BBC Bias Digest

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16 April 2026

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David Keighley

BBC Bias Digest 31 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC STAFF HEADCOUNT ‘FALLS BY JUST 2 PER CENT’:  Freddy Mayhew (Press Gazette 30/7) reported that despite the BBC spending £500m in severance pay and restructuring costs in the past 11 years, the headcount had shrunk from 22,874 to 22,401 – only two per cent. He said the Corporation’s annual reports showed that the BBC had been engaged in ‘constant drives to cut back on staff numbers’, including in 2009, a pledge to reduce its headcount by 10 percent (1,800 posts) and in 2017 to cut 2,600 jobs to make £750 million in savings. He quoted a BBC spokesman: “As ever, our staffing numbers and redundancy figures don’t tell the full story here.

“During this time, the Government awarded the BBC a grant as part of the biggest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s, we launched the BBC Scotland channel and developed our digital services, all of which could not have happened without taking on staff according to our changing business needs. We have also taken a value for money approach to contracts by bringing resources and some teams in-house whilst reducing the number of back office and support roles. As such, an independent report by Ernst & Young found the BBC among the most efficient 25% regulated and non-profit organisations in the UK.”

 

NEWSNIGHT ‘NONSENSE’ ABOUT LOCKDOWN ANNOUNCEMENT:  Guido Fawkes claimed (31/7) that BBC Newsnight policy editor Lewis Goodall had been responsible for spreading the ‘nonsense’ doing the rounds that health secretary Matt Hancock had announced the new North-west semi-lockdown via his personal Twitter account.  The article asserted that the imposition of new measures was actually released by the department of health  in a pooled television interview. It dismissed the idea picked up in some newspapers that the measure was designed to be ‘anti-Eid’.

 

BBC IS NOW ‘STUBBORN PET SHOP OWNER SELLING DEAD PARROT’: Joe Ventre (Taxpayers’ Alliance blog 30/7) argued that the BBC – in demanding that the licence fee should be retained – was selling the equivalent of a ‘dead parrot’ by pretending its services had unique value in a television environment which now contained rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Mr Ventre argued that the licence fee, which was being defended on the same terms as 35 years ago despite a massive explosion of choice,   should be replaced by subscription funding.  He stated:

‘When arguments around content inevitably fall away, Auntie’s admirers will turn to the supposedly unbiased and accountable nature of the broadcaster. Leaving spurious claims of impartiality aside, the fact of the matter is that the BBC leaves much to desire when it comes to transparency. Unlike most public bodies, the Beeb is granted special exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act (2000). This means that taxpayers have no recourse for finding out how much of their money is spent on material used in creative content. We’ve previously covered this topic when news broke of Holby City holding (and subsequently donating) real ventilators to fighting coronavirus. One issue with trying to find out if the BBC offers value for money is it won’t tell you how it’s spending the money!’

BBC Bias Digest 30 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

OFCOM SURVEY FINDS “MORAL DISLIKE” OF THE BBC AMONGST YOUNG:  Craig Simpson,  Daily Telegraph (£ 30/7), said that a report from Ofcom had found that younger audiences ‘are flocking to streaming services like Netflix to find shows with a “talkability factor”‘ and that BBC programmes ‘fail to provide “watercooler moments”’ for young people. The report found that, with attitudes to the BBC,  younger audiences are “more likely to be indifferent” than hostile to the BBC and many value the “societal glue” of the public service broadcaster. But it also said that a minority “cohort” of viewers from largely poorer backgrounds held a “moral dislike” of the corporation ‘over licence fee issues’, including ‘resentment that over-75s will have to pay for it, and because “they feel that the BBC lacks relevant content for their cohort, or that there is bias in the news.”

Mr Simpson reported that a BBC spokesperson responded: “This research highlights the importance of providing world-class, easily-accessible and universally available content that includes an impartial and trusted news service, alongside high quality, distinctive UK programming to bring the nations, regions and diverse communities of the UK together. Despite huge changes in the market, the BBC remains the most-used media organisation among young people with 80 per cent of 16 to 34 year olds using the BBC every week.”

 

BBC GUILTY OF ‘BREATHTAKING BIAS’ IN MURDOCH SERIES: Stephen Glover (Daily Mail 30/7) argued that the BBC Two three-part series Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, which had concluded on 28/7, was a hatchet job which showed the BBC was ‘incapable of balance’.  He said that the case against Rupert Murdoch was put ‘one-sidedly by inveterate Murdoch-haters (such as Max Moseley and the actor Hugh Grant) whose own discreditable pasts were overlooked, while Mr Murdoch was treated as ‘low-grade Mafia’ with his achievements overlooked.  Mr Glover asserted:

‘the case against the tycoon was made at such length and so tendentiously that it was hard for this viewer to keep calm — particularly so when Murdoch’s hysterical accusers were wheeled out.’

Mr Glover noted that the programme made no mention of – for example – Max Moseley’s support for the South African apartheid regime; of former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson’s championship of Carl Beech, who had wrongly accused leading politicians of being part of a paedophile ring; or that Hugh Grant was a member of the ‘fanatical’ anti-press lobbying group Hacked Off.

 

BBC ‘HORROR’ REPORT ‘DENIGRATING WINSTON CHURCHILL’: Commentator GP Taylor, writing in the Yorkshire Post (29/7)  said he had ‘sat in horror’ when Huw Edwards introduced on the BBC One News at Ten a piece that condemned Winston Churchill and his role in the 1943 Bengal famine. ‘It was as if the contributors had been selected on the basis that they believed Churchill to be solely responsible for three million deaths from starvation’, he wrote, adding ‘It doesn’t take a genius to search the internet to find out the background to Churchill and why famine relief was not forthcoming.’ He describe the attempt to ‘blame one man’ as ‘a total disgrace’, calling it an ‘attempt to suck up to anti-establishment agitators’. Mr Taylor quoted LSE Professor of economic history Tirthankar Roy, who said that Churchill had not been a factor in the famine. It had been the government of Bengal, which could have imported grain from other regions but had not done so.

 

BBC GIVES MURDERERS MORE AIRTIME THAN CLIMATE ‘SCEPTICS’: Eric Worrall (What’s Up With That 28/7), reviewing ‘How they made us doubt everything’,  a 10-part  BBC Radio Four series about climate change, noted that the final two episodes were devoted to ‘vilifying’ astrophysicist and climate change analyst Dr Willie Soon, and then did not present Dr Soon’s response to allegations against him.   Mr Worrall concluded:

‘Regardless of whether you think Dr Soon is right or wrong….(he)  deserves better than this one sided gutter press assault on his reputation from the BBC.

‘Even dictators and murderers are often given an opportunity to argue their case on the BBC. But this is a courtesy the BBC “How they made us doubt everything” series has so far failed to extend to a mild-mannered law abiding climate scientist, who was unfortunate enough to be a prime target of their latest ugly smear campaign.’

Mr Worrall said the programme had set out to compare climate scepticism to rejecting the link between tobacco and cancer, but said this was ‘irrelevant to the climate debate’.

Comments on the article included:

‘The programme is comically and aptly named ‘How they made us doubt everything’. The ‘THEY’ is the BBC. The propaganda, bias and distortions dished up daily by the BBC and their fellow travellers have made us doubt everything. They could have called this programme ‘An example of how we at the BBC produce fake news and destroy trust in the media!’.’

 

BBC Bias Digest 29 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC AXES AFTERNOON NEWSROUND AFTER 48 YEARS: Joe Kasper (Sun 29/7) said the BBC was axing its afternoon live television edition of the children’s news service Newsround – shown currently on kids’ service CBBC , but formerly on BBC One – after almost 50 years. Mr Kasper reported that the BBC wanted to transfer more of its children’s content online – and now had Ofcom’s permission to do so – because they were watching increasingly less live television. He added  that despite the lockdown, audiences for the Newsround bulletin had fallen from 37,000 children aged between 6-12 in 2019 to 24,000 in May this year. Mr Kasper noted that Ofcom had earlier warned that if audiences did not engage with the BBC, support for the licence fee could be eroded, and had now said it made sense for more children’s content to be provided online. It had also decided to impose safeguards to ensure the quality of programmes on CBBC was maintained while allowing the amount of news content on the live television channels to be reduced from 85 to 35 hours a year.

 

BBC ‘SEEMS SWEPT UP IN AN EMOTIONAL TIDE’:  Former Guardian political editor Michael White tweeted (28/7), ‘. . . .Lots of anti-racist talk on BBC Radio 4’s Today (again) today, much of it muddled, conventional thinking (again). It’s an important issue, but BBC seems swept up in an emotional tide. I switched to R3 where there are no complaints (yet) that music is too dominated by dead white Germans.’

 

THE BBC’S BROADCASTING MONOPOLY: At The Mallard website (28/7), Serena Lit argued that the BBC is essentially a ‘broadcasting monopoly’ with a ‘stranglehold’ on the industry, saying that the Corporation uses its size and licence fee funding to win advantage against commercial rivals. Where they have to earn their income from adverting the BBC ‘only advertises its own projects across the entire network’.

‘For decades’, she wrote, ‘the BBC has been failing to uphold its charter obligation to provide original services by choosing to create outlets and produce content remarkably similar to what is already being provided by the commercial sector’, and she wondered if top-rated BBC shows would have proven able to compete with Netflix or Apple ‘without help from the licence fee and the BBC’s free in-house advertising’.

‘The bulk of BBC iPlayer’s traffic is a direct result of the licence fee’, she stated. ‘Given we are all obligated to fork out £157.50 a year for it, many feel (understandably) compelled to get their money’s worth. Consequently, we have no meaningful indication of how popular the BBC and its content actually are with the British public’.

 

BBC’S ‘CHURCHILL TRASHING’ POLL LAUNCHED: Kathy Gyngell (Conservative Woman 29/7) argued that recent BBC reports about Winston Churchill, in which he was said to have caused the death through famine of three million people in the Bengal Famine of 1943,  felt like dangerous ‘dog-whistling’ to appease the most ignorant and aggressive end of the so-called anti-racist movement, and she invited readers to vote on the question “Is it time to stop calling Churchill a racist?’. Kathy asked:

‘Is trashing Churchill’s reputation deliberately fuelling the fires of division and prejudice? Is it time to stop denigrating the man who courageously led the West’s battle for freedom against the unspeakable evil of the Nazis?  We want to know what you think.’

BBC Bias Digest 28 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

SKY ARTS ‘TO FILL GAP LEFT BY BBC CUTS’: Luke May (Daily Mail 28/7) reported that satellite broadcaster Sky had decided make its dedicated arts channel available from September on the Freeview platform with no extra charge because cuts on the BBC Four television channel meant there was an important gap to fill. Mr May said that the BBC had cut the budget for BBC Four because it had decided to focus instead on a more youth-focused service on BBC Three. He added that Sky had also announced a raft of new commissions for the arts channel, including Landmark, designed to bring communities together to create the next ‘great British landmark’, as well as a programme about the playwright Harold Pinter. It would also be offering a series of arts bursaries.

 

BBC CHURCHILL REPORT ‘WAS OUTRAGEOUS CALUMNY’:  Henry Getley (Conservative Woman 28/7), analysing further a BBC news report which posited that Winston Churchill had killed three million Indians by triggering the 1943 Bengal famine, asserted that  to ‘anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an ounce of humanity and common sense, the BBC’s outrageous calumny beggars belief’. Mr Getley, noting that ‘ironically’ a 2002 BBC poll – responded to by 1.6m viewers – had found Churchill the greatest Briton ever, also argued that in siding with the mobs who had defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the BBC had sold its soul to Left-wing creeds of progressiveness, virtue-signalling, identity politics, diversity, race, gender and man-made climate change’.

BBC Bias Digest 27 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC ‘FINALLY ADMITS’ PANORAMA BREACH: Guido Fawkes (27/7) said that the BBC had finally admitted – after receiving 800 complaints –  that its April Panorama programme ‘Has the Government Failed the NHS’ had breached editorial standards by not labelling one of the contributors, Dr Sonia Adesara, as a Labour activist. But the article also declared:

‘The organisation, however, refuses to apologise for not labelling other left-wing campaigning contributors accurately, including ‘Docs not Cops’ member Irial Eno, Labour member of 53 years John Ashton,  or Corbyn-rallying Unison steward Libby Nolan.’

 

BBC CORRESPONDENT APOLOGISES TO STURGEON: Freddy Mayhew (UK Press Gazette 27/9) said the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) had ruled that a report by Scotland editor Sarah Smith on BBC One News at Ten had inappropriately said that Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon was ‘enjoying’ the opportunity to make her country’s own lock down rules.  Mr Mayhew noted that Ms Smith had apologised via a Tweet for her choice of word the following day and claimed she had meant to use the word ‘embraced’ but mistakenly used ‘enjoyed’. He reported that the ECU, in its ruling in response to seven complaints about the ‘biased’ report by Ms Smith, said it had been appropriate to issue apologies, and on this occasion via a Tweet because Ms Sturgeon had registered her objection via a Tweet.  The ECU had also ruled that no further action was required.

BBC Bias Digest 26 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC VETERAN ATTACKS ‘SPITEFUL AND VENOMOUS’ REPORT ABOUT CHURCHILL:  Writing in the Mail on Sunday (26/7), veteran BBC investigative reporter Tom Mangold – who joined the Corporation in 1964 –  expressed ‘sadness’ at the BBC, provoked by watching ‘for the tenth time’ an ‘outrageous’ News at Ten report which branded Winston Churchill a racist responsible for the 1943 Bengal Famine. He described the six-minute report as ‘biased, partial, unbalanced and filled with the spite and venom of the worst of toxic woke culture now pulsing through the heart of the Corporation’, adding ‘Viewers were left in no doubt that the reporter agreed with her own preferential report’.

Mr Mangold said that had led him to wonder ‘what on earth has happened’, given that the BBC’s charter remains ‘unequivocal’ about its statutory commitment to impartiality.  He added:

“Today that holy contract is well and truly broken. And so it is that News at Ten is allowed to use Huw Edwards’s authority and credibility – and the Corporation’s reputation for truth – to call Churchill a racist killer. The protester who sprayed graffiti on the statue of the wartime leader during the Black Lives Matter protests, accusing him of racism, must be overwhelmed with gratitude at the BBC’s vindication”.

Mr Mangold attributed the breach in obligations  down to ‘the BBC’s bizarre obsession with youth, diversity and the ever-growing pressure of woke argument’. He suggested that it ‘threatens to become its final act of self-harm’ because the movements the BBC is seeking to appeal to ‘still represent in total only a very small part of Britain’, a ‘minority audience’.

He continued that,  though ‘the BBC at its best is the most wonderful public service broadcaster in the world’, now suddenly, the Twitter trolls, the social media addicts, the young, the immature and the often daft have become the BBC’s recruitment and audience target.’ He concluded:  ‘If you believe Winston Churchill was a racist killer, sit back and enjoy the product. If not, try to help the BBC leap off the greasy slope down which it is sliding faster every day.’

 

BBC ‘NOT HELPING’ NOSTALGIA TV SERIES: Simon Heffer , discussing the nostalgia TV service Talking Pictures (£ Daily Telegraph, 25/7) -which was run from a garden shed and claimed to have up had 6 million viewers a week  –  reported that the BBC had refused to sell founder Noel Cronin the rights to the 1960s TV series Z-Cars and Dixon of Dock Green.  Mr Heffer speculated that ‘either [the BBC] is being the dog in the manger, or perhaps its executives realise they have misjudged the viewing public, and have retro plans of their own’. He added that the latter would be better, as the Corporation was continuing ‘to force upon viewers programmes pandering to the right-on, metropolitan prejudices of the small but noisy minority they meet at dinner parties’. Mr Heffer  concluded: ‘If it really does think such nonsense, then the sooner the licence fee is abolished, the better.’

 

JOHN HUMPHRYS: ‘EU IS WONDERFUL ORGANISATION’: The Sunday Times (£ 26/7) reported comments made by former Today presenter John Humphrys during a Times Radio interview in which he said he was  ‘not a fan’ of Boris Johnson, claimed not to remember who he voted for in the 2019 general election and expanded on his Remain vote in the EU referendum. Mr Humphrys had said:

‘I felt fairly strongly about it. But I did my job, which was to question both sides with equal vim and vigour. I was born in the war. I believed one of the ways to stop it happening again was to join this wonderful organisation where the countries in Europe would be friends. That was what drove me to vote remain.’

The article also noted that Mr Humphrys had been accused of ‘seeming (to be) Eurosceptic’ in interviews by critics.

 

‘CREATIVE DIVERSITY’ AT THE BBC: The Observer (26/7) interviewed June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, quoting her saying that she had ‘rarely’ been on sets ‘where there were other people of colour’.  The article  also noted that the corporation was spending £12m of its commissioning budget ‘to making diverse and inclusive content’ for the next three years, devoting £100m of the current television commissioning budget to ‘on-air inclusivity’ and bringing in a mandatory off-screen target for ‘20% diversity across the networks for new commissions’ from April 2021.

 

BBC ‘GIVING NICOLA STURGEON A ‘PLATFORM TO SCORE PARTY POLITICAL POINTS’: The Sunday Times (£ 26/7),reported claims by opposition politicians that the BBC in Scotland hasd given Nicola Sturgeon an ‘unacceptable platform to score political points’ by continuing to broadcast her hour-long Covid-19 briefings on the BBC’s main Scottish channel while they ‘struggle for airtime’.  It was reported that the Labour Party has requested a breakdown of how much airtime has been given to Ms Sturgeon and Scotland’s other political leaders but it was said that the request this has been ‘declined’ by the BBC.

Labour party deputy leader Jackie Baillie had said:

‘The BBC’s refusal to answer these extremely significant and important questions is highly disappointing. The BBC has a duty to ensure that it remains an impartial broadcaster and that important broadcasts such as the first minister’s coronavirus briefings do not degenerate into the party political sniping and grandstanding we have seen in recent weeks. I urge the BBC to seriously reconsider its refusal to answer these very simple questions. If we cannot rely on the national broadcaster to be straightforward in its dealings, then serious questions around impartiality and professionalism will be raised.’.

 

ESTHER MCVEY ATTACKS OVER-75s LICENCE FEE DECISION: Former minister Esther McVey, and leader of the Blue Collar Conservatism group (Sunday Express 26/7) had warned that the BBC ‘could be mortally wounded’ by its decision to go ahead with requiring over-75s to pay £157.50 for their licence fee from August 1. She had asserted:

‘I think the best thing that you could do to keep the public on board is to actually be a public service broadcaster and look after the people in this country who pay £5billion a year for the service.’

The article noted that Ms McVey was one of 66 Conservative MPs in her BCC group who had written to BBC director general Tony Hall last week questioning the need to penalise over-75s when savings could be made elsewhere.

 

LICENCE FEE IMPLEMENTATION ‘DISTINCTLY AMATEURISH’:  Media correspondent Rosamund Urwin (£ Sunday Times 26/7) warned that the BBC was in danger of making a ‘complete hash’ of the implementation of the decision to force over-75s to pay for their licence fees. She reported that Caroline Abrams of Age UK had claimed that implementation was  ‘distinctly amateurish’ because the TV Licensing unit would only start issuing the 4.5 million ‘payment invitation’ letters on August 1 – the date the new fees were due –   and they would be  posted in batches, ‘so many pensioners face a longer wait’. Ms Abrams claimed the approach smacked of being a last-minute decision,  of a last-minute decision’ and added that it did not give much confidence that it would be well- administered.

News-watch Launches BBC Bias Digest

News-watch Launches BBC Bias Digest

BBC Bias | | by David Keighley

BBC Bias Digest is now a key, regularly updated feature of the News-watch website, and a central focus of our efforts.

  • To try and hold the BBC to account in the public interest
  • To facilitate reform in its governance.

Each day, we are combing newspapers and the web for stories about the BBC relevant to its Charter obligation to deliver impartiality in its news coverage and the handling of controversial matters in its  general output.

It will thus become a central point of recording the deluge of concerns about BBC bias.

News-watch has been chronicling the BBC’s failures of impartiality for more than 20 years, particularly in EU-related output, where the Corporation has not properly reflected the extent and range of pro-Brexit opinion. The evidence for this is posted on this site.

Recently,  such bias has intensified to the extent that recently, BBC Two Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis delivered a blatantly partisan attack on Dominic Cummings, one of the Government’s key officials.

All parts of the BBC’s output have been infected by liberal-left viewpoints on topics such as Brexit,  climate change and green activism and cultural diversity. This has also been chronicled in books such as The Noble Liar, by Robin Aitken, in some newspapers, and widely in sites on the web such as Is the BBC Biased? and The Conservative Woman.

Despite this, the BBC remains impervious to concern. Its complaints process is designed to allow the Corporation to defend itself, rather than taking into account concerns among its audience.

This complacency – a national scandal – is being addressed by News-watch in various forms, including a recent High Court application for judicial review, together with Freedom of Information requests and other legal challenges to the Corporation’s intransigence.

BBC Bias Digest 23 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC ‘WRONGLY BLAMES CHURCHILL FOR INDIA FAMINE’:  Writing for The Critic magazine (21/7), Christopher Howarth accused the BBC, ‘the most powerful megaphone in the land today’, of airing ‘a one-sided attack’ on Winston Churchill.  He wrote that a feature, by the BBC’s Yogita Limaye, which was broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme (20/7), only included voices critical of ‘Britain’s most famous politician’, all concurring in presenting him as ‘reprehensible’ and ‘racist’. Mr Howarth added that the Radio 4 piece focused on the devastating 1943 Bengal famine, and held Winston Churchill ‘responsible’ for it. Mr Howarth argued that it reflected the BBC’s ‘obsession’ with ‘a particular version of history based on…poisonous, chronic racial essentialism’, projecting a ‘narrative of British evil and oppression’ . He added that it was not ‘worthy’ of the BBC to report it ‘as fact, without any semblance of balance’.

Rory Tingle (Daily Mail 23/7) reported that historians had attacked the BBC for an ‘unbalanced’ BBC One News at Ten report (on 21/7)  by Yogita Lamiye  claiming that Churchill was responsible for the ‘mass killing of three million people’ in the 1943 Bengal famine.  Mr Tingle said that in the item – part of a series examining Britain’s colonial legacy’ – contained claims from Indian academics that the then prime minister had framed policies which made him a ‘precipitator’ of mass killings and that he  could have  prioritised ‘white lives over Asian lives’ by not sending relief.  He added that LSE academic Tirthankar Roy had pointed out that the weather-induced famine had been due to the Bengal government’s unequal distribution of food and its failures to invest sufficiently in agricultural development. Mr Tingle said the BBC had responded that the report had contextualised Churchill’s actions  in relation to his overall war strategy, and that they ‘stood by’ the story.

 

VETERAN RADIO 2 PRESENTER ATTACKS BBC MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE: A report by Matthew Moore in The Times recorded BBC Radio 2 veteran Ken Bruce’s interview with David Lloyd’s Radio Moments Conversations podcast (£ 21/7). Mr Bruce, host of the Britain’s most popular radio programme, told Mr Lloyd that the BBC is ‘a frustrating place to work’ and that he sometimes thinks ‘a cull of managers would be no bad thing’, except that, ‘somehow’, whenever such a cull happens, ‘they come back within a few years’. Complaining about licence fee money being spent on the Director-General’s car, Mr Bruce asks, ‘How much does Radio 2 need a policy unit dealing with government?’.

 

BBC ‘SHOULD MOVE BEYOND BIG CITIES’: In a piece in The Times headlined ‘Time to move the civil service out of London’ (£ 22/7), Ben Houchen noted that, ‘too often’, for organisations including the BBC, ‘the north seems to mean Manchester’, arguing that ‘real change’ will come when such  organisations broaden out and also base themselves outside big cities.

In a similar vein, Jim Waterson, media editor of The Guardian (22/7), quoted former Culture Secretary, now Government minister, John Whittingdale saying that it is ‘absolutely essential’ for the BBC to ‘try to sustain support for the licence fee in all these communities [people who live in smaller towns and rural areas] and not just serve the metropolitan elite in London and Manchester. I am very much aware that communities like Cleethorpes begin to feel that the BBC is not providing sufficiently for them’.

 

JOHN WARE ‘CONSIDERING SUING JEREMY CORBYN’: BBC Panorama presenter John Ware (Daily Mail 23/7), noting that former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn had said that his party’s decision to pay damages to him over an edition of Panorama which had investigated anti-semitism in the party was ‘political’ rather than legal, said he had been advised by his legal team that the statement was defamatory and potentially actionable. Mr Ware also said that ‘pro-Corbyn conspiracy theorists’ were persisting in spreading falsehoods about him on the internet. Mr Ware asserted:

“It is broadcasters like the BBC that are trying to hold the line on standards, not the self-appointed ‘media activists’ who make up their own rules and whose self-righteousness leaves them with dangerously little self-doubt. If we want fair and truthful journalism to prevail over deceitful propaganda on the internet, we must hold their authors to account. If we continue to let them get away with it, truth will not be the only casualty. Democracy itself will be wounded – perhaps fatally.”

BBC Digest 22 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

LABOUR PARTY PAYS ‘SUBSTANTIAL DAMAGES’ TO BBC  PRESENTER’:  A report in the UK Press Gazette (22/7) said that the Labour party had paid substantial defamation damages to John Ware, the veteran BBC Panorama presenter’, over an edition of the programme broadcast in July 2019 which investigated the extent of anti-Semitism in party ranks. The report explained that an official party press release had falsely accused Mr Ware of ‘deliberate and malicious misrepresentations designed to mislead the public, and had also claimed that he had invented quotes, flouted journalistic ethics and ‘knowingly promoted falsehoods’ in pursuit of a pre-determined outcome of the question posed by the programme title about anti-semtiism.  The Daily Mail (22/7) claimed that the total libel bill for the party  – which also included payments to seven ‘whistle-blowers’ featured in the programme – would top £500,000. The article also reported that the BBC had called the Labour press release ‘an extraordinarily vitriolic attack’.

 

BBC ‘DISTORTS PALESTINE’ REPORT: Hadar Sela (Camera UK 22/7)  alleged that the BBC ‘Hardtalk’ programme had allowed Husam  Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to London to misrepresent  – without sufficient challenge – the reasons for the expulsion of the Palestinian envoy to Washington in the US. Mr Sela said that in a question, the show’s host, Stephen Sackur had said that he had been expelled because the Trump administration did not want him around anymore, when the real reason was that Palestine had refused to engage in negotiations with Israel, and had thus flouted US laws pre-dating the Trump administration.

BBC Digest 21 July 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

BBC PRESENTER ‘SAVAGED’ OVER LICENCE FEE CLAIMS: The BBC’s Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty – paid £190,000 a year by the Corporation – had been savaged by viewers after saying that the BBC licence fee was ‘worth it’ to ensure that people were ‘educated’ (Daily Mail 21/7). James Gant noted that a storm of tweets had followed Ms Munchetty’s claims in the Radio Times that there had been ‘noise’ about the licence fee for years, but her programme was not ratings driven but there to provide a service that informed, educated and entertained viewers, and the £157.50-a-year BBC licence fee was ‘worth that’. Mr Grant noted that, in response, former MP Douglas Carswell had written:

‘If the BBC licence fee is ‘worth it’, as this well-paid BBC presenter insists, they’d have no difficulty getting folk to pay it as a voluntary subscription without criminal records for non-payment #DefundTheseTroughersNOW.’

Mr Gant, noting that the government was considering plans to decriminalise payment of the BBC licence fee,  also said that Ms Munchetty’s remarks appeared to be at odds with fellow Breakfast presenter Dan Walker, who had posted on Twitter the previous month that his programme was ranked the number one breakfast show on television ‘by some distance’.