is the growing clamour for price controls, most obviously around fuel but increasingly in other area such as basic foodstuffs, as the twin effects of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine continue to work their way through the global system. What this suggests is the weakening grip of finance on the public definition of "economic health" and a popular recognition that price-gouging is driving inflation rather than wage demands (with a corresponding unwillingness to accept that inflation can only be tackled by pushing down on wage rises, suggesting that economics isn't as "over my head" for most people as the BBC report suggests).
What these developments point to is firstly a divergence of interests in haute finance between banks and asset-holders that goes beyond short-term policy: tight money and higher interest rates versus loose money and tax cuts. Though this has produced spectacular political epiphenomena (e.g Liz Truss's ill-fated premiership), the more fundamental issue is how the long-expected post-2008 adjustment (i.e. the downward revaluation of speculative financial assets versus the productive economy) will be handled. This will either be at the expense of fixed incomes, through persistent but controlled inflation, or at the expense of assets, through values depressed by high interest rates. This divergence of interests has relaxed the three-line whip in the media that applied during the era of austerity and the pandemic, when all fractions of capital supported the transfer of funds from the public to the private sector, whether through the Bank of England's quantitative easing or the government's handouts to business and no-strings contracts for cronies.
This has created a space for a more popular interpretation of what matters in the economy. Thus we've seen a turn away from financialisation, notably the obsession with asset price growth (e.g. house prices). There has instead been a turn towards the "real economy" and in particular the profit-wage share (hence the sympathy for striking workers). Against this background, the BBC is hedging its bets by shifting from a political to a more technical stance in its coverage of the economy, even as it persists in a political approach to industrial relations - e.g. taking it as read that strikes are bad for the country. It's possible the BBC is going to improve it's coverage of economics, but it would be naive to believe that this has come about because of a decade of justified criticism by academics or the derision aimed by the great unwashed at Laura Kuenssberg on social media. Economics is in an apolitical state at the moment because the establishment has yet to reach consensus on how financial assets are to be devalued: abruptly through recession or steadily through inflation. The BBC's reset reflects this, and only this.
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