BBC Bias Archive

The Brexit Collection reveals the depth of the Corporation’s pro-EU bias – 13/07/2016

The Brexit Collection reveals the depth of the Corporation’s pro-EU bias – 13/07/2016

After the EU referendum, the BBC assembled on Radio 4 a barrage of anti-Brexit programmes which predicted that there would be rioting on the streets over food supply, the virtual ruin of the Scotch whisky industry and an uncontrolled explosion of hate crimes against EU citizens.

July 13, 2016

BBC reform, like so many other issues, has been pushed off the agenda by the referendum hullaballoo.

But sorting out BBC bias as the Brexit process gets underway is surely an urgent and major priority for the new May government – that is, if she genuinely wants Britain out.

The Corporation clearly now sees its central mission to push at every opportunity the case for Remain, for a second referendum, for a general election to endorse the exit plans. Anything, in fact, anything to upset the referendum vote.

So great is their opposition to ‘exit’ that their bias is now arguably (for example Newsnight, here) a deliberate attempt to undermine the democratic process, and to reinforce the view (held by many in the Conservative and Labour party and those who mounted demonstrations at the weekend) that those who voted ‘Leave’ were basing their decisions on lies; that they were deluded and plain wrong.

The new BBC Royal Charter is due to come into effect by the beginning of 2017, and yet the changes so far proposed by culture secretary John Whittingdale – broadly putting complaints under Ofcom and creating a new management board – will scarcely scratch the surface of current malpractice.

And meanwhile, BBC bias is continuing on an industrial scale. So brazen has it become that it has posted on the BBC iPlayer the Brexit Collection, a selection of 15 Radio 4 programmes about the Brexit vote.

The bias across most of the programmes is so extreme that it is impossible to know where to begin in describing it. News-watch, will, in due course, publish all the transcripts together with a full analysis and report.

In the meantime, a good entry point is the edition of The Food Programme, first broadcast on Sunday July 3, and presented by Dan Saladino.

He assembled for the bulk of the programme a cast list of six guests who declared, between them, that Brexit could lead to food riots; that ensuring food security after Brexit amounted to the worst peacetime challenge that the UK had ever faced; that farms would be abandoned, agricultural jobs would be lost, that the Scotch whisky industry faced virtual ruin, and that immigrants in the food processing and production industry the length and breadth of the UK were now living in fear. The full picture is here.

A key mover in this blatant exaggeration and scare-mongering was Professor Tim Lang from the City University in London, the main ‘expert’ on food supply. What Saladino did not tell listeners, however, was that Lang also works for a greenie food charity called Sustain, which, their annual reports show, receives a significant part of its funding (at least 10 per cent and probably as high as 25 per cent) directly or from the EU.

Ranged against the six gloom-mongers was a lone fisherman, who said he wanted Brexit but little more – the diminution of the UK fishing industry under the Common Fisheries Policy was not on the agenda –  and Tim Worstall, from the Adam Smith Institute. The latter managed to suggest, against all the predictions of doom elsewhere in the programme, that Brexit would actually lead to a reduction in food tariffs, and that the UK could make better trade deals with partners throughout the world.

But Saladino clearly thought that any positive comment about post-Brexit prospects should come with a health warning. Unlike with Professor Lang and his link with EU funding, he carefully pointed out that Worstall had been a speechwriter for Nigel Farage. For a BBC presenter, that, of course is a dog-whistle hand grenade that any views from the contributor have to be treated with caution because of (in the BBC’s eyes) Farage’s ‘extreme’ political views.

Another programme in the Brexit Collection was How to Make Brexit presented by Carolyn Quinn, about Greenland’s decision to leave the EU back in the 1980s. The bias is so evident it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Close to the beginning, Quinn used an extract from a pro-EU rant on the Now Show to illustrate one of her key points. The tone was thus set.

Quinn’s linking commentary and choice of quotes was framed with only one aim in mind – to tell us how desperately complex a departure would be. The first quote in this vein from a contributor was:

“This is the largest scale legislation and policy exercise that has possibly been carried out ever…The trade options alone are staggering….” Quinn left absolutely no room for doubt: leaving the EU is something that only a fool would contemplate.

Further initial commentary about the Brexit Collection can be found on the Is the BBC Biased? website here.

The choice of these programmes shows above all that the BBC itself does not care about and does not even begin to understand the depths of its pro-EU bias. The new Secretary of State for Culture has a huge challenge on his hands. The task of dealing with it has scarcely even begun.

BBC Drama revives anti-capitalist Priestley in a not-so-subtle hymn to Corbyn 18/09/2015

BBC Drama revives anti-capitalist Priestley in a not-so-subtle hymn to Corbyn 18/09/2015

This post from 2015 suggested that the BBC’s new version of the J.B Priestley classic play An Inspector Calls  – deliberately mangled to big up the core anti-capitalist theme – had been broadcast to celebrate the appointment of Jeremy Corbyn  as new Labour party leader.

18th September 2015

J.B Priestley, who in the 1930s and into the Second World War set himself up as the BBC’s master of socialist propaganda in his regular radio talks – so much so that Churchill believed he was undermining the war effort – must be smiling from on high today.

A new bells-and-whistles version of his play An Inspector Calls – written in 1945 and actually first performed in Stalin’s Russia – was chosen by the right-on comrades at Portland Place to go out on a Sunday night BBC1 primetime slot to mark the election of their hero, Jeremy Corbyn.

Coincidence, do I hear you cry? Not a chance. The BBC has a promotions unit whose job it is identify and head off scheduling clashes that might cause offence to the politically correct. Have no doubt, the timing was deliberate. What a lovely wheeze to celebrate the election of the most left-wing Labour leader in a generation.

But, then again, maybe even Priestley might be turning in his grave about how the BBC comrades mangled his most famous play.

His masterful plot – in which a mysterious inspector arrives to tell a mill owner’s family of the death of a poor hapless woman who, it transpires, they had all in different ways abused – reveals their moral culpability and shows them to possess almost every negative human characteristic imaginable.

The inspector, by contrast, emerges as  a brilliant, incisive sleuth who exposes and nails every aspect of their selfishness, nastiness and hypocrisy. The working class heroine, Eva Smith,  only referred to but never actually seen in the stage play, was mistreated in different ways by each member of the family. Because of their amoral self-interest, she is first sacked for union activism, driven  into poverty, then forced into prostitution, and finally denied the charity she seeks. They, in effect, force her into agonising suicide by swallowing disinfectant.

Gosh, how the BBC went to town on her on Sunday night..

In  a massive hijacking of the original text of the play, they decided to bring Eva directly into the plot in a series of flashbacks.

We saw Eva, a solid, flesh and blood character, descend into hell thanks to this evil, rich family. In this subtle-as-a-brick change, the intent was for the audience to see and empathise with the capitalist exploitation of her, and to witness her transformation from a porcelain, stunning beauty to an emaciated wreck.  The manufactured additional scenes were scripted and shot  for maximum  impact so that there could be no doubt that the upper/middle class tyrants who tormented Eva were unambiguously bad.

This was a subtle and  disturbing tale of 19th century morality, conscience and class transformed into a crude anti-capitalist  rant. All traces of subtlety were smashed to smithereens.

Is this over-egging the pudding in terms of claims of BBC bias ?

Well the BBC’s chums at The Guardian clearly got the message. Its television drama critic Sam Wollaston said the plea to the audience by the inspector at the end of the play to heed the plight of the working class could today be substituted using the word Syrians instead of Eva Smith and made direct reference to the little boy found drowned on a Turkish beach:

“There are millions and millions of Alan Kurdis left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and a chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.”

Did the BBC press office maybe suggest this to Wollaston behind the scenes?

Every aspect of this beautifully shot, directed and acted production worked in similar vein. Ken Stott, as the mill-owner, and Miranda Richardson, his wife, used all their formidable acting talent to emphasis just how thoroughly, deeply vacuous, unpleasant and unprincipled this capitalist couple were.

In other words, an ode to Corbyn mania. Elsewhere, too, the  BBC has been bigging up the message.

Revealed: Humphrys’s own catalogue of Brexit bias 24/09/2019

Revealed: Humphrys’s own catalogue of Brexit bias 24/09/2019

Almost two years ago, John Humphrys retired from his role as presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and published a new autobiography to mark the occasion.  This blog claimed he was being hypocritical in continuing to work for the Corporation over the last decade while secretly disagreeing with its Brexit coverage.

24th September 2019

Kathy Gyngell clearly highlighted on TCW yesterday the hypocrisy of John Humphrys revealed in his forthcoming memoirs, being serialised in the Daily Mail. Today she discusses further evidence of his double standards, this time over the Iraq Dossier affair.

How could he have continued to work on BBC Radio 4’s Today – drawing massive pay from the pockets of the public he professed to serve – with the concerns he says he had about the anti-Brexit bias of the BBC hierarchy and the Corporation’s general liberal left groupthink bias?

Some would call that fraud.

There is another glaring contradiction in his stance. Mr Humphrys declares that he still believes that the BBC is a wonderful institution, is a ‘tremendous and irreplaceable force for good’ and that the country is stronger because it exists.

How does he square such sycophantic hyperbole with his assertion that the flagship BBC programme Today and news output generally is infected with institutional bias? It’s a massive contradiction. Impartiality is a core BBC Charter obligation and his grave allegations are that the Corporation has been in breach of it at least since the EU referendum (as well as at other times, as outlined below).

Digging into the Humphrys archives unearths rafts of similar inconsistencies in his approach and conduct which suggest he has worked for at least the last 20 years in a bubble of what at best can be described as selective vision and hearing.

Much of what Mr Humphrys has put into his book is not new at all. In 2014 (perhaps when he started drafting his memoirs? – there was no other obvious peg) and again in 2017 (h/t Is the BBC Biased?), he gave interviews to Radio Times which contained strikingly similar key points: that there was at the Corporation an all-pervading liberal outlook, and that the BBC’s reporting of the desire for EU withdrawal and concerns about high immigration levels had not properly reflected widespread public concern.

Then, as now, he was noticeably vague on detail. He seems to lay most of the blame on ‘bosses’ who were upset by the referendum result. Is his view that they have directly influenced programme content – and if so, who was it who followed their instructions? The Today editor? Presenters? Producers and behind-the-scenes staff?

In 2014, when the first Radio Times piece appeared, News-watch noted this point, and stated in a blog:

‘He doesn’t say in which interview, with which guests or how or when he arrived at the judgment . . . No, this “bias” happened at some undefined, mysterious time in the murky miasmic mists of the Blair era. It evidently made Humphrys queasy and uneasy, but back then, he and his chums above and below him in the BBC hierarchy did nothing at all about it. Now, though, says the great man, the bias is fixed – it’s a matter of regret, but move along there, folks, nothing to see: everything in the BBC garden is tickety-boo.’

News-watch has analysed over the years more than 1,200 EU-related interviews conducted by Mr Humphrys. Analysis in the News-watch reports highlight that his approach to Brexit was shot through with the bias he now seems to blame others for creating.

Two prime examples stand out. In 1999, when a thirty-something Nigel Farage was standing for the first time in the European Parliamentary elections as a Ukip candidate, most of the interview was taken up with suggesting that Ukip was, in effect, a maverick aberration. A News-watch blog observed: 

‘Farage said he simply wanted his country back on an amicable basis, and free trade; Humphrys’s stance was that this was ‘literally unthinkable’. . . . (he) did everything he could to attack the credibility of Ukip and asked nothing about the thinking behind the need for withdrawal. His opening gambit was to observe that it was “funny” (peculiar) and “puzzling” that Ukip was contesting seats in the European Parliament when it wanted to withdraw from the EU.’

Spool forward to the closing days of the EU referendum, and Mr Humphrys filed a highly unusual (in terms of its length) 27-minute Today item on attitudes towards immigration based on visits he made to Keighley in West Yorkshire, Shirebrook in Derbyshire and Hackney, east London. The News-watch analysis concluded:

‘Humphrys’s approach was heavily biased. In his world those who oppose immigration do so . . . from a position of prejudice. He . . . missed out numbers and rate of expansion – the key bedrock of opposition to current levels of immigration. Contributions of those who expressed concerns about immigration came across as shallow and prejudiced, a picture that was made worse by Humphrys’s repeated putting of “racist” claims to them. They had to deny they were racists, and were given only minimal space to advance their fears about numbers. ‘On the other side of the coin, Humphrys heavily stressed the contributions of those who were, in various ways – in their own estimation – victims of prejudice . . . Immigrants he spoke to wanted a better world, and had been thwarted in that quest only by white prejudice.’

All this, coupled with other more detailed analysis in News-watch reports, boils down to the fact that Mr Humphrys is as responsible as everyone else at the Corporation for BBC bias. What he is alleging now will probably generate book sales, but do nothing to sort out the problems he identifies. Those inside the BBC bubble, Mr Humphrys included, are incapable of seeing outside it. And complacency of the type displayed by Mr Humphrys for at least 20 years (the period of News-watch analysis) has blocked any chance of a solution.

Will Mr Humphrys now be thrown to the wolves by the bosses he so clearly despises? No. The Corporation will carry on regardless. As it always does.

Don’t rewrite history – we voted Leave because of Farage and mass immigration 26/07/2016

Don’t rewrite history – we voted Leave because of Farage and mass immigration 26/07/2016

A few weeks after the Brexit vote in 2016 the official Leave campaign (led by Dominic Cummings)  – aided and abetted by the BBC – were hell-bent on claiming they had won because they had ‘neutralised’ the alleged overt racism of Nigel Farage and the alternative Leave axis. 

26th July 2016

Referendum history is being re-written. The official ‘out campaign’ – in an interview for the Daily Politics and Brexit Britain Newsnight Special – has said that a key element was neutralising ‘the threat’ of Nigel Farage and presenting a more middle ground alternative.

Codswallop!  This is a simplistic and Orwellian re-writing of history. Most of the Conservative party, the BBC and the Left have always hated Ukip and Farage – and now that the dust is settling on the referendum are busy writing a hagiography that chimes with their contempt.

The reality is, however, that without Nigel Farage, there would have been no referendum. And there certainly would have been no ‘exit’ vote. It happened because of a crassly inept ‘remain’ campaign (analysed here) and a range of interlocking factors focused on an intense dislike and fear of the damage to British society and culture the EU has wrought.

Those hagiographers should take on board some basic, sobering facts. Holding the poll was adopted as official Conservative party policy in 2013 only because Ukip – guided by Farage – was making such deep inroads into the Conservative vote that David Cameron had no alternative. Up until that point – it has now emerged – he was a Conservative leader living a lie.

He had conned the Conservative party parliamentary rank and file and grassroots into backing him as leader in 2005 (against David Davis, a true ‘out’ campaigner) because he had told a huge porky – that he was ‘eurosceptic’.

The reality, as emerged in graphic detail during the referendum campaign, is that Cameron – and many of his supporters – is every bit a pro-EU figure as Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Edward Heath. He was rashly, perhaps even recklessly, prepared to stake everything – and tell huge economic untruths – on ‘remain’.

Second, although elements of Vote Leave were based on smart online marketing techniques, there were glaring shortcomings in its approach from the outset.

For example, it failed to set up a proper unit to rebut BBC propaganda, and it failed to understand who to put up in the media to argue the Brexit case. The BBC coverage in response to this inadequacy nearly swung it for remain.  The Corporation could not believe its luck.

Vote Leave were also not clear about who they were targeting or what was likely to motivate ‘out’ voters. Control of immigration, for example – and the impact it was having, was scarcely mentioned until the final weeks of the campaign, and then only half-heartedly.

Farage, by contrast, after 25 years of campaigning at grassroots level – and putting up with name-calling, death threats from Scottish nationalists and the abuse of the BBC throughout – knew that the biggest issue for the 17m+ who voted ‘out’ was not how much money we give to Brussels, but that the EU socialist project was swamping our sense of identity, and was causing dislocation by allowing uncontrolled mass immigration on an unmanageable and unprecedented scale.

He knew because he had personally been there and spoken to thousands of voters, that folk in Boston in Lincolnshire, in Sunderland (despite the Nissan plant) and Middlesbrough, in Gravesend and Southend, in Ebbw Vale, in the Tory shires and the so-called ‘working-class North’, were sick to the back teeth of being patronised and lied to about the true nature of the EU project by politicians.

The hagiographers now say that the poster showing a snaking queue of ‘immigrants’ released by Farage on the Thursday before polling was ‘racist’. The BBC has amplified that message in dozens of contexts, and continues to do so. It is being disgracefully projected in lockstep with figures such as Baroness Warsi, Jeremy Corbyn and Eddy Izzard.

The reality is that the poster summed up exactly the frustration of the millions of voters who made Brexit happen, to defend their communities and stand up to the oppression and chaos unleashed on Britain by Brussels.

Of course, such a strategy ran risks. No-one could have foreseen the shooting of MP Jo Cox, and then the relentless and utterly cynical milking of the tragedy by ‘remain’, by Labour MPs totally out of step with their constituents, and the BBC, to suggest that supporters of ‘out’ – and above all, Farage – were all hate-filled racists. The reality is that the totally unforeseeable backlash unleashed by this tide of anti-Ukip/Farage certainly cost ‘out’ many votes.

That, however, was compounded by figures such as Michael Gove, who on the Sunday before voting, on the Andrew Marr show deliberately suggesting that he believed the Ukip poster to be racist and inexcusable.

The sobering, awful reality after the biggest democratic vote in British history is that elements of the Conservative party, aided and abetted by the BBC, are now back in control and are busy re-writing history in Animal Farm style. Such opinions suggest that Brexit is far from assured.

Yes, David Davis, is a genuine ’outer’, an immensely able politician. But he and his main lieutenant, Liam Fox, are surrounded by a party made up many for whom the lessons have clearly not sunk in. The British people did not vote for the Tory party on June 23. They voted with a roar to say that British cultural identity – in its many and tolerant guises – should be protected, and to get rid of the oppressive and destructive clutches of the EU.

We’re right about climate change, say the BBC – and let the facts go hang 16/10/2018

We’re right about climate change, say the BBC – and let the facts go hang 16/10/2018

A milestone in the BBC’s descent into becoming an overt political campaigning group – on a par with Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion – came in October, 2018 when director of news Fran Unsworth issued a formal directive which decreed in effect that climate alarmism was based on proven facts and could no longer be challenged on BBC airwaves. One of her senior executives, James Stephenson, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Feedback programme to explain the new directive.

October 16, 2018

How idiotic has the advocacy of climate alarmism by the BBC become?

Last month, as TCW reported, BBC news director Fran Unsworth issued a formal directive stating, in effect, that alarmism is proven and may not be challenged on the BBC airwaves.

Now one of her key minions, James Stephenson, the BBC’s overall editor of news and current affairs, has appeared on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4’s Feedback to ram home the message.

Full reading of the transcript is recommended to appreciate the jaw-dropping scale of the bias involved, but in essence Stephenson declared that, despite viewer concerns that the Corporation was adopting a partisan approach, ‘the science’ is beyond doubt and the IPCC’s word on the subject must be considered gospel.

His stance amounts to a total junking by the Corporation of basic scientific empiricism, which since Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus in 1267 has been based on the premise that one new set of verifiable data can sweep away any theory.

In that context, the alleged existence of ‘consensus’ between climate scientists on which Stephenson relies for justifying his propaganda position matters not one jot.

In fact – despite all the IPCC’s posturing, politicking and blustering – the study of the workings of the globe’s climate is in its infancy, not least because measurement of variables is so unreliable and incomplete.

A leading anti-alarmist scientist (and true empiricist), the Australian Jo Nova, excoriatingly reports that the world’s major climate ‘record’ – on which are anchored many of the IPCC’s alarmist predictions – is riddled with massive errors, gaps and assumptions.

So extreme was Stephenson’s partisanship in favour of the climate alarmist stance on Feedback that he bloody-mindedly defended a major mistake in the Corporation’s IPCC-related coverage.

Today presenters John Humphrys and Sarah Montague both wrongly said the IPCC report was warning about a 1.5 per cent rise in global temperatures when actually it referred to 1.5 degrees. Whoops, but in the BBC’s manual of climate change reporting, who cares? Stephenson accepted that this was inaccurate, but claimed it did not matter because ‘audiences would have recognised it was a slip’.

Eh? In other words, in the BBC’s climate change universe, never let the facts get in the way of a good scare story.

Ironically, perhaps, the BBC position on alarmism can be compared to that of the Catholic Church as imagined in Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 play The Life of Galileo. In the 1960s this was a ‘must see’ drama for all those on the Left. They wanted to ridicule the play’s projection of the unreason and unbending conservatism of Catholicism, then one of the biggest targets of every Left-winger. Ultra-Marxist Brecht represented Galileo as the voice of ‘reason’ against the Church’s defence of bigoted religious orthodoxy. The BBC, of course, would love to see themselves as Galileo in the climate change debate.

In reality, they are not. The BBC, the IPCC and other bodies such as the EU, politicians and governments who have swallowed the IPCC agenda, the multi-national companies benefiting from ‘green’ energy, and academia are now all vested interests defending the ‘warmist’ status quo at any and every cost – including the rejection of reason itself.

Every man (and woman and non-binary) jack of them, like the Catholic Church in Brecht’s projection, is pitched against true scientific inquiry. Those who question alarmism are not ‘deniers’, as the BBC so insultingly calls them. Rather, it is they, the ‘deniers’, the anti-alarmists, who are heroes and heroines fighting to smash the deeply corrupt alarmist scam, which, on some estimates, is costing taxpayers trillions of dollars a year.

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
David Keighley: So who did pay for the BBC’s latest blast of pro-EU propaganda? 04/03/2015

David Keighley: So who did pay for the BBC’s latest blast of pro-EU propaganda? 04/03/2015

March 4, 2015

Scratch the surface of almost any BBC statement about ‘impartiality’ or ‘bias’ and you unearth rather an unpleasant smell.

The BBC says no EU money was used in the making of its Sunday night pro-EU extravaganza The Great European Disaster Movie, which depicted  in ludicrous, extremist terms  the total disintegration of civil society across the Continent, if, God forbid, the EU was forced out of existence.

Note the weasel words: ‘in the making of’. The reality is that post-production, the film-makers Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras – both of whom are pro-EU fanatics – have told the outside world they are receiving EU money for the transmission of the film in other languages. So put another way, it is an EU propaganda project.

And the BBC were co-producers of that film.

What’s also not clear is who did fund the project. It was made by Piras’s company Springshot Productions, and that means its financing is totally opaque. Things here don’t add up. It’s unlikely that the budget of a project of such scale and production standards would be anything less than £1m, and yet Springshot is tiny. According to the company website, it has made only one other film, two years ago.

The point here is that it is only larger production companies turning over millions a year that can afford to make glossy hypothetical dramas – and they don’t generally make money, which is why they are so relatively scarce. Someone with deep pockets and a deep desire to spread massively pro-EU propaganda was behind it. The BBC should tell us who this was so we can make up our own minds about the decision to show it.

It seems that someone, somewhere in the higher echelons of the BBC hierarchy has a guilty conscience, because immediately after it was shown, a very rare occurrence happened, the BBC equivalent of a Blue Moon. In a Newsnight special hosted by Robert Peston,  two genuine EU ‘come outers’, Mark Reckless, the Ukip MP, and Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist, were fleetingly allowed to make some of the arguments in favour of withdrawal and to explain why the claims by Emmott and Piras were preposterous.

Unlike the unremitting one-sidedness of the film, the views of Reckless and Hitchens were of course offset, notably by a spokesman of the Greek Marxist party Syriza, who agreed with Emmott in ascribing all the current massive economic problems of the EU to nasty ‘austerity’.

There are other BBC-related problems in this film which only surface with digging. Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, and Piras, an Italian who worked as a foreign correspondent in London for many years, are clearly united in their huge desire to ram the need for the EU down our throats.

They are so fanatical that they have set up an organisation called The Wake Up Foundation, a so-called charity, the main aim of which – though clothed in high-flown language – is another vehicle to spread their EU bile. A feature by Emmott on their website in which he compares Nigel Farage to Silvio Berlusconi typifies the approach.

Far more concerning about The Wake Up Foundation, however, is that one of its trustees is Richard Sambrook, who is a former head of BBC newsgathering and Director of News, who was moved sideways to the World Service at the end of his BBC career because of question marks in some quarters over his judgment relating to the BBC’s handling of the fall-out from the Iraq war.

Sambrook, after a spell as a public relations adviser, re-surfaced as a Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University.  His department was commissioned by the BBC Trustees in 2011 to conduct research linked with the Stuart Prebble inquiry into whether the BBC was covering EU-related issues in accordance with the Charter.

That research, as has been reported by Kathy Gyngell on TCW, was ineptly conducted and as a result gave the wholly false impression that BBC news programmes gave adequate coverage to eurosceptic and withdrawalist opinion. Not only that, the main person who conducted the research had recently received a substantial slug of EU cash from the EU for a project designed to ascertain how the EU might better project itself.

So, put another way, the BBC commissioned a rabidly pro-EU programme from a film making duo who have close professional and organisational links with a former Director of BBC News who, in turn, has been appointed by the Corporation to tell the outside world – on a supposedly ‘objective’ basis – how balanced and impartial is the BBC’s output in relation to the EU.

The linkage raises several awkward questions.  Was Sambrook directly involved in the making of the European Disaster Movie? Was he involved in any way in persuading the BBC to show it and to become co-producers? To what extent is he involved in the dissemination of the pro-EU propaganda of The Wake Up Foundation? Were the BBC aware of his links with Emmott when they commissioned his department to do the Prebble survey?

Something in the state of Denmark, if not rotten, smells very fishy indeed.

David Keighley: A star line-up for the new BBC theme park. Russell Brand despatches figures of hate 15/12/2014

David Keighley: A star line-up for the new BBC theme park. Russell Brand despatches figures of hate 15/12/2014

In this satirical piece hinged on plans announced in 2014 by BBC Worldwide to build a BBC theme park on the Thames estuary, it was imagined that a BBC ‘hero’ – the comedian Russell Brand – should act as Lord High Executioner in despatching BBC ‘figures of hate’ such as Nigel Farage and other supporters of Brexit.  

Roll up, roll up…the BBC’s commercial arm Worldwide has signed a deal that could mean BBC programmes becoming part of an entertainment park being built in Ebbsfleet and due to open in 2020.

This has triggered inevitable speculation about which programmes would achieve star-billing – Doctor Who is top of the list. Another hot tip is an Eastenders theme ride where everyone shouts at each other.

In fact, BBC ideology is now so well-defined that it won’t take much adaptation to get the crowds flocking to the park. The blueprints are already on the management board’s desks with former Labour minister James Purnell, the BBC’s head of strategy, in charge of making sure everything fits with Corporation rules about partiality and diversity.

The plans have been leaked exclusively to TCW. Here’s the list:

CHOP-CHOP: Following the rip-roaring success of choosing Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about murdering Margaret Thatcher as the latest Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, Ms Mantel has devised a theme park special game, inspired by her Thatcher fantasies and also based on the BBC 2014 adaptation of her Thomas Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Each afternoon, in the Thatcher memorial arena – with the centre area lovingly recreating Tower Green – a BBC figure of hate will be publicly ‘decapitated’ by Corporation hero Russell Brand  using the latest BBC £100m special effects techniques to make each despatching look as realistic as possible.  Already on the list are, of course, Nigel Farage, Mark Reckless,  Theresa May, Lord Lawson of Blaby (for being both a Thatcher chancellor AND daring to challenge the BBC orthodoxy of climate change), and – the most popular – a legion of nasty City bankers.

NOT SO FROZEN PLANET: Here, the BBC – inspired by David Attenborough’s nature programmes – invites its public to experience what it knows for certain (because Ed Miliband, Christopher Huhne, scientists and computer models  say so) how the world will be in 2100.  Modelled partly on the geodesic structures in the Eden project, this exciting Epcot-style attraction will feature melting ice, endless storms, flooding and searing temperatures – all of which, it will be explained, were once foolishly called weather but are now known by Corporation correspondents and presenters to be certain evidence of impending disaster. The most exciting feature is at the end – the BBC vision of what must be done to save mankind: the destruction of capitalism and industry, and a reversion to the Stone Age.

QUESTION TIME: In line with focus-group findings that the public now find political debate too boring and must be spiced up, this attraction is set in a re-creation of the Coliseum in Rome. Rival gangs of politicians, aided and abetted – and sometimes led – by their celebrity backers, are invited each afternoon to devise ever-more-gruesome methods of combating each other. Consultants for ensuring maximum visual impact and unpleasantness are Jeremy Clarkson and the team from Top Gear. At the end, the crowd (hand-picked, of course, by the BBC from among Labour supporters) will be invited to decide who among the survivors should be spared.

NO MINISTER: supported by the EU’s diversity and public information fund, this attraction holds nothing back in showing how wonderful the EU is. With lots of polyglot singing. aerial gymnastics and illusionism, there are  a series of tableaux demonstrating how uncontrolled movement of people and endless new regulation benefit everyone. A special feature, drawing on the ever popular Yes Minister programmes (but without the humour, of course), illustrates how the EU is run without any democratic input at all, but is nevertheless entirely democratic. The second phase of this feature – intended when it is built to be star of the park – will allow the public to participate in a whole series of cross-European experiences showing how nationalism must wither and be replaced by a borderless Socialist Utopia.

Photo by Angie from Pexels
David Keighley’s BBC Watch: Radio 4 still fights the last propaganda war against Brexit 17/08/2016

David Keighley’s BBC Watch: Radio 4 still fights the last propaganda war against Brexit 17/08/2016

This item showed that in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum,  the BBC went flat out to project that the ‘yes’ vote had been a huge mistake. Their reports from what they dubbed ‘Brexit Street’ on Teesside were fake news of the worst kind and were designed to misrepresent and malign the views of those who voted to leave the EU.  

What could be the biggest threat to Brexit?

Tory back-sliding and plotting by remainiacs like Anna Soubry? Undoubtedly they will have spent much of the summer fomenting new lines of subversion. They are ready pounce on and exaggerate any dissension in party Brexit ranks, as last weekend’s Sunday Times story about the alleged turf-war spat between Boris Johnson and Liam Fox underlined.

Or could Owen Smith confound the whole Westminster village, win the Labour leadership election and, with a miraculously re-unified party behind him, force, as he says he will, a second referendum? Most Labour MPs still obdurately think that voters for Brexit, many of them their constituents, were deluded fools.

Pigs are more likely to fly of course than Owen Smith is to beat Jeremy Corbyn. But much stranger things in politics have happened in the bewildering battery of developments since June 23.

One constant in the equation, and perhaps the biggest threat of all to Brexit – through the corrosive propaganda they are continuing to generate on an industrial scale – is the BBC. Two months on from the referendum vote, they are still searching relentlessly for reasons why ‘no’ was totally a mistake.

It is impossible to keep track of this deluge. It’s suffused, for example, throughout the Corporation’s business coverage (best evidenced in Today’s 6.15am business news slot), has infected food, environment and comedy programmes, and of course, dominates news coverage. If you have doubts, take a while to browse the Corporation’s Brexit Collection on the iPlayer – almost every programme rams home hard the collective anti-Brexit meme.

Such is the scale of the effort that a whole new mythology is in the process of being forged. In BBC programmes, Brexit voters are mostly unemployed, usually almost inarticulate, and they speak in impenetrable northern or guttural regional accents. They are mostly old and despise the young. Above all, they hate strangers and immigrants to the extent that they are plotting and committing by the hour ‘hate’ crimes on unprecedented levels.

A further bedrock of this new BBC reality is that ‘out’ voters were duped by unprincipled, racist opportunistic politicians such as Nigel Farage who spun a web of fiendishly convincing lies.

Over-egging? No. A manifestation of these fables-in-the-making is being broadcast on Radio 4’s PM programme, Producers have built around a real, but unidentified ‘ordinary’ street on Teesside a series they have dubbed ‘Brexit Street’.

So far reporter Emma Jane Kirby has fronted five reports, each of which has brought listeners – through the views of local residents – what is claimed to be the reasons why people voted out.

In the right hands, this could be interesting, revealing broadcasting. But this is the BBC, and instead it is a caricature of Northern voters that is beyond parody.

For a start ‘Brexit Street’ is not ‘ordinary’. The exact location has not been revealed to listeners. All that has been said is that it is in the town of Thornaby-on-Tees, an inner city area sandwiched between Stockton on Tees in the west and Middlesbrough to the east.

A little digging from the facts presented by Kirby (it has terrace houses, a Salvation Army premises, a bookies’ and a supermarket) reveals that it can be only one local thoroughfare, Westbury Street. And once identified, a whole series of alarm bells start ringing.

First, the housing is mainly old inner city stock and a terrace house can be bought there for between £40,000 and £60,000, compared with the local average of around £100,000 and a regional North-eastern figure of around £120,000.  So it’s pretty downmarket, even in an area (Middlesbrough especially) which is facing very tough and exceptional times because of the closure of the local steelworks.

Second – and this is probably the killer blow to any pretence of balanced journalism – Kirby revealed in the opening report that ‘a large number of asylum seekers’ are residents. Further spadework reveals that Middlesbrough and Stockton town councils are the only two in the North-east which are accepting asylum seekers on a large scale. There are nearly 700 in the local government area covering Thornaby, equating to one in 280 local residents.

That said, Westbury Street has only 120 households, and the local average house occupation rate is 2.3 – so it would be expected that only one or two residents there would be asylum seekers. Kirby, however, says there are ‘large numbers’ living there (and of course she’s interviewed many of them) – suggesting that the local council is using the street for their re-settlement because housing there is especially cheap.

What this boils down to is that Westbury Street is not at all average and not at all ordinary. Kirby has focused in two of the first five reports on that the asylum seekers feel isolated and alone and are not integrated, mainly because of the views and implied prejudice of the locals who voted out.

Asylum seekers, of course, are nothing to do with the EU. But never mind the facts. Going there and projecting the alleged prejudice against these unfortunate people (one is a victim of alleged military atrocities in the Congo) as a contributory cause of the Brexit vote fits neatly with the new BBC mythology.

More reports in the series are a treat in store. What has been presented so far is a travesty of balanced journalism.

The Buck Stops with you, Lord Hall 20/08/2018

The Buck Stops with you, Lord Hall 20/08/2018

In 2014, the BBC seriously breached the privacy of Sir Cliff Richard by filming a police raid on his home, and eventually (in summer 2018)  were ordered by the High Court to pay the singer £1.9m in damages and court costs. This article argued that, despite the judgment, the BBC were still disgracefully arguing against it and that because of this, the then BBC director-general Lord Hall should resign.   

Lord Hall, the BBC director general, has immense powers. He is not only the chief executive of the £5billion-a-year Corporation, he is also its editor-in-chief.

The only check on his conduct is the BBC Board of Management, but that is packed with BBC executives and so-called ‘independent’ members, such as Arts Council chief Sir Nicholas Serota and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, who are anything but because they share Lord Hall’s liberal-Left ‘diversity’-at-all-costs mindset.

The dual role entails responsibilities beyond those in other large media organisations dealing with news. National newspapers, for example, almost invariably have chief executives to run the business side and editors to run the news content, usually with a dispute resolution mechanism for when clashes occur. The same is the case at the BBC’s only terrestrial broadcast rivals, ITV News and Channel 4 News.

The Cliff Richard breach of privacy court case – with the BBC’s decision on Wednesday not to go to the Court of Appeal despite much blustering to the contrary – has culminated with the Corporation conceding game, set and match to the singer.

It has also generated a damages and legal costs bill of at least £1.9million, the equivalent of almost 13,000 licence fee payments.

Because of his dual role, responsibility for this huge misjudgment lies firmly with Lord Hall. It happened almost two years after he was appointed and had recruited former Times editor James Harding to be his key lieutenant as director of news.

Lord Hall centrally carries the can for the huge breach of Sir Cliff’s privacy and everything that went on in connection with the raid.

According to Mr Justice Mann in his judgment, that included disingenuous, coercive and sometimes lying conduct of BBC staff; the gung-ho and sensationalist pursuit of a perceived scoop; the decision to enter the ‘scoop’ for a Royal Television Society award; the naming of Sir Cliff before he had been arrested, questioned or charged in connection with any criminal offence (or indeed knew anything of any allegations against him); and the grossly over-the-top deployment of a helicopter in the raid coverage.

At the time of the raid in August 2014, leading international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson said it amounted to ‘a conspiracy to injure’ the singer.

Is that, then, the end of the matter? Has Lord Hall come forward to to explain why he has brought the reputation of BBC journalism (such as is left of it) into disrepute? And to apologise unequivocally to Sir Cliff for causing him so much distress by such a flagrant breach of his privacy?

Of course not. On Wednesday, as the decision not to appeal was made public, Lord Hall was – as has been the case throughout this four-year debacle – nowhere to be seen. Nor was Fran Unsworth, his recently appointed director of news, who had signed off on the coverage in a more junior role and was the most senior BBC defendant in the court case.

Instead, it was left to David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, to field interviews.

Nevertheless, what he had been sanctioned to say would almost certainly have been cleared by Lord Hall himself. And what was the BBC message?

Well, despite its own legal advice that the Corporation had no chance of winning an appeal, the BBC is not yet ready to bury the hatchet.

Mr Justice Mann said three weeks ago in his reasons why he would not allow an appeal (prompting the BBC to ponder an Appeal Court ruling):

‘It has been suggested that my judgment is remarkable in imposing a new blanket restraint on the reporting of the subject of a criminal investigations. . . That is an erroneous reading . . . My judgment acknowledges that the reasonable expectation of privacy in the fact of an investigation is a presumption or starting point that can give way to countervailing factors; the safety of the public is one example.’

Despite this, the BBC’s message on Wednesday was that Mr Justice Mann is wrong. In the BBC’s eyes, the ruling will endanger public safety and disallow the naming of suspects. They have now written to the Attorney General demanding a change of the law to recognise this.

A second point conveyed by Jordan on His Master’s behalf was that Mr Justice Mann – who meticulously detailed in his core judgment last month why he did not believe the BBC’s account of its dealings with South Yorkshire police over the raid, thus doing what a judge does – had erred.

It boiled down to two fingers from Lord Hall to both the British court process and to Mr Justice Mann for daring to rule that the Corporation could be wrong.

To be fair, Jordan did also repeat an apology to Sir Cliff and acknowledge the distress he had suffered. He also accepted clearly for the first time that elements of the BBC coverage were ‘ill-judged’.

But in the context of the heavy BBC caveats about the judgment, do these words of qualified appeasement add up to anything meaningful or genuinely felt?

Two weeks ago, as the BBC was still considering an appeal, former BBC Chairman Lord Grade waded into the debacle. In an excoriating attack in the Times, he observed:

‘If there is a higher principle at stake, why is the editor-in-chief of the BBC, its director-general Lord Hall of Birkenhead, like Macavity, nowhere to be seen or heard? Why was he not on the steps of the court after the judgment? What and when did he know about the decision to launch helicopters and collude with the police? Is he proud of the scoop?

‘The ultimate custodian of the public interest in the BBC is its publicly appointed board. What action are they demanding over this shameful episode? Is there not a public interest in explaining their position to their paymasters, the licence-fee payers? It’s time the BBC Board spoke out about one of the most shocking lapses in the history of BBC journalism. It’s not too late for the BBC hierarchy to exercise some judgment.’

A further question now outstanding is whether Lord Hall should resign. The buck for this whole sorry saga, and the continuing obfuscation and prevarication, stops with him.