A few childish questions can destroy bias

THE ONE subject on which you can never have an unbiased argument is bias. Having been described as both a Tory harpy and a New Labour crony within the same week, I presume that equal and opposite insults cancel each other out.

Prejudices are a protective shell against uncomfortable surprises. Other people's are, of course, a different matter and a source of perennial irritation. In public life bias is a strange and uneven thing to deal with because it is so obviously woven into the people who then make supposedly objective decisions. Take Lord Hoffman, the Law Lord who delivered the final vote in favour of allowing the Pinochet extradition procedure to continue. He did not consider his wife's Amnesty International role - and his own charitable support - as affecting his ruling. But one can hardly blame the ex-dictator's lawyers for seeing the matter differently. The perception of undeclared influence undermines trust in judicial process. So Lord Hoffman made a quite serious error, on any reading of the case, in not declaring his links to the charity.

The most acceptable form of the bias-ridden argument is the one which is so open that it collapses into ritual. Imparting no new information strengthens existing prejudice. In the testier Conservative columns, those of us who do not believe that most of society's woes are down to the baleful influence of the 1960s become "lifestyle choice merchants". Similarly, the words "self-styled" or "self-confessed" are like the man with a red flag walking in front of a train: they warn you that the next loaded statement will be along shortly. The term bien-pensant invariably arrives with "liberal" in tow and "trendy" as an optional extra. Without reading on, we know that of a bien-pensant, liberal, self-confessed, trendy lifestyle choice merchant, no good can ever come.

Through the ideological looking-glass, the right-wing enemies of sturdy left-wingers are invariably described as "lunatic", "deranged" or "further right than Attila the Hun", which must have been funny the first time someone said it, but not the other forty thousand times afterwards. When all other words fail, they are "fascist". In the mid-1980s on the left, "fascist" was co-ordinated with "bastards", which had a reassuringly plosive para-rhyme to it.

The lumping of people and views into groupings is a dead giveaway of deep-seated prejudice, whether it is Alastair Campbell blasting about the Foreign Office's "Old Etonians" or the withering Tory snobs decrying the views expressed at "Islington dinner parties". In the Soviet bloc this tactic was used by governments to make alternative opinions appear worthless. The late East German writer Stefan Hermlin tackled this head- on by beginning a lecture: "Speaking as the son of the Jewish capitalist bourgeoisie..."

The forms of bias mutate with intellectual and political fashions. William Hague has just set up a media monitoring unit to reveal the shocking callousness of BBC broadcasters towards his party. It is part of the great rituals of British life that the BBC should periodically be alleged to skew its coverage. Remember Norman Tebbit attacking Kate Adie in 1985 because her coverage of the bombing of Libya was insufficiently bloodthirsty? Or Mr Campbell saying he would not let those poor ministers on to Newsnight in case someone sneered at them?

This is a zero-sum game, since the obvious tactic of the party in whose favour bias is supposed to be operating is to complain that it too is unfairly treated and thus neutralise the charge. It took Sir Bernard Ingham to see that this was a huge waste of time: albeit after he had given up being Margaret Thatcher's media rottweiler. There was no point, said the mellow Sir Bernard, in politicians "bleating on" about supposedly slanted coverage. It just reinforced the image of a self-absorbed caste.

Indeed, complaining about the media only reinforces the impression that the Conservatives are down on their luck, just as it did when Labour used to blame the preponderance of Tory papers for its troubles in the 1980s. A lesson of the post-ideological 1990s is that if you look like a winner, the bias will shift in your favour.

The less palatable truth, as Mr Hague probably knows in his gizzards, is that too few members on his own front bench are currently up to going on to Newsnight or the Today programme and playing a blinder. When they do, the audience will drop its marmalade and cry: "too bloody right", regardless of whether James Naughtie has let an unguarded sympathy or irritation show in the questions.

That said, Mr Hague is right to discern an instinctive left-leaning bias in the BBC. Journalists, when weighed en masse, tend to come out more leftish than rightish. Being a top-heavy and over-managed organisation, the BBC inclines to appoint to senior positions people prone to a kind of educated, metropolitan conformity which is instinctively hostile to the Conser- vatives and more likely to admire modernised Labour.

The more spiky, individual or unpredictable souls are probably off starting multi-media businesses in warehouses or running internet radio stations from their back bedrooms. The BBC's problem is not so much being biased as being boring in the kind of people it hires and promotes and who tend to magnify any slant in the institution by coming to think alike.

Journalists cannot help but embody background sentiment in the way they conduct interviews. We are inclined to be kinder about fresh new governments than old and tired ones, but then so are most readers and viewers. What the monitors call bias is often just an uncomfortably sharp reflection of the public mood at any given time.

In a sceptical age, we none the less retain an element of tribal blind faith by being inclined to believe the worst of our enemies and the best of our enemies' enemies. The pleasure of the left in settling an old score with General Pinochet leads to a rash of conclusions that the Chile of the ousted Salvador Allende must have been a marvellous place, which it was not. I say this not to defend Pinochet, a cruel dictator who does not deserve a peaceful old age and has, in the manner of a magical realism novel, got his comeuppance.

But the illusion that a country which has nasty enemies and is embattled must therefore represent something good and right - Cuba and Nicaragua being the other beneficiaries of this fallacy - is dangerous. It promotes a kind of intellectual laziness, the soft landing on the feathers of self- righteousness, which is the enemy of critical thought.

Children often ask adults how we know the things we think we know - hence their maddeningly regressive "whys?". As instinctive philosophers, they readily test the notions of truth and proof and seek to found their views on greater certainties. It is a skill we too readily unlearn. The most stringent monitor of bias should be the one inside us.