Busting the BBC propaganda

The BBC headline blaring about record wage rises was profoundly misleading

"UK wages rise at record rate" blared the BBC headline, while social media framing claimed that the it’s been the fastest wage rise since records began, but it’s only when you actually read the article that they bother to mention that this “wage rise” is actually a wage cut of 0.6%, once inflation is taken into account.

Furthermore the claim that this real-terms pay cut is the fastest rise since records began is demonstrably misleading, because the BBC is pretending that comprehensive average wage statistics only began in 2001 (when the calculation methods were altered slightly), while the reality is that ONS wage growth records go back to 1963.

The truth is that wage growth was significantly higher than the current rate of 7.8% throughout the 1970s much of the 1980, and into the 1990s too, but the BBC simply pretends these records don’t exist because they don’t fit with the narrative they’re trying to push.

If they’d said "since comparable records began in 2001" it would have been less inaccurate, and provided important context, but they chose to mislead by pretending the records that existed before the 2001 methodology change simply don’t exist.

Actually reading the article makes it clear that real-terms average pay is falling mainly because of government wage repression policies against public sector workers, who have been restricted to annual pace of 6.2% wage growth between April and June, while inflation was much higher at 7.9%

And the article entirely omits to mention the fact that average private sector wage growth stats were heavily skewed upwards by large pay increases in finance and business (9.4%), while sectors like retail and restaurants (6.3%) and construction (5.8%) actually suffered dramatic real-terms pay cuts.

The BBC post on Twitter ended up getting corrected with a community note to explain that the record pay rise they’re blaring about is actually a pay cut.

Interestingly the BBC Verify fact checking service hasn’t bothered to issue any kind of correction or context to this misleading BBC headline, preferring to focus their efforts on debunking the absurd conspiracy theories about the Hawaii wildfires being caused by laser weapons.

Yes this deluded drivel about Hawaii needs countering, but if the organisation doing the rebuttal refuses to correct misleading headlines from their own organisation, it rather discredits the rest of their fact-checking output, doesn’t it?

Then there’s the fact the BBC sneakily changed the headline from "UK wages rise at record rate" to "Wage surge raises prospect of further interest rate hike", without following the good journalistic practice of making a note of this alteration in the article, and explaining the reasons for making it.

As to why the BBC is intent on misleading their readers over wage growth, it seems like more than a mere coincidence that it fits in with the ridiculous Tory narrative that inflation is being caused by workers wages, rather than unrestrained corporate greed and grossly inflated energy bills.

UK workers are still earning less in real-terms than they were in 2008, and wages are still not keeping track with inflation, yet Rishi Sunak and the Tories want people to believe that soaring prices are being caused by workers running around with too much excess cash in their pockets!

It’s up to you to decide whether it’s just a pure coincidence that the BBC’s misleading headline aligned so tightly with the reality-reversed Tory narrative that inflation is being driven by workers asking for inflation-matched pay rises.

But what’s not up for debate is fact that the headline itself was misleading, as was the way it was framed in BBC social media posts.