MORE BLOOMIN' BIAS

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Wednesday night's The World Tonight featured another report from Jonty Bloom that crossed the line between simple reporting and outright advocacy. The issue was a highly political one - inheritance tax.
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Robin Lustig introduced the report thus: "Unpopular the tax may be, but as our economics correspondent Jonty Bloom reports, there are economists who argue it's actually rather a good thing." If that had been how Bloom's report functioned, all would have been well. The problem of bias arises because Bloom himself used the views of those economists to himself argue that inheritance tax is "actually rather a good thing".
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The first of Bloom's talking heads was "Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, which has been at the forefront of such free-market thinking and is named after the father of laissez-faire economics, Adam Smith."
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Dr Butler made the case for scrapping inheritance tax for just 9 seconds before Bloom sprang his trap, asking him: "That's not what Adam Smith actually thought is it?" Dr Butler's answer lasted a further 13 seconds - and that was it. We never heard from him again. Having contradicted Dr Butler during the brief interview clip, Bloom then contradicted him again after the clip had ended!: "Adam Smith might have thought that, but what he said about inheritance tax is that it's the most absurd of all suppositions that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth".
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By giving the opposite point of view from that of which he approves so short a shrift, and simultaneously undermining its advocate - twice! -, Bloom shows the true propagandist's knack for manipulating a story to his own ends.
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He went on from that last quotation to make the point he wanted to make: "i.e. that passing on wealth to your children creates an increasingly unfair society and destroys the idea of a level playing field with equal opportunity for all". How can the poor ever catch up if the rich leave ever larger amounts of money to their children?"
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As connoisseurs of bias will know, biased reporters have a habit of 'bigging up' the expertise of those whose views tally with theirs - and Bloom gave a plum instance of this before introducing his next talking head:
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"That's one reason Irwin Steltzer believes in inheritance tax. And that matters, because he's listened to by governments on both sides of the Atlantic, including Gordon Brown's, and is sometimes known as Rupert Murdoch's representative on earth. Dr Steltzer believes that inheritance tax is fair - especially if these days it hits people whose wealth has been built up not by hard work and industry but just because they own the family home."
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(Note, incidentally, that Bloom gives Steltzer his title 'Dr', which he did not apply to Dr Butler. I gave him his proper title!)
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The third talking head also supported Bloom's argument: "And that isn't the only economic argument in favour of inheritance tax. In America the tax is supported by some of the richest in society, including Bill Gates Snr, the founder of the father of Microsoft. His argument is that self-made billionaires, like his son, owe a debt to society because they couldn't have made all that money in the first place without its help."
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Note that, unlike in the case of Dr Butler, neither Dr Steltzer not Mr Gates Snr were (a) questioned or (b) contradicted.
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And unlike Dr Butler, Dr Steltzer got a second bite of the cherry: "Making a lot of money then giving most of it away has long been a tradition of American billionaires and, although as Irwin Steltzer points out, not many of their children end up living in poverty, there is a wider social and economic good to be gained from taxing inheritance."

Bloom then proceeds to his conclusions, and here his advocacy for inheritance tax is full-on:
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"Leaving millions of pounds to your own children, tax-free, always sounds like a brilliant idea, but if virtually no-one - no matter how rich - has to pay inheritance tax then we all have a problem. And that's increasingly what is happening. Inheritance is a tax that the very rich can afford to avoid, which doesn't effect the vast majority of us at all. In fact, fewer and fewer of us are paying it every year. And that is not necessarily a good thing because inheriting wealth destroys the incentive for future generations to study hard, make new discoveries, improve themselves, invest in new businesses and take entrepreneurial risks. As a society and an economy we should worry if increasingly large numbers of people don't have to work at all because the living is easy."
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The political implications of all this were not neglected - for who, besides the 'free-market' Dr Butler, were against inheritance tax?
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"At this year's Conservative Party conference it was hard to find anyone to say a good word about inheritance tax."
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Ah, yes, it's the Tories who are wrong too.
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This is not the only side-taking report from Jonty Bloom - as you'll click if you click on the label 'Jonty Bloom' below. The obvious and natural desire of parents to leave their children a good future was not considered, but, as an instinct, I'd guess it's nearly universal - except among the very rich, and left-wing BBC reporters.
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