A RULING by the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) about numerous aspects of BBC climate change coverage in response to a complaint submitted by News-watch confirms with chilling detachment and arrogance that the Corporation is locked in biased denialism of the worst, dogmatic kind.
They have determined that because the United Nations, governments round the world and their agencies such as the Met Office and Nasa in the US, along with NGOs, believe in the snake oil of climate alarmism, the BBC will only ever cover the topic through that lens.
As part of last week’s curt one-page dismissal of the complaint, ECU Head Fraser Steel, speaking on behalf of Director General Tim Davie, even ruled that the BBC’s brand of climate change alarmism and support for Net Zero was ‘not a matter of political controversy in the UK’.
Tell that to oilrig employees in the North Sea who fear for their jobs because of Ed Miliband’s eco-fascism. Or pensioners who will freeze to death this winter because of rocketing fuel bills triggered by cruel renewables policies.
Readers of TCW Defending Freedom and News-watch are well aware of the BBC’s outrageous bias in this domain through the work of Paul Homewood and others, as well as blogs over many years from News-watch itself, but this latest reply represents a new level of stonewall totalitarianism.
The comprehensive News-watch complaint was originally submitted to Ofcom in October last year on the ground that the BBC’s climate change was so biased that it was a matter of major national importance. Ofcom, in its usual sloth-like handling of complaints from people and organisations it does not like, decided in February that it was not of urgent national importance and said it could be handled by the BBC.
Accordingly, News-watch then wrote to Tim Davie re-submitting the original Ofcom complaint. He regarded it of such minor importance that he left it to the complaints unit to reply. The first part of the usual BBC stonewalling can be read here. In a nutshell, it said that because everyone in power the BBC slavishly follows – from the UN downwards – believes in climate change alarmism, it must be true.
There is no appeal against this BBC decision, and so News-watch is now appealing to Ofcom to review the ECU decision. Rejection is almost inevitable because in almost six years of being the appeals body Ofcom has ruled against the BBC in only a tiny handful of cases. Until the BBC is no longer its own judge and jury in the handling of impartiality complaints and these are instead handled independently, the saga underlines yet again that the BBC is impervious to criticism and has free rein in pursuing its own political agendas in the left-wing/woke arena.
News-watch is campaigning relentlessly to ensure that the new BBC Charter makes the Corporation genuinely independently accountable, or loses its licence fee funding. What are the chances of change under Labour as the new Charter negotiations begin imminently? The work must go on.
Pictured: Kathy Gyngell, left;Norman Fenton, second left; Mark Steyn, right.
Kathy Gyngell, the founder and editor of the TCW (The Conservative Woman) website, has published a powerful blog by an expert risk assessment professor about Ofcom’s and the High Court’s ham-fisted – and arguably dictatorial – role in discrediting Mark Steyn, a courageous campaigning journalist/blogger in highlighting the massive growing concerns about the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccines.
News-watch has been campaigning for more than a decade to make the BBC and Ofcom more accountable for its decisions about impartiality – including its own (ultimately rejected)High Court application for judicial review in 2019 about the BBC’s cavalier rejection of complaints.
The latest developments in the Steyn saga underline that Ofcom, just like the BBC, makes highly questionable rulings – with itself as judge and jury – which seriously threaten free speech held by the so called ‘right’ in British politics.
Mr Steyn was censured by Ofcom on March 2023 for two broadcasts he made on GB News in 2022. In them, he stated that, despite strong claims to the contrary by the government and the NHS ‘establishment’, there was unequivocal mounting evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines were potentially a serious danger to the public.
In brief, Ofcom ruled that the first Steyn show breached its rules as it gave a “materially misleading interpretation” of the figures “without sufficient challenge or counterweight”, which it said risked “harm to viewers”.
Mr Steyn’s application for judicial review was heard at the High Court in June and the sweeping rejection verdict was handed down at the beginning of this month.
The TCW blog by Norman, Fenton, emeritus professor of risk at the Queen Mary University in London, published in full below, contains a damning rebuttal of the Ofcom evidence against Mr Steyn and the High Court judge’s ruling.
News-watch also has another application for judicial review – due to be heard in the High Court in February 2025 (after a delay in listing of an unbelievable two years since the application was submitted) – about Ofcom’s rejection of complaints. More details will follow during the autumn.
It was Ofcom, not Mark Steyn, that misled and harmed the public
IT’S BEEN three weeks since the judge (Mrs Justice Farbey) in Mark Steyn’s case ruled against him, upholding Ofcom rulings against him for comments made in two of his GB News shows back in 2022. The full judgement can be found here.
One of the Ofcom rulings (claim AC-2023-LON-001656) focused on a programme in which Steyn claimed that UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency) data showed triple-vaccinated people were at much greater risk of contracting, being hospitalised, and dying from covid than unvaccinated people. Ofcom ruled that Steyn misled the public on these claims.
The other ruling (claim AC-2023-LON-002280) focused on a show in which his guest Naomi Wolf made claims about vaccine adverse reactions. Ofcom ruled that these claims were inaccurate, and that Steyn failed in his duty as the presenter to challenge Wolf on them.
The Ofcom rulings led to Steyn losing his job at GB News (while he was in hospital following the second of two heart attacks in quick succession after the rulings). Ofcom, who act as judge and jury, did not allow him to provide any defence against the rulings so he decided to mount a judicial review against their rulings in the High Court.
A couple of weeks before the case went to court on June 11 2024 I was asked to provide a report about the statistical issues in the case. As the claim regarding the Naomi Wolf programme was not about statistics, I focused entirely on the claim made against Steyn regarding the UKHSA data. My findings bear on Mrs Justice Farbey’s final decision (point 106 relating to claim AC-2023-LON-001656) that: Ofcom was not ‘obviously wrong’ to insist that broadcasters avoid the risk that vaccinated individuals be caused alarm.
Hence, it is important now to bring the facts into the public domain that show that Ofcom was indeed ‘obviously wrong’. Sadly, it seems the judge did not have these full facts at her disposal.
The full Ofcom complaint against Steyn is detailed here. In particular, their ruling with respect to claim AC-2023-LON-001656 stated: ‘Mark Steyn said in the programme that UKHSA data on those people that had, and those that had not, received a third Covid-19 vaccination dose could be compared because the two groups included approximately the same numbers of people. However, his interpretation that there was “only one conclusion” from this comparison – that the third vaccination caused increased levels of infection, hospitalisation and death – was misleading because it did not take account of key factors such as the significant differences in age or health of the people in these two groups. The programme also failed to reflect that the UKHSA reports made clear that the raw data should not be used to draw conclusions about vaccine efficacy, due to the biases inherent in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.’
The details of my report, which includes relevant links to the data and evidence, is provided below. In summary what I found was that:
Ofcom’s editorial judgement/ruling that ‘Mark Steyn misled the viewer’ is based on the narrow examination of the available UKHSA data and only that to which Steyn specifically referred. Ofcom took no account of the fulldata available at that time which categorically supports (and strengthens) the contention, suggested by Steyn, that the vaccinated were more likely to be hospitalised than the unvaccinated. Analysis of all the data in fact shows Steyn’s assessment not just to be correct but to underplay or underestimate the negative hospital outcomes for the vaccinated categories when compared with the unvaccinated. Their ruling made no reference to the full data published at that time, which showed negative hospital outcomes for the vaccinated to be the one clear conclusion that could be taken from it.
It is somewhat ironic that the only editorial criticism they could have validly made was that Steyn did not provide an analysis in support of his contention using the full published data – and that if he failed in anything it was to insufficiently alert the audience to the risks from booster vaccination.Not only were the boosters ineffective, but the covid case rates in the ‘ever vaccinated’ were higher than those in the ‘never vaccinated’ in almost all age groups, and at least three times higher in the boosted than the never vaccinated.
With respect to covid mortality data,Steyn’s comparison between the UKHSA boosted and unboosted vaccine categories was over-simplified but this was understandable given the obfuscated way in which the UKHSA presented the data. Even had he broken it down by age to avoid ‘age confounding’ (as the Ofcom counsel claimed he should have done) it would not have changed the overall conclusion to be drawn from the data that, for a reason known only to Ofcom, they failed to take into account.
What was missing from Ofcom’s analysis was that for the much more important statistic – all-cause mortality (as opposed to just covid mortality) – in most age groups the all-cause mortality rate was higher in the boosted than the unboosted. And, once we take account of systemic biases in the data, all-cause mortality was higher in the ever vaccinated than the never vaccinated in each and every age group.
Once the systemic biases in both the relevant UKHSA and the ONS datasets are accounted for, both show a consistent lack of efficacy for the vaccines. Ofcom in its ruling against Steyn has encouraged the suppression of this critical information while the public has continued to be offered booster vaccines, exposing them to risk and thereby subjecting them to harm.
If Steyn missed addressing the effect of age confounding, Ofcom’s omission was much more serious and fundamental. It is guilty of using this narrow point to ‘disprove’ a thesis which in every other respect stands up. They are in fact guilty of the ‘blowfish fallacy‘. This is the technique of laser-focusing on an inconsequential methodological aspect of scientific research, blowing it out of proportion in order to distract from the bigger picture. If you persuade people to focus hard enough on specific details, they can miss the gorilla walking through the room.
As stated on its website, ‘OFCOM’s principal duty is: (i) to further the interests of citizens, and (ii) to further consumer interests in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition.’
Ofcom is supposed to be independent and dispassionate. It is neither its role to endorse Government policy nor to prevent criticism of it. Yet an infamous programme segment was screened on ITV which insisted that the (subsequently withdrawn) AstraZeneca vaccine was 100 per cent effective against hospitalisation and death with no interrogation from the presenters about risk, at great potential harm to the public. Ofcom did nothing about this despite hundreds of complaints to them about this segment.
Detailed analysis from my report
Mark Steyn OFCOM case: the UKHSA data
Norman Fenton, 21 May 2024
Summary points
The thrust of Mark’s comments were correct and, if anything, understated because even at the time of the broadcast it was known that, not only were the boosters ineffective, but the covid case rates in the ‘ever vaccinated’ were higher than those in the ‘never vaccinated’ in almost all age groups and at least three times higher in the boosted than the unvaccinated.
With respect to covid mortality data, there are issues with age confounding in what Mark said about the UKHSA data comparing the boosted to the unboosted; this was understandable given the obfuscated way in which the UKHSA presented the data. However, other data and relevant information does indeed confirm the gist of Mark’s statements. Moreover, for the much more important all-cause mortality (as opposed to just covid mortality) in most age groups the rate is higher in the boosted than the unboosted. And, once we take account of systemic biases in the data, all-cause mortality is higher in the ever vaccinated than the never vaccinated in each age group.
If Mark had taken all data that were available at the time into consideration, he could have made even stronger statements showing lack of effectiveness and risks of the booster (and the vaccination in general).
Background/context: The UKHSA data
In week 44 of 2021 the UKHSA weekly vaccine surveillance reports stopped publishing graphs that consistently showed the covid case rates in almost all age groups were higher in the ‘ever vaccinated’ than the ‘never vaccinated’. This was well documented in [1]. However, despite attempts at obfuscation, the reports still provided tables of raw data that enabled us to produce the case rate comparisons as shown in Figure 1. Note that in this week the case rates were higher in the ever vaccinated in all age categories above 30.
Figure 1
This (and subsequent) UKHSA data caused such embarrassment that some key academics who strongly supported the vaccine programme attempted to argue that the UKHSA data should not be used at all and that the ONS data should be used instead. This dispute is discussed in [1][3], where we argue that there are problems with both the UKHSA and ONS data, but that, once we account for systemic biases both datasets show consistent lack of efficacy of the vaccines. Key biases of both datasets include the curious definitions of the different categories of vaccinated people. For example, a person is defined as ‘unvaccinated’ in the first 20 days after the first dose, single vaccinated in the first 20 days of the second dose, etc. These definitions grossly exaggerate vaccine efficacy as explained in [4][8] especially as people are disproportionately likely to test positive within the first two weeks of vaccination (such vaccinated people are classified as unvaccinated!).
What Mark said about the number of boosted (‘triple vaccinated’) versus unboosted:
‘Let us start with the basics. There are approximately equal numbers of triple vaccinated as the combined total of single, double and unvaccinated’;
Based on Table 7 of week 15 report [2], this statement is correct.
‘As you can see, from a pool of 63million, down at the bottom there, 63million, there are 32million who are triple vaccinated. That leaves just under 31million who are either double, single, or unvaccinated. So, we have two groups of similar size, 31, 32million. So, it’s relatively easy to weigh the merits of the third shot upon group A vs group B.’
While this statement is correct for the population as a whole, the numbers of boosted versus non-boosted in each of the different age categories are not roughly equal. For example, in the 70-79 age category, almost all are boosted (4,655,045 compared to 442,667 unboosted), whereas in the 30-39 age category more are unboosted than boosted (5,2103,368 against 4,211,897)
What Mark said about the (covid) mortality rates:
‘We matched these numbers across all age groups. So, the point is, an 80-year-old with a booster shot is more likely to die than an 80-year-old without a booster shot. And likewise, a 30-year-old with the booster shot is more likely to die than a 30-year-old without a booster shot.’
While it is true that, for the overall population those boosted are much more likely to die with covid than those unboosted, this is because the boosted population is made up of disproportionately older people. We call this ‘age confounding’. To avoid age confounding, what we need to do is compare the covid mortality rate in each of the different age groups. In fact, for the 70-79 age group there were 1,668 covid deaths in the boosted compared with 341 in the unboosted. When we divide by the number in each group, we get a covid mortality rate of 36 per 100K people in the boosted group compared with 77 per 100K people in the unboosted group. So, in the 70-79 group the mortality rate is higher in the unboosted (but see later comments about this). However, in the 30-39 age group the story is very different. Here, there are 10 deaths in the boosted group and 9 in the unboosted, meaning that the mortality rate is lower in the unboosted, 0.17 per 100K people, compared with 0.23 per 100K in the boosted.
‘There’s 32million who had the third booster shot, there’s 31million who didn’t. So, we can directly compare the numbers, overall numbers, because they’re the same size. So, if you got the booster shot, you’re dying at three times the rate of the people who didn’t get the booster shot.’
Again, while that statement is true for the overall population it is not true for each age group based on the UKHSA data. In some age groups the mortality rate is higher, but in others it is lower as the examples above demonstrate. However, both the definitions of the vaccination categories and the bizarre definition of a covid ‘death’ (as anybody who dies within 28 days of a PCR positive test irrespective of cause of death) mean that comparing covid mortality rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is almost meaningless. It is for this reason that vaccine efficacy is best measured by comparing all-cause-mortality in the vaccinated against the unvaccinated [7]. Moreover, what was missing from Mark’s analysis, is that there is extensive evidence, as documented for example in [3][4][5][6][7][8], that all-cause mortality is higher in almost all age groups in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated once we adjust for systemic biases.
What Mark said about the covid case rates:
While there is again some age confounding in what Mark said about the case rates, there is no dispute that the UKHSA data shows that covid case rates are much higher (generally at least 3 times higher) in all age categories (except the under 18s) in the boosted (3 doses) compared to the unvaccinated. This is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
A comprehensive thread on X [9] deals with this and the attempts made by the ONS and UKHSA to cover up the embarrassing data.
It is also extremely important to point out that all UK Government claims – including in both the UKHSA and ONS data that (at the time of the programme) the unvaccinated were at higher risk of hospitalisation and death were based on a combination of fraudulent definitions and deliberately murky record-keeping as explained in [10].
The recent report [8] is important to this case because it is a new systematic analysis that shows the extent to which every major study that has claimed vaccine efficacy is biased/flawed due to inappropriate vaccination classification and statistical tricks by which you could show that even a placebo is highly effective.
References
[1] ‘UKHSA Efficacy Stats Death Watch: Week 44’, https://www.eugyppius.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-watch
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1069290/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w15_v2.pdf
[3] ‘Official mortality data for England suggest systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination’, http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28055.09124
[4] https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/how-to-create-the-illusion-your-vaccine
[5] ‘Official mortality data for England reveal systematic undercounting of deaths occurring within first two weeks of Covid-19 vaccination’, http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12472.42248
[6] ‘What the ONS Mortality Covid-19 Surveillance Data can tell us about Vaccine Safety and Efficacy’, http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30898.07362
[7] https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/09/all-cause-mortality-rates-in-england.html
[8] ‘The extent and impact of vaccine status miscategorisation on covid-19 vaccine efficacy studies’ http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.09.24304015
[9] https://x.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1675005406274523137
[10] https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/claims-the-unvaccinated-were-at-higher
ASTONISHINGLY, it is almost ten years since I first wrote my first blog for The Conservative Woman website. By that time, I had been friends with and worked with Kathy Gyngell – whose brainchild it was – for almost 30 years, 14 of them in trying to hold the BBC in check over its outrageously pro-EU coverage, through News-watch.
The springboard to that blog a decade ago? The BBC’s incestuous, self-serving infatuation with Glastonbury. I noted that the Corporation was sending its usual hundreds-strong army to mount disproportionately lavish coverage of the event.
And why? I argued that in the BBC’s warped events diary, this was a ‘woke’ happening par excellence – because at its heart was support for a galaxy of right-on causes such as climate alarmism, led that year by Greenpeace.
My observations about the BBC – underpinned by News-watch research – soon became a feature of TCW’s regular Beebwatch column, and subjects in the first couple of years included the Corporation’s spiteful participation in the baseless claims against Cliff Richard, the build-up to the Brexit referendum, and then in its aftermath, persecution and denigration of Nigel Farage, and the concerted effort to undermine and reverse the ‘yes’ vote.
With hindsight, these were the years in which BBC bias towards ‘woke’ issues became so deeply entrenched that keeping track of the torrent of misinformation became truly impossible to track. Today, virtually every syllable of output is distorted. Weather bulletins are propaganda exercises in which statistics are bent at every opportunity to exaggerate alarmism. Drama is often comically crude but malicious neo-Marxist agitprop. Any coverage of history is about how vile Britain’s contribution to the world has been. Education coverage is about making the young into warriors for woke causes.
A decade on has anything changed at the BBC, and is it likely to any time soon? Sadly, no. In late January, Lucy Frazer, the useless Tories’ Culture Secretary, very belatedly released the BBC’s Mid-Term Review (MTR).
It was announced by her predecessor Nadine Dorries two years earlier. The exercise was trumpeted as a genuine attempt to attack BBC bias and early indications were that there was genuine intent. News-watch was invited to contribute to the process and did so here and here.
We argued in our submission that the only hope of making the BBC properly impartial and in tune with the audiences it is supposed to serve is if the complaints system – in which the Corporation is its own judge and jury – is swept away and replaced by a robustly independent replacement process with teeth.
As recently as late last summer, sources at the highest levels within the Culture Department were still saying that such reforms were under active consideration. But it was not to be. The MTR has turned out to be – like every alleged BBC reform before it – worse than useless. The blunt truth is that the BBC remains in charge of complaints handling. It is the fox with the keys to the hen house. In the entire Charter period (since 2017), only 147 complaints of almost two million received have been upheld by the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit.
The MTR supposedly beefed up the complaints process by suggesting that Ofcom should become more rigorous about BBC bias. The reality is that since 2017 Ofcom has seen fit to investigate only a handful of BBC complaints. Most of its Content Board have strong BBC connections and instead focus their energies on attacking GB News.
Thus, nothing is happening to halt the ‘progressive’ agenda embraced by everyone at the BBC from the Director General downwards. All anyone can now do to resist BBC bias is to stop watching.
AS Marvin Burnell adroitly chronicled here on Thursday, when Nigel Farage told the outside world that he had been appallingly ‘debanked’ by Coutts, the BBC did not even report the story for five days.
They then carried a report on the affair which amounted to what looks like a huge untruth: that his account had been terminated because he did not have enough money to meet the bank’s wealth criteria.
Instead, internal Coutts documents obtained by Mr Farage seem to suggest that he was thrown out on his ear because sinister figures working for the bank had crudely concluded, in some kind of internal kangaroo court, that he supported Brexit and was a bigot, a racist and climate change denier, as can be read here.
After considering the possible reasons for the delay in the BBC covering the story, Burnell concluded that this was a case study in totalitarianism, that Mr Farage was maligned because in the BBC’s mindset, he is ‘an outsider, a dissident . . . the enemy who every right-thinking, inclusive, kind citizen-warrior knows must be destroyed before they can open their mouth’.
Events since then have underlined this conclusion in that the BBC have refused to apologise for their errors. Adding insult to injury, they invited on to their usual Farage attack vehicle, Newsnight, a so-called banking commentator who in reality is an extremist Remainer who’s been spouting vitriol against him for years, not least that he is a racist and xenophobe.
Even more chilling is that this has been par for the course In the BBC’s treatment of the man who, for over a quarter of a century, led the UK people’s revolt against the EU.
News-watch has been tracking the Corporation’s coverage of the former UKIP leader and the Brexit case since the European parliamentary elections of 1999. The record shows that Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys told him that year that it was ‘inconceivable’ – in the usual BBC dismissive attitude towards the Brexit case – that the UK would ever leave the EU.
The relentless focus of the BBC throughout has been to avoid Mr Farage whenever possible, but when an appearance was necessary under electoral law and coverage rules, to use every trick in the book to discredit him. For example, in 2009 during that year’s European parliamentary elections, and as Mr Farage orchestrated pressure for an EU referendum, the BBC’s Europe correspondent posited that he led an ineffective, extremist party which resembled ‘the BNP in blazers’ with ‘the gravy stains of corruption spattered down their fronts’.
In 2013, on the night when David Cameron announced that the EU referendum would take place, Newsnight assembled a programme in which 18 Remainers were pitched against one representative of the ‘out’ case – Mr Farage. News-watch lodged a BBC complaint. The verdict (with the BBC as ever both judge and jury)? No case to answer, m’lud, because this was ‘due’ impartiality – aka the BBC’s view of it.
And when, in 2016, a few weeks after the EU referendum a Polish man was killed in a Harlow shopping mall by a young man in what the BBC reported as a frenzied ‘race-hate’ crime connected to the Brexit vote, John Sweeney assembled a report for Newsnight which suggested that Mr Farage had blood on his hands. It turned out – despite the BBC’s outrageous sensationalism – that the death of the man was nothing to with his nationality, nothing to do with the Brexit vote and nothing to do with the former UKIP leader. When it comes to Mr Farage, the BBC never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Did the Corporation apologise? No: again they maintained they had reported events with ‘due impartiality’. The full saga was reported on TCW here.
The full horrors of the catalogue of BBC invective against Mr Farage and the Brexit case can be seen here under the heading ‘News-watch research into the BBC’s coverage of the EU 1999-2016’.
What has happened with the BBC’s ‘debanking of Farage’ coverage can be seen as yet another step in a constant continuum of discrediting and smearing. This time their first instinct was to ignore the story altogether for, in the BBC’s world, Mr Farage has always been considered a blight on the nation.
The man leading this latest assault on Mr Farage is Simon Jack, BBC business editor and erstwhile Today programme presenter. In this domain, he has form. This News-watch report about the hugely biased Today programme’s anti-Brexit business coverage in the post-referendum period presents evidence of his stance.
A few weeks ago, on July 3, at a charity dinner in the five-star Langham Hotel (cost of afternoon tea there? £75 pp) Mr Jack was seated next to Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of NatWest, the owner of Coutts. We don’t know what went on in their discussions, but it looks as if Dame Alison gave a highly misleading briefing which was music to Mr Jack’s ears and he duly posted his story about Mr Farage the following day.
Mr Farage has rightly demanded a formal apology from the BBC. So far, neither Mr Jack nor the BBC have done so. The only ‘movement’ to be seen is that in the online version of Mr Jack’s story, a paragraph has been added which says that the allegations in the article came from ‘a source’.
No doubt because of this intransigence, Mr Farage upped the stakes at the weekend and lodged a complaint with the Information Commissioner against NatWest’s alleged breach of security and mishandling of his personal data. If the case is upheld, the bank could face a fine of up to £17.5million.
Editor’s note: Since this article was written, the BBC and Simon Jack have issued an apology to Nigel Farage, which you can read here.
THE BBC has crashed to new lows of bias. Director-General Tim Davie, who assumed office three years ago in September, set as his priority the restoration of impartiality. But in the past few months he has presided over a huge campaign – conducted through the so-called Trusted News Initiative, which the Corporation orchestrated, and BBC Verify – to root out and shut down ‘disinformation’ spread by those who disagree with its flagrant anti-British agenda. Not just on the BBC’s own platforms but elsewhere too.
It is tempting to invoke loose parallels between how they are now mobilising to crush dissent with the reign of terror instigated by self-declared Witch-Finder General Matthew Hopkins during the latter part of the English Civil War. He became convinced that battalions of witches were infecting and perverting the body politic in rural East Anglia. Hundreds of innocent women were tortured and at least 100 of them hanged.
The modern-day perceived evildoers are ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘deniers’. It is now emerging that those miscreants in the BBC’s sights are ‘right-wing’, are anti-lockdown, have reservations about the safety of vaccines, do not accept that climate change is a major existential threat, do not believe gender is a matter of elective choice, or that the British Empire was not a malevolent influence on the world.
A BBC ‘disinformation’ witch-finder called Marco Silva – a part of their massively resourced ‘fact checking’ operation Verify announced by news chief Deborah Turness in May – leapt into indignant action last week. He appeared on the Today programme and posted online on Friday.
His primary target? An American businessman and ‘success coach’ residing in Scotland called Dan Pena. His crime? He apparently said in 2017 that he believed that ‘people with money’, the financial institutions and banks, knew that ‘climate change is not going to happen’. Further, that this was ‘the greatest fraud that has been perpetrated on mankind this century’. His quote went viral and has attracted 9million views on and via the social media platform TikTok.
Cue outrage from Silva. He thundered: ‘The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence has found that world temperatures are rising because of human activity, leading to rapid climate change and threatening every aspect of human life.’
How this high priest of the BBC climate religion cult arrived at such certitude is not evidenced, though his Muck Rack account shows he is engaged in a major propaganda exercise against fossil fuels and all those he sees as ‘climate deniers’.
As part of his duties to shut down such ‘disinformation’, Silva detailed on Today how he was making strenuous efforts to have the Pena statements removed, and for TikTok and other social media platforms to ‘clamp down’ on climate change denial and prevent ‘false climate change information from spreading’. He has also detailed how he has found another 365 different videos in English ‘denying the existence of man-made climate change’, and how he has persuaded TikTok to non-platform them.
In parallel with Silva’s efforts, 27-year-old Marianna Spring, rejoicing in the title of BBC ‘disinformation and social media correspondent’, is in full cry searching for ‘conspiracy theorists’. Ms Spring is a former Guardian reporter who specialised in stories about perceived oppression, and so her credentials for working under the Verify aegis are immaculate.
As already noted on TCW by Niall McCrae, she has completed her first BBC magnum opus, a ten-part podcast series grandly called Marianna in Conspiracyland. News-watch has transcribed the full series and is in the process of writing a full survey of its shortcomings. It is chilling reading, not least because of its cub-reporter crassness in believing that differences in opinion can so easily classified and identified as wrong-headed.
Is she another witch-finder, or maybe rather – despite seeing herself hubristically as an innocent Alice – the Red Queen?
Her targets, as she repeats endlessly in the series, are those she perceives to be right-wing conspiracy theorists. She believes these sinister, potentially murderous folk are beavering away in towns such as Totnes and Stroud to foment revolution in the shires. Their off-with-their-heads crimes? These villains are not convinced that anti-Covid vaccines work, are opposed to future lockdowns, do not believe in climate alarmism and dare to talk to people in other countries who have similar beliefs.
Further, it is arguable that the main purpose of her series is to demonise as a conspirator-in-chief Darren Nesbit, the publisher of an alternative newspaper called The Light. As Niall McCrae observed, her treatment of him was massively unfair, and arguably an attempt by the megabillions BBC to shut down a rival operation which operates on a meagre advertising income from local businesses.
Trust in BBC News has suffered a catastrophic collapse, and these developments making the BBC a campaigner for its own worldview illustrate vividly some of the reasons. Everyone who watches the BBC is forced to pay for the privilege, but its core programming no longer serves vast swathes of licence fee-payers.
An organisation without a guaranteed income would be forced to take heed of customer complaints, but the smug BBC – which serves largely as its own judge and jury on matters of impartiality – does not.
A new detailed survey conducted by News-watch of the BBC First complaints handling process shows that the procedure is unfit for purpose. It expands on the submission made by News-watch to the DCMS at the invitation of then Secretary of State Nadine Dorries in July 2022 in connection with the BBC Mid-term Review.
A FRONT-PAGE headline in the Mail on Sunday claiming that highly paid BBC presenters including newsreaders Huw Edwards and Sophie Raworth and Today presenter Nick Robinson have received ‘shock’ redundancy letters fleetingly raised hopes that the Corporation – at last! – is being cut down to size.
But all is not what it seems. The letters have been sent to all high-level news division staff as a matter of routine personnel housekeeping and no one is being forced out. They can, if they like, opt for a redundancy payment of up to £150,000.
According to the MoS, a BBC spokesperson said: ‘This isn’t about any new job cuts – it’s a standard HR exercise relating to savings we’ve announced previously – and it’s not targeting any individuals; we have to send it to everyone who’s at the same grade. We’re looking for expressions of interest in redundancy, not offering it, and it’s not the case that any or everyone who came forward would be accepted.’
The story arguably has the fingerprints of the 225-strong, lavishly funded BBC PR machine all over it. One clue is that Sunday’s story appeared as Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer (the 12th incumbent of the post since 2012) signs off the finishing touches to the BBC Mid-term Charter Review, which was ordered by Nadine Dorries last May and is due to be published towards the end of next month. In the BBC’s bubble-world they still believe themselves to be a sacrosanct national treasure, and no doubt calculate that sob stories such as this will evoke sympathy and temper any reforms that might be in the pipeline.
A MUCH-trumpeted BBC-ordered report into the Corporation’s coverage of economics by erstwhile BBC presenters Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland – who, it is said, are economic ‘experts’ – has been published after almost a year in gestation.
The 50-page document was commissioned as part of Director General Tim Davie’s desperate attempt to prove that the Corporation is impartial and thereby avoid any significant changes being made by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in the BBC’s mid-term review, due in May.
Reading it confirms that while Dilnot and Blastland dish out some stinging negative observations, they are BBC sycophants. Further, the vast majority of the 50 or so people they consulted in preparing their report also inhabit the BBC echo chamber of liberal-left bias. The list is here. Fewer than ten could be seen as leaning towards alternative views.
The conclusions of the report include:
· Many BBC journalists lack understanding of basic economics;
· Output suggests too much that public spending is good;
· Reporters should exercise more caution in making sweeping statements such as that governments ‘will have to’ (carry out prescribed tasks);
· Output does not make clear that fiscal political decisions are also political choices;
· The perspectives of low-paid people are under-reported;
· Contributors do not come from a wide enough spectrum of opinion and interests;
· Output does not give enough information to those who are poorly informed and did not understand fiscal stories.
It has not been disclosed how much the authors were paid for their efforts, but these are all arguably subjective judgments which anyone could arrive at in a matter of days through watching and listening to BBC programmes. Dilnot and Blastland claim to have combed through 11,000 items to reach their ‘expert’ conclusions, but they at no point provide sufficient evidence to justify claims of objective superiority.
Further, it is clear from their methodology (outlined in an appendix) that they regard properly detailed analysis of content as ‘useless’.
Their report can thus also be seen as an exercise in laziness. On the subject of whether economics coverage might be skewed politically, they say: ‘We didn’t find evidence that BBC coverage of fiscal policy is overall too left or right – because we can’t. Others might think the answer obvious, we do not. We doubt the methods available are equal to the task, not with any statistical robustness. These methods would, without a truly vast amount of time and expense, themselves be at risk of bias. In any case, we think it more useful if we’re specific.’
With an approach like this, the BBC will wriggle off the hook of any of the criticisms contained in the report and will carry on regardless. The process is already under way. The official BBC Board response is: ‘We note that the reviewers found widespread appreciation for BBC coverage of tax, public spending, debt and borrowing and they conclude that they did not find evidence of political bias in this output. However, they also concluded that significant interests and perspectives in these areas could be better served by BBC output and the review as a whole provides clear indications for how we can improve editorial standards and audience impact as a result.
‘We have asked the Director General and his Executive team to address the issues presented in this review and to return to the next Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee of the Board (EGSC) with a proposed action plan to fully address these challenges. We will then review that plan at the following Board meeting before implementation. We have also asked the EGSC to consider the lessons learned from this thematic review to inform our approach to the next reviews,’
In other words, move along, nothing to see here. The BBC commissioned the report and are deigning to pay some lip service to the conclusions. By contrast, they have never considered in detail the much more thorough work carried out by News-watch.
