BBC Bias Digest

11:54 am
21 December 2024

BBC Director General

Hall and Birt deny responsibility for Bashir fiasco

Hall and Birt deny responsibility for Bashir fiasco

BBC Director General, Martin Bashir, Panorama | | by David Keighley

THE Lord Dyson report established that the BBC acted appallingly in its handling in 1995 of the interview of Princess Diana.

Prince William reacted by stating that it showed his mother had been ‘deceived’ and asserted that ‘the ripple effect of (the BBC’s) culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life’. He also said: ‘She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking tough questions.’

Serious charges indeed from the second in line to the throne. But who was to blame in this catalogue of coercion, forgery, gross professional incompetence and cover-ups?

Why had Martin Bashir been, in effect, cleared of misconduct in 1996 even though he owned up soon after the interview to forging documents? Who were the ‘leaders’ at the BBC who had looked the other way? And why was Bashir, a proven liar, re-hired by the BBC as religious affairs editor in 2016?

That was what the Department of Culture (DCMS) select committee sought to find out last week.  Summoned to appear before the MPs were Lord Birt, director general of the BBC in 1995, Lord Hall, the then director of BBC News (and director general from 2012-20), along with Tim Davie, the current director general and Richard Sharp, the current BBC chairman.

How did the committee, chaired by Conservative MP Julian Knight, fare in its task?  You can judge for yourself here from the 32,000 words or so of transcript.

Put bluntly, it was a textbook example of BBC stonewalling and obfuscation. Far from owning up to failures of leadership, the corporation doubled down in its insistence that such was not the case.

One element stands out like a Belisha beacon. This was that, according to the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the inquiry, the Lords Birt and Hall – both looking like insolent schoolboys called to see the headmaster – Martin Bashir was the villain of the piece. He was a rogue reporter, a conman and a charlatan who had lied and practised deception on a monumental scale, and had duped senior management into trusting him.

Was anyone else at the BBC at fault? They themselves? Other senior management figures such as the editor of Panorama, who broadcast the show and was thus editorially responsible for the content as well as the conduct of his staff?

Goodness me, no! In both lords’ views, the actions of the main senior management figures involved – Steve Hewlett, the editor of Panorama, Tim Gardam, the head of current affairs, Tim Suter, the managing editor of all BBC news and current affairs, Richard Ayre, the director of BBC editorial standards, and Anne Sloman, the BBC chief political adviser – were beyond reproach.

Not only that, said the two peers of the realm, they had talked the matter through among themselves and with Steve, the two Tims, Richard and Anne, and all agreed they were on the right track and had handled matters correctly. That, they believed, proved that no one was to blame for the fiasco. They knew it to be the case and, lo! – it therefore was.

The MPs on the committee – some of them former BBC staff, including chairman Knight, the SNP’s John Nicholson and Steve Brine – pulled no punches in their attempt to hold Lords Birt and Hall to account. Their tenacity was impressive.

They may have failed in their task of obtaining direct confessions, but in response to their efforts, Hall and Birt did some monumental buck-passing. They showed that then, as now, the BBC is a disgrace to journalism, that those who run it are arrogantly unaware of their shortcomings and that as an institution, the BBC is rotten to the core with shared values of the gutter.

After the Dyson report appeared, on TCW and Briefings for Britain I wrote:

‘Don’t hold your breath [expecting reform] . . . The danger is that despite the evidence of incompetence, almost unlimited arrogance and moral turpitude, the corporation carries on regardless because no one has the political guts or will to tackle a massive overhaul. The core problem is that the BBC will never admit misconduct, and has been immune to outside complaints for most of its history because it is its own judge and jury in that domain in most respects.’

The testimonies of Lord Birt, Lord Hall, Tim Davie and Richard Sharp are remarkable for the reasons already outlined above, but they deserve further analysis in future blogs, and these will appear on TCW in the coming weeks.

As a taster, current director general Davie revealed that – although he never discussed Bashir with him – he ‘fairly regularly’ talks to Lord Birt, and believes him to be ‘a wise and trusted source of advice for me around how we reform the BBC, how we go through this job’.

Be afraid, be very afraid. The man who in 1993 playwright Dennis Potter called a ‘croak-voiced Dalek’ in his approach to BBC management and reform still has a hand on the tiller almost 30 years on.

Window-dresser Davie’s bogus BBC revolution

Window-dresser Davie’s bogus BBC revolution

BBC Bias, BBC Director General | | by David Keighley

Tim Davie, the BBC director general, has been in his post for six months, and on Thursday he delivered to staff his second raft of big ideas for reform. 

His first proposal, in his first week of office in September, was to make BBC impartiality his number one priority, with a crackdown on biased tweeting by staff.

How’s that commitment going?

Well, hours after his latest staff speech was delivered last week, BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty and her male sidekick, Charlie Stayt, were hauled over the coals by Corporation top brass and ‘reminded of BBC impartiality rules’.

In the scale of PR cock-ups, that was a pretty spectacular own goal. Davie claimed in his staff speech that BBC news was doing ‘an outstanding job delivering impartial output’; hours later, two high-profile presenters were sniggering and sneering like schoolchildren about the idea of a government minister being patriotic by having a Union Jack in his office.

That said, was there anything in Davie’s speech which gave hope that he was intent on improving BBC output and had the vision and drive to deliver it?

Don’t bank on it. The first half of his message was marked by smug complacency. According to the director general, BBC news is brilliant, programmes are spectacularly good, and audiences are soaring.

He evidenced this by quoting a raft of disconnected figures: BBC overall audience reach is 90 per cent; BBC news reaches 86 per cent (up from 81 per cent a year ago); overall BBC viewing is up 8 per cent in both January and February.

Davie carefully avoided quoting other audience research, for example showing that the BBC’s Christmas television audiences were at an all-time low (and reached less than 10 per cent of the population) despite the lockdown, and that less than half the population don’t trust BBC journalists to tell the truth. 

He did not mention that viewing of BBC television is in steep decline with all BBC services now attracting only a total of 31 per cent audience share. 

Put another way, despite the BBC’s £3.5billion licence fee income – more by miles than any other media company in the UK – its audience share is now only three times that for Sky or Viacom (which owns Channel 5).

Seemingly undaunted by this, Davie said he was cutting jobs to make running of the Corporation more efficient, with 900 fewer people now employed, and bureaucracy ‘stripped away’. Paperwork, he claimed, had been cut by over 30 per cent.

Another trumpeted step forward is in ‘diversity’. Despite his claim of reduced paperwork and less bureaucracy, Mr Davie said that every department now had specific targets to reach employment levels of 50 per cent women, 20 per cent ethnic minority and 12 per cent of mentally or physically disadvantaged individuals.

Also targeted is ‘sustainability’. Davie said the Corporation’s ‘clear and strong’ position on this is that ‘a 2030 net-zero target’ has now been set. What this means is as clear as mud, but almost certainly involves a blizzard of bureaucratic effort. Ditto ‘diversity’.

Davie made a point of adding that ‘the over-75s licence fee policy’ had been ‘implemented professionally’ and was ahead of targets. What he meant, of course, was that despite fierce opposition, the BBC is forcing the age group which contains the most lonely, poor and vulnerable section of the population to pay to receive BBC services and that pensioners are subject to prosecution by the ‘door-to-door salesmen’ who enforce licence fee payment.

The alleged meat of his speech was that over the next six years the corporation will shift its ‘journalistic and creative centre away from London’. This, claimed Davie, will create an ‘economic benefit’ for the regions of £850million, provide a dramatic jobs boost ‘and improve representation on and off screen’.

Looking at the small print – and trying to convert his gobbledygook into something comprehensible – it means that, for example, the Today programme is going to come from outside London at least 100 times a year; Newsbeat will be produced in Birmingham; 60 per cent of programmes will be made outside London; a team of 100 ‘digital journalists’ will be deployed across the UK outside London; and two ‘long-running drama series’ will be made outside London.

Davie claims that this will be ‘the biggest transformation of the BBC in decades’.

Will it? The BBC’s main problem is still that it is riddled with bias, obsessed by ‘woke’ virtue-signalling, and has a complaints process which is risibly stacked in the BBC’s favour, existing to defend the corporation rather than to address the concerns of audiences. The Salford Quays development, which a decade ago was meant to signal a major shift by the corporation away from London bias, is every bit as much a woke media bubble as the London operation.  

In prioritising drives towards ‘diversity’ and ‘sustainability’, and by being disingenuous about the massive fall in audiences and trust, Davie showed he is not addressing the real problems of the BBC but further encouraging the metro mindset on which it is based.  The Davie ‘transformation’ is little more than crude window-dressing.

BBC bias: An open letter to the new director-general

BBC bias: An open letter to the new director-general

BBC Bias, BBC Director General | | by David Keighley

THE BBC’s bias on Brexit has been proven beyond doubt. That is the Telegraph‘s response to News-watch’s latest report on the BBC’s Brexit coverage this week. In the words of Robin Aitken, former BBC producer and author of The Noble Liar (an excoriating and deeply perceptive book about BBC bias) our report shows an overwhelming pro-EU slant in BBC coverage from the close analysis of one random week.

The conclusion we reached, and Aitken concurs with, is that the Corporation is still regarding Brexit through the lens of Project Fear.

The question Aitken raises is whether the new director general of the BBC will take it seriously. Your move, Tim Davie, he says.

As he reports, we are indeed seeking an urgent meeting with Mr Davie to discuss how he intends to meet his pledge to make BBC impartiality a priority. And we are still waiting to hear whether he is prepared to put his money where his mouth is and, unlike his predecessor, accord News-watch the time of day and the respect its long-term independent monitoring of the BBC’s Brexit output deserves.

To encourage him on the path he’s promised, here is our open letter to him in advance of that meeting.

Dear Mr Davie

On September 3, in your first address to staff after taking over as director general, you stated that impartiality – as required by the BBC Charter – would be your main priority. 

You have announced measures which require staff not to post biased remarks or opinions on social media.

That sounds good, and was handled by the gargantuan 350-strong BBC PR machine to achieve maximum impact but, with respect,  BBC bias is not confined to ill-advised tweets – crass as they may be – from John Simpson and Gary Lineker.

Everything from comedy to drama and from the educational content of BBC Bitesize and BBC Ideas is also infected with woke, partisan zeal. 

One indication of the scale of the rot is the latest News-watch report.

Which, as Robin Aitken outlined, shows that despite everything that has happened since the 2016 referendum and the imminent departure from the EU ratified by the 2019 general election, the corporation is still pursuing Project Fear about life outside the EU, and is still swamping EU coverage with the views of  those who oppose Brexit or are pro-EU .

On top of that, not one programme has ever been broadcast by the BBC which explores possible benefits of departure. In sharp contrast, hundreds of hours of programmes have been devoted to climate alarmism and the supposed benefits of electric cars, so called ‘green’ energy and a carbon-free future.

But the reality is that a full audit of the extent of BBC failures of impartiality would take a team of dozens of scribes and analysts working round the clock for years to achieve.

Mr Davie, you are thus faced with a Herculean task in rooting out bias. But as yet, you have given no indication to the outside world – other than instituting the Tweet purge – about how you intend to achieve this.

Many viewers, of course, do not believe that reform is possible, which is why recent surveys show that  the majority no longer want to pay the BBC licence fee and don’t trust BBC news. 

But the current Charter is in place until 2027, and as the agenda for our forthcoming meeting, may I suggest the following urgent action points as a basis for our discussions and instant attention?

Find top-level advisers who are genuinely independent and will give you a perspective other than the stifling wokery which has infected the Corporation at every level.  Put some of them on the internal management board so their views are heeded.

Ditch opinion polls as a way of determining whether BBC output is impartial and get properly in touch with real people out there north of Watford and west of Oxford who will tell you what needs changing.

Institute instead rigorous monitoring of BBC output compiled by independent advisers who are not in the BBC or woke bubble. This will make the constant struggle to be unbiased a properly transparent process.

Scrap the current internal complaints system and put the 350 BBC publicists (combined pay £15million-a-year plus?)  to work instead in scrutinising output to get rid of liberal bias and in ensuring complaints are properly investigated rather than being seen as an intrusion.

Abandon your defence of the BBC licence fee and the outmoded notion of universal provision and start planning now for major change to reflect changes in the media environment. It’s only when the  Corporation has to fight in the marketplace for audiences that it will become fully responsive to audience needs and preferences, and it will be all the better for it.

Make genuine ‘diversity’ an important internal and output goal without the BBC being an overt arm of the woke ‘racism’ agenda and a fanatical tick-box exercise.

Scrap in its present form the lavish BBC Academy and relaunch it as the bastion of rigorous professional integrity and training to ensure that audiences across the whole of the UK are properly served.

Inject new life into the programme-making process by ditching tired formats such as Question Time and Newsnight – both around 40 years old – and replace them with new offerings which genuinely incorporate diversity of views.

Tell those who write for the BBC that they are not on a mission to convert the audience into woke-infected zombies but rather to stimulate them with challenging, fresh material containing a variety of perspectives and views.

At every level, celebrate British history and culture rather than preaching the message that we are a nation who should be ashamed of our past, and are tarred with blood-guilt. End once and for all the Biased Broadcasting Corporation and make the first ‘B’ stand for British in the full sense of the word.

Tim Davie: Reformist or PR Hype?

Tim Davie: Reformist or PR Hype?

BBC Director General | | by David Keighley

Is Tim Davie genuinely a reformer?

His regime as new BBC director general took off at an apparent breakneck speed from September 1. In his first three days in office, he reversed the decision not to include the sung version of Rule Britannia in the last night of the proms; said he was going to ensure BBC output was scrupulously impartial; claimed that management and staffing of the corporation were to be slimmed down and made more sharply efficient; he axed former Labour minister James Purnell, who, under Tony Hall,  had improbably become the corporation’s  director or radio and education, from the BBC’s executive committee; warned presenters to stop tweeting and posting political opinions; and declared that BBC colonisation of the airwaves through the development of new channels were over.

But not so fast.  Is his agenda really radical? Or PR hype?

The answer lies in the small print – and, more tellingly, in what he did not say  – in his address to staff made at lunchtime on Thursday (September 3) at BBC Cardiff, now housed in a spanking new £100m Welsh headquarters building

One immediate point is that his headline-grabbing decision to change the format of the last night of the proms next Saturday (September 12) was no big deal.  A choir was already performing in the Royal Albert Hall and was going to sing You’ll Never Walk Alone.  Of concern – showing perhaps that nothing much has yet changed at the corporation – is the wording of the BBC press statement about the decision. It’s an exercise in PR guff and obfuscation which casts what had clearly been a woke decision to axe patriotic songs as being determined by creative considerations.

Perhaps Mr Davie’s  biggest pledge is his push to restore BBC impartiality. That he has to say this at all – given that it is a core Charter requirement – shows the extent of the decline of the corporation.

Here, the crash-bang announcement was that Emily Maitlis and the army of BBC presenters who believe their legitimate goal is to change the world according to the rubric of the woke instruction manual rather than to report it, are going to be muzzled and prevented from posting incontinently on social media and Twitter. If true, that’s a welcome development, even if it comes well after the horse has bolted.

But will even this relatively straightforward intention work out? Already, there are reports that Gary Lineker, the £1.7 million-a-year lead presenter of BBC football, has shown he doesn’t give a hoot what Tim Davie thinks. On Friday, he launched a political advocacy video which – in pushing the need for open UK borders – suggests  that we would not have fish and chips if mass immigration not been in full flow throughout the centuries.

And what of restoring impartiality in a more general sense? Here, Mr Davie has the  biggest mountain to climb. The rot set in decades ago with the BBC’s pathological hatred of Margaret Thatcher – yielding programme’s such as the Panorama edition Maggie’s Militant Tendency – and reaching its zenith under the recently-retired  Lord Hall of Birkenhead.

He never tired of telling us his BBC was free from bias while shutting down whole rafts of national debate over issues such as climate change and swearing blind Brexit coverage was balanced when patently, it was not.

And the problem with BBC bias, of course,  is that it is not just in news reporting and current affairs programmes. It totally saturates output. Dramas are now made primarily to preach political points and to reflect diversity targets. Doctor Who, according to BBC director of content Charlotte Moore is ‘inspirational’. Why? Because it’s cracking good drama? Of course not! It’s because it now has a female in the main role. The fulcrum of most BBC comedy is ridicule of Donald Trump. Nature programmes such as Springwatch have become, in effect, Extinction Rebellion propaganda manuals.  Science so-called documentaries are commissioned and constructed to make  political points (as Charlotte Moore’s speech also underlines), and history programmes are a sustained exercise in attacking the United Kingdom and its achievements while simultaneously pushing a globalist agenda.

So what is Mr Davie going to do about this vast, multi-billion pounds avalanche of bias and distortion? Here,  his speech of last week – apart from the headline-catching assault on tweeting – was largely silent. He said he was ‘committed’ to it, and said vaguely that there would be a re-casting of internal editorial guidelines and some ‘training’.

That’s like using a toffee hammer to demolish a house. There are no new internal measures for reviewing and policing output; and nothing about bringing independent scrutiny to challenge the decisions and judgments made by BBC staff. And David Jordan, the BBC director of editorial standards – who some credit with offering a smidgeon of ballast against the relentless tide of wokeness under Lord Hall  – has been axed from the Tim Davie executive committee, while June Sarpong, the Lord Hall-promoted director of diversity, remains.

Mr Davie was virtually silent, too, about how to restore impartiality, but, by contrast, not so on ‘diversity’. That, he said, was  a top priority in every editorial meeting and every future staff appointment, in steps towards creating BBC staffing which is 20 per cent black and ethnic minority, compared to 13 per cent in the population as a whole.

And what of the licence fee? On that subject, not a peep, even though polls have suggested that 60 percent of the UK population oppose it and view it as an anachronism in the world of Sky Q, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

That’s an astonishing omission, given the pressure now building to abolish it.  Especially as Mr Davie also declared that he is opposed to a shift to subscription financing.

 

Nicholas Burnett: Can Tim Davie Turn the Tide of Bias?

Nicholas Burnett: Can Tim Davie Turn the Tide of Bias?

BBC Bias, BBC Director General, Tim Davie | | by News-Watch

This is a Guest Post from Nicholas Burnett from The Conservative Woman:

THE paradox of the Western World is encapsulated by the angst the BBC so willingly brings upon itself. Once a central plank of British culture, it is now part of a pro-globalising bourgeois media-set who will report ‘largely peaceful protests’ straight-faced against a backdrop of burning cities. It’s as if there is something the rest of us are not privy to. And of course, there is.

Black Lives Matter, a far-Left Marxist organisation, was immediately hailed. BBC coverage continually affirmed the BLM narrative, at times taking a campaigning tone for the cause. Like many, I objected to the clearly favourable line on a movement which descended into rioting, but the wider issue is the corporation’s merger with Left-leaning identity politics.

I complained to the BBC in June. I pointed out that under the BLM narrative white people are summarily accused of racism; that the BBC fails to balance its sudden specific interest in police brutality with a wider context; conflating American experience with the British is absurd and that the far greater cause of violent black deaths is ignored. I finished ‘I despair for race relations following the hysterical coverage and tensions you have abetted’. And I genuinely do. If anyone at the BBC thinks its approach will have a generally wholesome impact on race relations they are deluded. One only has to see the thinking behind UKBLM how divisive their message is.

https://twitter.com/Never_Again2020/status/1298982384059084802

In response, the BBC claimed its reporting ‘reflects the global impact . . . and the strength of feeling . . . galvanised’ insisting that it ‘will continue to report impartially on issues highlighted as this story develops’. When it talks about ‘global impact’ and ‘strength of feeling’ one can only assume it is referring to its own echo chamber which includes other Leftist cultural institutions, academics and campaigners. You can respond back to the BBC if you are unhappy with its first reply, which I did, and two months on no follow-up has been received (rather an email suggesting I try Ofcom as they are oh-so-busy right now).

BLM has explicit aims to destabilise society. Surely its inflammatory messaging is relevant to the looting and violence continuing in America as well as abuse of and attacks on police officers on both sides of the Atlantic? When 36 police officers were injured in London in that first weekend of unrest in June, the BBC talked of ‘largely peaceful protests’ and omitted to inform viewers about what BLM thinks about our police. None of this matters to the BBC in the same way it would (and did) do when those ‘protesting’ are white nationalists. The BBC believes it has an active duty to stand against racism but it conflates the narrative of activism with reporting, apparently assuming the righteous position of BLM from the outset.

Throughout the summer, in the midst of racial tension stoked by Marxist agitators, the BBC chose to amplify individuals’ claims of racism against the police without challenge or context. The same sense of grievance plays out in much of the ‘woke’ narrative too often consuming BBC News output. Many black people don’t feel deeply offended by white society. Many gays feel awkward with train carriages painted in their name. Many women roll their eyes when the next round of gender-pay grievance figures is headlined. Conservative views are omitted from the BBC’s narrative as it gives credence to ‘strong feeling’ over balanced rational coverage. Britons do care about fairness, tolerance and equality but not the version pushed by activists.

Michael Collins, author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, touched on the issue of race in a recent interview with Peter Whittle: ‘We kind of covered it ’cos we had to . . . we are being educated by people that didn’t have that experience’.  

White working-class Londoners did the BLM thing 40 years ago, moving through and beyond racial tensions as a community that got on with it. The liberal middle classes have apparently suddenly discovered this cause, delivering the message with a tone that insists on national self-reflection and demands a review and cleansing of the past. Many see through this preaching for what it is: vanity.

The ruling elites with a globalised worldview in both the USA and here in the UK were sent packing by electorates in 2016 yet a bourgeois liberal class have retained their position as cultural custodians and decanters of information in the media they control. Trump and Brexit were shocking to these elites but self-explained as mere interruptions to their assured hegemony which with the ‘right information’ the electorate could and would be corrected to understand what’s good for them. The explanation BBC Newsnight editor Lewis Goodall has for public dissatisfaction with output lies somewhere around the retort that ‘sometimes the truth hurts’:

Unfortunately there is another ‘truth’ to which the BBC is oblivious: Brexit didn’t go away and far from being shamed as an embarrassing irony of the misinformed, Trump is hot on the heels of Biden in the American polls and may well be about to take round two. What are the liberals not seeing? Perhaps they, too, need ‘unconscious bias’ training about working-class Britons?

The BBC continues unabashed with a declaration for more diversity. What it sees is not unique among our institutions’ worldview: race, sexuality and gender have become primary factors in the worth and measurement of people. For example, after the selection of Kamala Harris as Biden’s candidate for vice president I was left knowing little about her beyond her sex and race – I could have figured those out for myself. By choosing this path it taps into a navel-gazing narcissism which will only demand ever more attention.

For institutions, identity politics may cynically keep bureaucratic claims of inequality and discrimination at bay but ‘being seen to do something’ hardly lays the foundations for lasting change or growth. For the individual, identity politics may help the existentially weak claim a sense of Self, but it hardly builds real character, resilient enough to integrate into the whole of society ‘just as oneself is’. Last week the Huffington Post reported claims of institutional racism within the BBC with employees of its Africa service complaining that having a white manager is akin to ‘working the cotton plantations’ of old.

This really is what you reap when you sow a vision of humanity that goes no deeper than the immutable characteristics of birth and assumes those are the determiners of our life experience.

We are told that incoming director-general Tim Davie is seeking to reform the BBC and make its output more politically diverse. But will he be able to turn back the tide?

 

Image by Patrick Behn from Pixabay