BBC Bias Digest 7 August 2020
BBC ‘RECEIVES 18,000 COMPLAINTS OVER N-WORD’: Darren Boyle (Daily Mail 8/7) noted that the BBC had received 18,000 complaints over a report about a hit and run accident on July 29 in which presenter Fiona Lamdin had used the n-word in a quote attributed to the perpetrators of the accident, who were believed to have been racially-motivated. Mr Boyle said the report had run on local south-west services and the national BBC News Channel, though it had since been removed. He added that by comparison, a report by Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in which she had attacked Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings had received 23,674 complaints. Mr Boyle said that Ofcom guidance on the use of the word was that it was ‘highly unacceptable’ at all times, but could be used when ‘strong contextualisation is required’.
BBC ‘PUSHES WHITE PRIVILEGE’ IN EDUCATION VIDEO: Jack Montgomery (Breitbart London 5/8) reported that a video advocating that ‘white privilege’ meant that ‘your skin colour had not been the cause of your hardship or suffering’ was being pushed by BBC Bitesize, which provides lessons for British schools. He said the film had been made by former basketball player John Amaechi.
Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 6/8) observed that the item was receiving considerable criticism and posted a selection of tweets:
Patrick O’Flynn: BBC indoctrinating school kids with guilt complexes and cultural Marxist BS is one thing that really pushes my buttons. Simply unacceptable from an organisation that levies a compulsory subscription fee. On reflection, the most insidious aspect of this (which I tweeted an initial reaction to last night) is the BBC’s use of the term “explain” to describe an eminently contestable analysis. That kids are led to believe these are established truths and cannot be contested is awful.
Dr Chris Newton: Radical left wing propaganda for kids funded by the BBC license fee payer. And the Tories, with an 80-seat majority, just stand by and let this one-sided indoctrination happen. Unacceptable. Unforgivable.
Calvin Robinson: The BBC is obliged by its charter to “bring people together… and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the UK”. Instead, they are producing divisive material and fanning the flames of racial unrest. All while wanting a “greater role in children’s education”.
Ian Leslie: OK, but isn’t the more important question whether the BBC should be treating a tenuous and contested concept as if it’s neutral scientific knowledge? There are people who aren’t well versed in social theory? Shocking. But surely whether it’s a good explanation or not, it’s a political term adopted by a particular cohort & the BBC should contextualise it as such.
Frances Smith: Total nonsense. People are all born with an array of advantages and disadvantages, what this does is elevate skin colour above all others, and talk as if it were all that mattered. No wonder it annoys so many people. BBC shouldn’t mainstream such easily contested theories.
Karen Harradine: The poverty stricken, mainly white communities of the Rhondda Valleys don’t epitomise ‘white privilege’, a nasty concept riddled with conceptual holes. Why is the BBC race baiting again? And why are we forced to pay for it?
Madeline Grant: I’m old enough to remember when BBC bitesize was good for French vocab tests and GCSE history flash cards.
Darren Grimes: My two brothers, younger than I am are the grandsons of a miner, both without their father, both unemployed after attending rubbish state comprehensives and I’m supposed to believe they’re somehow privileged? The fact this is pushed by the BBC’s revision resources is dangerous. With BBC videos for children on white privilege, podcasts on ‘Karens’ and now the hounding of pensioners as the one group that they know are more likely to rely on their television set to combat loneliness, the BBC seems to be begging the government to act.
Jane Kelly: Why is the BBC asking this fatuous, racist question?
Tim Montgomerie: There are few bigger drivers of social justice than a stable family; especially built around marriage. Where’s the BBC video promoting that or the politicians arguing that? Belief in family isn’t fashionable but kids with two loving, committed parents have won life’s lottery.
Dr Rakib Ehsan: “Your skin colour has not been the cause of your hardship and suffering”. Try explaining this to underaged white girls who fell victim to cases of large-scale child sexual abuse. Cases fundamentally mismanaged by public authorities which were looking to “protect” race relations.
Laurence Fox: Anyone who choses colour of skin over content of character as a way of defining people, is a racist and racism should be stood up to wherever it rears its ugly head, however pretty a bow it’s wrapped up in.
Martin Daubney: That’s why the BBC has no place in education. Their “white privilege” propaganda actively suppresses those who are in the most need of help. It chokes policy & strangles hope. It actively divides our country. Rant over.
ZUBY: If BBC Bitesize have the cojones, I’d love to make a counter video for them explaining why ‘white privilege’ is a divisive, myopic, offensive and potentially dangerous idea that we shouldn’t be perpetuating. Let’s get both sides.
‘BASIC SCIENCE BEYOND BBC’: Jeff O’Leary (The Conservative Woman 7/8), argued that it was difficult to see how the BBC could get its reports of the Beirut explosion disaster so wrong. First noting that reports had said the amount of explosive varied between 2,500 and 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, eventually settling on 2,700 tons, Mr O’Leary suggested that this smacked of ‘take a middle figure as a safe bet’ approach. He then said that science correspondent David Shukman – who he noted did not have a science degree – had claimed the orange colour of the explosion was due to the ammonium nitrate itself, when it had in fact been caused by nitrogen dioxide, a by-product of the explosive reaction.
BBC MURDOCH PROGRAMMES ‘DOMINATED BY BILE’: Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie (£ Spectator 7/8) argued that The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, the BBC’s three-part series about Rupert Murdoch transmitted in July, was dominated by ‘bile’ and contributions by three of the ‘usual suspects’ – Tom Watson, Hugh Grant and Max Moseley – who each dispensed it. He added that, by contrast, a long contribution from Trevor Kavanagh, the former political editor of the Sun, had ended up on the cutting room floor, presumably because he had been ‘warm and supportive’ (of Murdoch). Mr MacKenzie said:
‘But to paint Rupert as a Logan Roy is ridiculous. Anybody who has worked closely with him will tell you his enthusiasms, his warmth and his never-ending drive make him fun to be around and exhausting. If you are a shareholder, you want a Rupert Murdoch to run your business. Always on. Always thinking. Always plotting. Literally 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And as a 12 per cent shareholder but with a voting right of three times that, always aligned to making you and him wealthier.’
BBC Bias Digest 6 August 2020
BBC ‘THREATENS PENSIONERS WITH BAILIFFS’: Continuing coverage of the BBC’s decision to charge 4.5 million over-75s for their licence fees from August 1, William Cole (Daily Mail 6/8) said the corporation was spending an estimated £38m this year on extra measures to make sure that they paid. He added that if ministers decided to make non-payment a civil rather a criminal offence – as was being considered – bailiffs could be sent into the homes of the over-75s to seize and sell their possessions.
Paul Baldwin, in a comment article for the Express (5/8), argued that in forcing pensioners to pay for their television licences, the corporation was currently pursuing them ‘like a grubby loan shark’. He also attacked the BBC’s ‘lefty politics’ as ‘sneaky and insidious’, and noted that John Humphrys, after his retirement as a presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, likened them to ‘out of touch Kremlin commissars’.
BBC MIDDLE-EAST REPORTING ‘DISTORTS HISTORY’: Hadar Sela (Camera UK 4/8) in an analysis of how the BBC had been presenting the framework of Israel-Palestine peace talks since the Oslo accords in the 1990s – when the potential terms were first set down by the US administration – said that the BBC continued to repeat wrongly that the accords had stipulated a ‘two-state solution’ involving reversion to territorial lines shown on the map before the 1967 Middle East war. Ms Sela said that BBC correspondent Paul Reynolds had first suggested , in 2007, that the Oslo accords had ‘implied’ a Palestine state. She said the reality was that the first time it became an aspiration in the framework of formal negotiations expressed by Palestinian and Israeli representatives had been in the Annapolis joint statement of 2007. Despite this, Nick Robinson had said in July on Radio 4 that the two-state solution had been talked about ‘for decades’.
BBC Bias Digest 5 August 2020
BBC ‘FACES PENSIONER REVOLT’: Paul Revoir (Daily Mail 5/8) said that the Age UK charity had warned that the 10-page letter sent out to the over-75s to explain the new licence fee arrangements was too ‘long and complex’ and failed to make clear when the elderly would get a demand for payment. Mr Revoir reported that Age UK director Caroline Abrahams had warned that some of the recipients would be determined not to pay for a licence ‘come what may’. He said that the community organisation Silver Voices was urging all over-60s to cancel their direct debit payments and instead to send monthly, backdated cheques to TV Licensing, thereby causing administrative chaos but keeping within the law. A group spokesman had said:
‘It defies belief that, as a second wave of coronavirus marches over the horizon, the BBC are doing this. It shows a lack of compassion, a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding.’
Mr Revoir said the BBC had said they had hired 800 additional staff to deal with queries from the over-75s and had received 300,000 calls on the matter since March.
BBC OVER-75s ‘FACE CYBERTHREAT’: David Snelling (Express 5/8) said that over-75s who were now having to pay for their television licences were facing a threat from cyber criminals, who were trying to steal their personal data by tricking them. He added that a common scam was the use of a text message which claimed to be an offer of a free year of television viewing. Mr Snelling said that the offer would be ‘hugely tempting’ because of the anger generated by the imposition of the new charge. He quoted a cybersecurity expert, who said that such messages looked convincing and were designed to make vulnerable victims act quickly.
BBC ‘SPREADS RECKLESS RUMOURS’ ABOUT BEIRUT ATTACK: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 5/4) noted that Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen had filed a report saying that there were ‘theories’ that an Israeli attack had caused the huge explosion in Beirut on the evening of August 4. Mr Byers noted that the BBC’s ‘specialist disinformation and social media correspondent’ Marianna Spring had already warned that such reports were ‘unfounded’ and risked spreading misinformation. Mr Byers added:
‘Both Hezbollah and Israel have ruled it out as an Israeli attack and the Israel government has offered to help Lebanon recover from this terrible catastrophe. Why on earth would he (Jeremy Bowen) spread rumours of an Israeli attack? Isn’t that astonishingly reckless and irresponsible from the BBC’s Middle East editor so soon after a devastating event?’
BBC Bias Digest 4 August 2020
MEDIA COVERAGE OF PANDEMIC ‘IS RETRIBUTION FOR BREXIT’: Tim Black (Spiked! 4/8) argued that the media establishment, including the BBC, had generated ‘a barrage of fearmongering’ about the dangers of Covid-19 and seemed to be almost revelling in the pandemic, as if high death tolls, raising infection rates and R numbers were political points to be scored against the ‘Brexity Tory government’. He said:
“That is partially why the dominant media narrative has been so unremittingly doom-laden. It is a form of vengeance for members of an embittered media class. Retribution for the sins of Brexit. Punishment for electing the dastardly Tories. And so, Covid-related death tolls have become a daily incantation. Graphs, always curving ominously, have been tweeted hourly. And always with a sort of grim sense of vindication. No context is offered. No attempt to situate Covid in among the many other causes of death, globally and nationally, is made. There is never any admission that, say, tuberculosis, a disease for which there is treatment and a vaccine, will kill more people around the world this year than Covid. Never any willingness to admit that this nasty virus is just that — a nasty virus, and not the end of the world.”.
BBC Bias Digest 3 August 2020
DEFUND THE BBC GROUP ‘LAUNCHES AGGRESSIVE AD CAMPAIGN’: Guido Fawkes (3/8) reported that the Defund the BBC group had launched a ‘provocative’ mobile billboard campaign across the North-west of England urging followers to cancel their TV licences to support the oiver-75s, who from Saturday (1/8) now had to buy a licence fee. The article said sites for the posters included Salford Quays (outside the BBC’s northern HQ), Oldham and Rochdale. It also noted that Ofcom had last week published a report about audience attitudes to the media and had found there was a ‘moral dislike’ of the BBC and its licence fee among ‘the working class’.
BBC Bias Digest 2 August 2020
TONY PARSONS: BBC ‘DOESN”T LIKE OUR COUNTRY’: Author and commentator Tony Parsons (The Sun on Sunday 2/8) claimed that the BBC’s decision to scrap the free TV licence for the over-75s was ‘a kick in the head’ for those ‘who have borne the brunt of this health emergency’. He asserted:
“This was the year for the BBC to reach out to its most loyal viewers. This was a chance for the BBC to restore its diminished, degraded reputation and to start acting like the voice of the nation. And Auntie blew it. The BBC is now pathetically disconnected from the nation it is meant to represent.”
Citing recent attacks on the reputation of Winston Churchill, Mr Parsons commented that, ‘increasingly, our national broadcaster acts as though it doesn’t like our country’. He added that the BBC ‘will never tell you that the British abolished the slave trade before any other nation on earth, and that no Empire in human history was ever dismantled so peacefully, or was so willing to offer its former subjects a home.’ He continued, ‘As the BBC constantly flaunts its own political agenda, the case for the licence fee collapses.’
BBC TV LICENSING WEBSITE CRASH ‘A FARCE’: The Sunday Times (2/8) and the Mail (2/7) called yesterday’s crash of the TV Licensing website, on the first day of the re-introduced charge for over-75s, ‘a farce’. Rosamund Unwin of the Sunday Times reported that viewers trying to pay were greeted with a message that said the service was “temporarily unavailable while we update it for the changes to over-75 licences”, before the site was restored last night. The BBC had said: “To make the 75+ Plan available for customers online, the TV Licensing website was temporarily offline on Saturday, as was always planned.”
The Sunday Times (2/8) also reported that pensioners were being asked to provide their bank statements to the TV Licensing office to prove that they were in receipt of pension credit, and therefore still eligible for a free licence, It was said that this was raising concerns that the elderly would be at a risk of identity theft and fraud. It was further reported that the BBC had responded:
“TV Licensing are not actively seeking bank statements — this is simply an option and we don’t expect to make very much use of it. The TV Licensing team take extreme care with personal data and have a wide range of measures in place to protect it.”
ENDING OF OVER-75s FREE TV LICENCE ‘WAS GOVERNMENT DECISION’: Katie Harris (Express 2/8), noting that the provision of free BBC TV licences to the over-75s had ended, quoted a BBC spokeswoman saying that it had been the government’s decision rather than the Corporation’s. Ms Harris said the axing of the free licences had happened on the day that a new director of BBC Scotland on a six-figure salary had been appointed. Expressions of concern about the appointment from pensioners affected by the new fee regime were included in the article. One commented:
“They can’t afford free licences for over 75s but can afford to pay a six-figure salary to him and he becomes one of the very very many on six-figure salary at the BBC the BBC should be cutting back on these high earners.”
BBC PROVIDES ‘DISGUSTINGLY UNBALANCED’ MATERIAL FOR CHILDREN: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 1/8), noting that BBC director of radio and education – the former Labour minister James Purnell – had said he wanted to give the BBC a bigger role in educating children, said he was analysing a range of material on the current BBC Bitesize GCSE pages. His first analysis focused on the BBC MIddle East history pages, and noted that the entire focus was on Israel and Palestine. Mr Byers observed that the list of contributors was ‘astonishingly biased’ because ‘not one of the seven Middle East class clips strays from the BBC’s left-of-centre, Israel-slamming narrative’. He concluded:
“And is this disgustingly unbalanced material typical of the BBC’s educational output? Especially in an age of reviving antisemitism, I think we urgently need to know.”
BBC Bias Digest 1 August 2020
BBC SLAMMED FROM WITHIN FOR USE OF ‘N-WORD’: The Daily Telegraph (£ 31/7) reported that the use by BBC social affairs correspondent Fiona Lamdin of the n-word an item broadcast on the BBC News Channel had come under fire from the BBC’s gender and identity correspondent, Megha Mohan, who had stated:
“By not saying the N-word, you send a clear signal that you will not normalise the most violent of language. It blows my mind that this is open for interpretation or being justified – especially at this of all times.”
The article said that the BBC had initially defended the use of the word because it was justified in the context it was broadcast, but had since removed the item from its archive.
THE BBC ‘WANTS TO PLAY A BIGGER ROLE IN CHILDREN’S EDUCATION: Anita Singh (£ Daily Telegraph 31/7), said James Purnell, the BBC’s head of radio and education, had signalled that he wanted the BBC to increase its ‘reach’ by making the Corporation take ‘a greater role in children’s education, and had said ‘the BBC’s online resources’ should ‘replace some of the “traditional” elements of teaching’. This, he claimed, would ‘free teachers to concentrate on pastoral care’.
Joseph Hearty, in the top-rated comment on the story, asserted: “Good God, no! If anyone wonders what sort of approach to education they would adopt just take a look at the Newsbeat section of the BBC website. It’s written by semi-illiterate children and promotes all the usual history-denying, trans-promoting, hijab-wearing, body positive, liberal guff that is exactly the reason people are turning against the BBC in their droves. Do they really think we want them teaching children this cr@p?”
THE BBC ‘IS LIKE A DISAPPROVING RELATIVE’: An article by Susannah Goldsbrough in the Telegraph (£31/7) headlined ‘The BBC is like a disapproving relative – it doesn’t get entertainment and doesn’t want to’argued that the Generation-Z age group (16-24) is turning away from the BBC towards streaming services because ‘their easy-come, easy-go attitude to entertainment’ is something the BBC ‘doesn’t get’ and ‘doesn’t want to’. For them, she claimed, ‘the BBC is like a disapproving relative’. Though the BBC is ‘serious about holding onto younger audiences’ and ‘wants to compete for [their] day-to-day viewing habits’, she argued that ‘the pillar of the British establishment’ needs to remember that ‘entertainment shouldn’t be a dirty word’.
BBC Bias Digest 31 July 2020
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
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 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.’