BBC Bias Digest

11:17 pm
19 April 2024

Search Results for: BBC complaints

The BBC at 100: Leading the push for totalitarianism

The BBC at 100: Leading the push for totalitarianism

BBC Bias, BBC Centenary | | by David Keighley

As the BBC marks its centenary,  how is ‘Auntie’? Not the benign figure the Corporation likes to portray, but perhaps more like Peter Sellers’s chilling comic creation Auntie Rotter?

As Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries appeared to be preparing the old girl for genuine surgery in the Charter Mid-term Review. But as the Tory party and our democracy itself spectacularly implodes, don’t count on it. Auntie is too useful to our new totalitarian ruling class as a vehicle for the liberal-left propaganda it disseminates on a gargantuan scale.

True to form, the Corporation commissioned its own self-congratulatory centenary ‘official’ history in 2016 and the author, a  former BBC producer and don at Sussex University, duly obliged with a volume which trashes British history and values and risibly claims with Marxist zeal that from its inception the BBC has championed the British working class against the forces of the right. In that projection, those who dare criticise the BBC are enemies of the people.

The reality is that BBC audiences were high only when the Corporation was a state monopoly funded by a compulsory licence fee. As soon as competition entered the frame, people looked elsewhere for their entertainment. BBC services are now declining precipitously in the ever-fragmenting media environment, trust in the BBC’s journalism is in freefall, and, according to Reuters Institute research, it has become the least trusted public service broadcaster in the world. 

A key to the mentality and current drive of the BBC can be found the latest annual report (2021/2). There are pages and pages devoted to self-righteous tosh on ‘environmental sustainability’ (and commitment to Net Zero agenda) and gender and racial diversity. But in terms of how popular (or rather unpopular) BBC programmes are, the report waffles only about audience ‘reach’. To find out how bad BBC audience figures actually are, you have to scour the internet. An example is BBC2 Newsnight, the flagship news and current affairs programme, which had more than 1million viewers in around 2000, but is now down to fewer than 300,000. 

The current director-general, Tim Davie, claims he is sorting out impartiality but his plans for doing so are designed only to keep the BBC as its own judge and jury in virtually everything it does, with the fig-leaf Ofcom to conduct appeals against the BBC’s own industrial-scale rejection of millions of complaints. A measure of his feebleness is that, on his appointment, Davie promised a crackdown on presenters who posted politically biased tweets. But it has taken two years, till last week, for BBC football presenter Gary Lineker to be held to any form of account for the deluge of left-wing propaganda he spews out – and then for only one tweet. His punishment? A docking of his obscene £1.35million-a-year contract? No, Mr Davie thinks he is a ‘brilliant presenter’ and instead has had a ‘good chat with him’. He believes Lineker now understands impartiality. That’s okay then.

With the benefit of hindsight, the BBC became unashamedly socialist in support of the Attlee government in 1945, and has never deviated from that campaigning zeal. Margaret Thatcher was the only PM who genuinely tried to reform the bloated state propaganda organisation but even she did not have the power to dismantle it.

The BBC erupted with fury after the Brexit referendum confirmed that the British people did not share its values, as this News-watch report confirms. But perhaps the defining characteristic of the BBC in its centenary year is its climate alarmism and its chilling insistence that the ‘science is settled’. Shamefully, the Corporation accepted this was the case at an internal meeting in 2005. Thereafter, instead of objective reporting, it has peddled climate activism. There is a daily deluge of programme and news features and stories. Turn to the climate pages of the BBC website and you discover the real agenda – a total fanaticism about the climate emergency, a burning desire to force British people to change their evil carbon-generating ways and a complete adherence to Net Zero fanaticism. 

Exhibit A is the BBC Media Action site – the so-called ‘charity’ arm of the Corporation which used to be the World Service Trust. Its purpose now is to promote the UN and IMF world government agenda. In this domain – funded by huge grants from Bill Gates and the EU, and in partnership with a host of woke corporations including Twitter and Facebook, – it now actually has training courses for journalists to learn how to become climate change propagandists.

In the Media Action worldview, the only cause for changing weather is ‘climate change’. Basic geography has been abandoned for a one-dimensional fear agenda. Flash floods in Africa are not the result of the sun’s heat and volatile tropical atmospheric forces but rather burning too much fossil fuel.

George Orwell’s statue has dominated the entry to the £1billion BBC HQ in Portland Place since 2017. Its presence is deeply ironic. BBC staffers are reminded every day of the man who showed with terrifying accuracy in Animal Farm and 1984 what totalitarianism is like. Yet every day, they are pushing on a massive scale the propaganda Orwell expressed. Current political developments suggest that nothing will now stop them.

The BBC, skewered through its rotten core

The BBC, skewered through its rotten core

BBC Bias, BBC History | | by David Keighley

Few readers of News-watch  will need convincing that the BBC is biased. The Corporation’s track record of hating Britain and its values in a helter-skelter quest for ‘diversity’, and as a political campaigner against conservative values and in favour of liberal-left causes such as climate alarmism, lockdowns and much more, has been chronicled voluminously in these pages.

Now university lecturer David Sedgwick’s latest book, Is That True Or Did You Hear It On The BBC?  brings a series of fresh and meticulously researched insights into the gargantuan scale of the bias. It shows that without doubt the BBC complaints system is rotten to the core.

The book has been published at an opportune moment. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is assembling her Mid-Term Review of the Corporation. The public consultation phase has closed (July 29). Of course, her tenure in office may be short, but she has at least taken steps in the framing of the review to attack BBC bias head-on. Her appointment rattled the BBC, and executives are fighting tooth and nail to thwart her ambitions.

Meanwhile, Director General Tim Davie – despite a deluge of evidence to the contrary after almost two years in office – risibly continues to claim that his top priority is restoring impartiality. He has ordered a raft of measures allegedly to tackle the problems, including a politburo-style ‘10-point plan’.

Close scrutiny of the measures, however, reveals that they are little more than all-too-familiar BBC window-dressing and an exercise in kicking the can down the road. There is, for example, an acceptance that output should be subject to independent (non-BBC) review. To deal with this, four consultants have been appointed by the BBC, so the idea that they are truly ‘independent’ is yet more BBC flannel.

The peerless BBC blogger Craig Byers explains the inadequacies of the 10-point plan in further detail here.

Sedgwick has already written two books about the BBC, and a review of one of them is on TCW Defending Freedom here. In 21 illuminating case studies of BBC bias at its most flagrant, his latest title nails exactly why Davie’s measures are the equivalent of tackling a petrochemical blaze with a water-pistol. His key line of argument is that throughout its 100-year history, the BBC has blindly supported the social and economic objectives of ‘society’s wealthiest and most powerful entities’, and does not report news but rather ‘news narrative’ and is therefore ‘a hugely valuable asset of global power’.

Some might disagree with his suggestion that the 1984 miners’ strike was part of a popular uprising against the establishment, but his main point, that the BBC in 2022 has swallowed the World Economic Forum ‘Build Back Better’ agenda and is thus supporting undemocratic political agitation against the interests of the British people who are forced to pay to receive it, is strongly made.

The book begins with the BBC’s current main activist hobby horse: fanning alarm about the climate. The Corporation’s so-called environment ‘reporters’ trumpeted in 2004 that the Maldives were a ‘paradise facing extinction’ and that the 360,000 inhabitants would soon be forced to evacuate. Eighteen years on, says Sedgwick, the population and tourism have both doubled, and more than $800million is being ploughed into expanding the main airport to meet the mushrooming demand. A survey of atolls worldwide has shown a growth in landmass of 8 per cent over the past 60 years.

Another example is a forensic dissection of the so-called Harlow ‘race-hate murder’ of Arkadiusz Jozwik, a Polish man, soon after the Brexit vote in September 2016. Daniel Sandford’s television news reports trumpeted it as a race killing, and BBC2 Newsnight embellished the sensationalism by including claims that Nigel Farage had ‘blood on his hands’. Eventually it emerged that Jozwik had provoked a gang of youths by himself being racist and was punched in retaliation. One youth was convicted of manslaughter. The outrageous BBC reporting was also covered on TCW Defending Freedom, for example here. 

Sedgwick chronicles how the BBC rejected all claims of bias over the case, but three years later broadcast a programme intended to put the record straight. It was titled The Brexit Murder? thus compounding the original Sandford claims and confirming that even when seemingly trying to correct errors, the Corporation is so mired in its own confirmation bias that it cannot do so.

For its 100th anniversary celebrations, the broadcaster appointed as an ‘official BBC historian’ Sussex University media studies don (and former BBC producer) David Hendy.  He has written The BBC: A People’s History, which is best described as pro-BBC propaganda, and an extension of how the BBC attacks all those who criticise it. Hendy, in essence, argues that those who criticise the BBC are mainly right-wing, malicious axe-grinders. I hope to review it for TCW soon.

Sedgwick’s clear analysis is a valuable counter-balance to Hendy’s flummery.

Grade’s Herculean task to tackle the biased, woke BBC

Grade’s Herculean task to tackle the biased, woke BBC

BBC Bias, BBC Complaints Process, Ofcom | | by Andrew

MICHAEL Grade – Baron Grade of Yarmouth – becomes chairman of Ofcom today.

He takes over days after Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries published Up Next, her White Paper on the future of broadcasting.

Main points include that the current BBC licence fee funding regime will eventually come to an end, Channel 4 will be privatised and that ‘TV-like’ content will be subject to ‘harmful content’ restrictions regulated and policed by Ofcom.

The latter point apart – which Big Brother Watch fears will presage a new age of government censorship – many of the aspirations in the White Paper make sense and can be seen as necessary and often overdue adaptations to developments in the fast-changing broadcasting  arena.

Lord Grade – who takes the Conservative whip in the House of Lords – has a formidable industry track record, from being director of programmes of the former ITV company LWT in the 1970s, controller of BBC1 and chief executive of Channel 4 in the 1980s and 90s, to chairman of the BBC and then executive chair of ITV in the noughties.

It is rumoured in Westminster that he intends to be especially tough on the BBC and in particular to use Ofcom’s regulatory leverage over the BBC to ensure impartiality. He apparently has the full backing of Mrs Dorries, who, it is understood, pushed hard for his appointment.

But ambition will not mean a fig unless the Corporation’s epidemic-scale wokery and groupthink is rooted out. BBC bias is now so blatant that it is impossible to keep track, as Peter Hitchens eloquently pointed out at the weekend. 

On issues such as diversity and climate alarm, BBC troops see themselves as warriors of change and activists rather than chroniclers of events.

Changing the licence fee could have a powerful corrective impact, but there is no definite date or detail as yet. So in the short term, the only hope of rooting out bias is through Ofcom.

Against this background, in the 22,000 words of the White Paper, there are only six mentions of impartiality. The key passage at Chapter 2, section 1 states:

‘Looking forward, the government also wants to see the BBC taking steps to reform over the next six years. This includes taking action to improve on its impartiality, which is central to the BBC’s Mission and to maintaining trust with audiences. In that context we welcome the BBC’s 10-Point Impartiality and Editorial Standards Action Plan, published in October 2021, which aims to raise standards by ensuring that BBC programmes and content are fair, accurate, unbiased, and reflect the UK public. Alongside this, the BBC adopted the findings of the Serota Review into the BBC’s governance and culture in full. While the Action Plan is a good start, changes are necessary and they need to be delivered.’

Does that suggest definite action of the sort required? Only time – and Lord Grade – will determine.

His task, though, is Herculean.

Ofcom’s track record as BBC regulator – which it became at the start of the current Charter in 2017 – can only be described as complacent and inept. One of its key tasks in this domain is as appeals body on complaints. But in the four years since it took over, the Content Board has decided to investigate only six of the hundreds referred to it; none has been upheld. This chart illustrates vividly how dire the position is:

Part of the problem here is the Content Board is stuffed full of figures who have worked for the BBC, and is thus not independent. 

Also in Lord Grade’s in-tray related to impartiality is the Jewish bus incident on December 1 last year. A party of Jewish youths innocently celebrating Hanukkah in Oxford Street were terrorised and spat at by racist thugs. The BBC initially claimed they had evidence which showed that the attack had been at least partially provoked by an anti-Islamic insult from someone on board the bus. The Jewish community was outraged, and eventually the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit issued a highly-qualified apology of the sort routinely deployed to make issues go away. 

At this point, Ofcom stepped in – and keen to make it look as they took their regulatory responsibilities seriously – announced that they would also investigate. 

More than three months on, the Content Board has not yet published its findings. This defies belief. With the board having never yet ruled against the BBC, the suspicion is growing that that the inquiry announcement was a PR ploy to deflect criticism.

This is just a starter in the list of mammoth tasks Lord Grade will face in the coming months.

Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack: Surprise, surprise! Next BBC Religion Editor is yet another Muslim

Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack: Surprise, surprise! Next BBC Religion Editor is yet another Muslim

BBC Bias, Martin Bashir, Religious Affairs | | by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack

This post by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack originally appeared on The Conservative Woman

WHAT would any outside observer think of a company which after a ‘competitive recruitment process’ continually appointed individuals from the same socio/cultural/religious grouping? Is it possible to conclude that the company had an agenda?

The BBC, after a long delay which caused a former World Service religious affairs correspondent to question its commitment to religious broadcasting, has appointed a new Religion Editor, Aleem Maqbool. It announced that ‘following a competitive recruitment process . . . Aleem will take the lead on the BBC’s expert analysis and insight on the major themes and issues affecting different faiths in the UK and around the world’. Currently BBC News North American Correspondent, Maqbool is a journalist of considerable experience having also reported from Pakistan, Gaza/West Bank and Egypt. He is due to take up his post early this spring.

He follows the disgraced Martin Bashir who stepped down last year with serious health issues. Bashir’s decision may also have been influenced by the resurfacing of the controversy surrounding his fabrication of evidence to procure the infamous interview with Princess Diana which made his name internationally known and helped procure lucrative employment in the American media.

During his stay in the USA he was forced to resign from the cable TV channel MSNBC having made ‘ill-judged’ comments about Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate. When even MSNBC, who are notorious for their one-sided journalism, are forced to take note of your behaviour, you must be out-on-a-limb biased.

Despite the scandals which seemed to follow him, Bashir eventually returned to the UK to work for the BBC once again. Fabricating evidence, which was known by the BBC in 1996, long before Bashir left for America in 1999, and being crudely partial were no obstacles to the BBC top brass thinking you were just the man to be Religion Editor.

Bashir had followed Aaqil Ahmed to the top job in BBC religious broadcasting. In 2009 the BBC had appointed Ahmed to what was then termed Head of Religion and Ethics. His time in charge was dogged by controversy, particularly his outspoken commitment to multicultural broadcasting and his perceived bias against Christianity. Ahmed responded to Church of England complaints about the lack of religious broadcasting by saying the C of E was ‘living in the past’. This was at a time when overall volume of programming had doubled and religious output on BBC television had fallen. A strange case of reverse empire-building.

Although our country was founded on Christian values Ahmed also thought Christianity should not be treated any differently from Islam or other religions. Mark Thompson, then Director General, only slightly disagreed. Thompson thought Islam should be treated more sensitively by the media than Christianity because Muslims are a religious minority in Britain and, as such, their faith should be given different coverage from that of more established faith groups. Ahmed left in 2016 after the BBC axed the role of Head of Religion and Ethics and replaced it with an executive team.

In 2017 the BBC promoted Fatima Salaria and put her in charge of commissioning religious output. Salaria was best known for commissioning Muslims Like Us, a reality-style show, plus a series of programmes about radicalisation. She had already faced a backlash in 2016 after giving Abdul Haqq, a convicted fraudster and former boxing champion, a platform on Muslims Like Us. Haqq, previously known as Anthony Small, was a member of the inner circle of the notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary. Before going on the programme Haqq had openly expressed support for ISIS.

Professor Anthony Glees, of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, was of the opinion that ‘if a BBC executive makes a programme that is notorious and then the BBC promotes them, it tells me that the BBC has in that area lost its moral compass’. Nevertheless the corporation, never willing to admit a mistake, defended their choice of candidate. A spokesman said: ‘People should be judged by their ability to do the job, not their religious background. Fatima was appointed as she is an extremely talented commissioner.’

There has been an undeniable decline in Christian adherence in recent years and a growth of Islam. This, however, is not as radical as the BBC appears to think. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2011, the last census for which we have results, 59.3 per cent of the population of England and Wales still self-identified as Christian, with only 4.8 per cent identifying as Muslim, whilst in Scotland only 1.4 per cent identified as Muslim.

The last three people in charge of religious broadcasting and a commissioning editor appointed by the BBC have been British Asians, three of them Muslims and one from a Muslim family. Even in a day when only 59 per cent of the population self-identify as Christians, can we seriously believe that since 2009 there were no suitably qualified Christian candidates for these posts? In the meantime, from a Muslim population of at most 4.8 per cent, suitable candidates seem to abound.

This could be understood as the usual BBC endeavour to celebrate diversity and multiculturalism. However, there are grounds for seeing it as more than merely an attempt to make amends for perceived bias in the past by reverse bias today, mistaken though that would be. It could be seen as a deliberate expression of the scorn which those in the upper echelons of the BBC hold towards Christianity and the British values which come from it, and the promotion and normalisation of Islam.

It would appear that the BBC has a clear agenda to emphasise a small minority of society over the majority, nevertheless expecting that we should gladly continue to pay a licence fee in its support, whether we agree with such policies or not.

News-watch in Freedom of Information battle with BBC

News-watch in Freedom of Information battle with BBC

BBC Bias, News-watch | | by Andrew

News-watch is battling the Information Commissioner and the BBC about the Corporation’s refusal to release basic information about how it collects data about impartiality and the subjects of complaints made by the public about programmes.

The long drawn-out fight was the focus this week (2 February) of an appeal before a first-tier tribunal by News-watch against the Information Commissioner. A ruling on the matter is expected within 28 days.

The process began in March 2020 when News-watch requested further information about a survey contained in the BBC’s annual reports and accounts for 2018/19 showing that 52 percent of respondents to an IPSOS MORI poll commissioned by the BBC thought the Corporation provided ‘impartial news’ but only 44 percent turned to the BBC if they wanted impartial news.

The extra information requested under FoI  included the details of the brief given to IPSOS Mori, the nature of the sample who were asked and the details of how the results were collated and interpreted. This was considered by News-watch to be a matter of major public interest because such data is used by BBC as proof that its output – despite claims to the contrary – is indeed impartial.

In parallel, News-watch also asked for the release of all complaints made to the BBC from 2015 to the present about impartiality on the ground that the Corporation only makes public the topics of those which it deems fit to do so.

The BBC refused the application point bank,  principally  on the ground that it has  a derogation from the FOI Act which allows a refusal if the material involved is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature’. News-watch appealed to the Information Commissioner against the ruling, but he broadly upheld the BBC’s stance and it was at that stage that News-watch appealed against him.

David Keighley, Managing Director of News-watch, commented:

“The BBC claims to be making efforts to be more impartial, so it is a matter of huge concern to licence-fee payers that it is so secretive about how it gauges that it is not biased, and also will not tell the public the content of the majority of complaints it receives about impartiality.

“News-watch has demonstrated that the BBC complaints process as it currently operates is not fit for purpose and stonewalls the vast majority of audience concerns. The purpose of this legal action is to force the Corporation to become more open and to stop this absurd claim that this sort of data should be confidential.”  

An end to BBC bias? Don’t count on it

An end to BBC bias? Don’t count on it

BBC Bias | | by David Keighley

The Bashir affair has brought into sharp focus again that BBC journalism is not fair and impartial, as its Charter requires. But after decades of bias in BBC reporting of the EU, what are the chances of genuine change?

Much has been written about the Lord Dyson report into the 1995 BBC Panorama interview of Princess Diana. Columnists and politicians galore are clamouring for urgent action to mend the Corporation’s broken ways. According to Lord Dyson these primarily included lying in pursuit of a story, coupled with massive brick-walling by senior management against any suggestion of wrongdoing.

And it seems that steps to reform and rein in the excesses of BBC bias and rank bad journalism might now be under consideration as part of the Corporation’s mid-term Charter review, due in 2022. Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, has suggested that structural governance reform will be on the agenda.

But don’t hold your breath. Much in a similar vein was written in 2012 when the BBC was caught entirely wrong-footed over its handling of Jimmy Savile. Or when the corporation in 2019 was landed with a £2 million+ legal bill for its cruel, vastly over-the-top coverage of baseless claims of sexual misconduct against Cliff Richard. Once again, with the latter, senior management disgracefully claimed no wrongdoing in their hounding of the singer. The High Court Judge in the case very strongly disagreed.

Through it all, the BBC has so far survived intact, a bloated, £3.5 billion-a-year protected state relic from an age when broadcast frequencies were a scarce resource. 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 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.

No government from those of Margaret Thatcher onward has dared grasp the nettle of genuine root-and-branch reform.

Under the new Charter operational from 2017, Ofcom assumed a regulatory role over some BBC matters including the conduct of BBC journalism. But this was too little, too late, and the Ofcom scrutiny has so far proved totally ineffectual, not least because most of its content board appointees are former BBC advisors or employees and have the same mindset as the Corporation itself.

So how can this problem be solved? Over the past 40 years – arguably since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 –  the BBC  has become increasingly opinionated and left-wing to the extent now that no part of its output is unaffected. Even the BBC1 programme Antiques Roadshow is larded with lectures by presenter Fiona Bruce on topics such as the evils of Britain’s colonial past.

In this vein, News-watch recently conducted a thorough survey of BBC Ideas, a catalogue of 600 or so five-minute videos ‘for the curious minded’

This is a project launched by former Labour culture secretary James Purnell at vast expense when he was BBC director of radio and education. The findings? of the titles, the majority (around 350) have controversial or political content in subject areas such as history, race, capitalism, climate change and feminism. Only 25 of them have points which could be regarded as ‘conservative’.  The rest could have been taken from a manual on how to construct ‘woke’ propaganda based on post-modern critical theory.

News-watch has also thoroughly scrutinised the Corporation’s EU coverage for more than two decades, and – as readers of this blog are painfully aware – this is the domain in which the most crass corporation bias has operated.  The 40 or so News-watch reports since 1999 summarised here show a massive weighting towards pro-EU opinion up to and including the Brexit referendum and then continuing through the Brexit process itself to the present day.  When has the BBC constructed a programme which shows the problems of the EU, and revealing that it is ultimately a huge anti-democratic project?

The BBC’s response to those News-watch reports? It has been characterised throughout by the same arrogance and stonewalling identified by Lord Dyson in his report on Bashir.  Corporation senior management – including many of those involved in the Prince Diana interview – chose to ignore them all. Without providing a shred of evidence, they claimed that they were worthless.

An easy and respectful way of testing their veracity would have been to appoint an independent panel to assess the quality of the News-watch work. But that possibility was never even on the BBC’s agenda.  They preferred instead to launch ad hominem attacks against me and eminent Eurosceptic Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who partially funded the News-watch work.

A key character in the Bashir affair identified by Lord Dyson was Anne Sloman, who was BBC chief political adviser, and therefore one of the key advisers to Tony Hall, who was then BBC director of news. Sloman was among those who investigated in 1996 claims of impropriety against Martin Bashir, and despite abundant evidence to the contrary, concluded that he was ‘honourable’.

She betrayed similar arrogance in her treatment of News-watch and the claims of anti-EU bias. In an editorial meeting in which the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle was present (in his then role of editor of the BBC Today programme), she asserted that eurosceptics like Lord Pearson were ‘mad’ and therefore should be ignored. Her treatment of me was even more outrageous. At a summer drinks meeting between Parliamentarians and the BBC attended by Lord Pearson, she told him that the reports I was compiling should be ignored because I had been ‘sacked by the BBC’.  This was an outright and baseless falsehood.  I had worked for the BBC for seven years without a blemish on my staff reports and had been promoted regularly throughout. I left the BBC because I found a more senior job at the ITV breakfast television station TV-am, where I became director of public affairs.

As a result of her claims, I was forced to fire off (at considerable expense) a pre-action letter for defamation of character, and she huffily backed down. But her intention was clear. She wanted me out of the way, to be discredited and taken off the case.

This illustrates that a basic tactic of BBC senior managers at the BBC is to try to destroy or discredit those who oppose it. That applied in the Bashir case with the graphics designer who drew the forged bank statements, with BBC Newsnight journalists in 2011-13 who wanted to blow the whistle on the BBC’s treatment of Jimmy Savile (their BBC contracts were not renewed) and in the Cliff Richard affair, when the BBC tactic was to throw the blame on to South Yorkshire police.

So how can be the BBC senior management be so arrogant and disdainful towards those who oppose the Corporation?  A central problem is that the BBC’s Charter gives the Corporation almost unassailable independence. It was as designed to protect BBC journalism from political interference. Noble aim. But the drafters of the legislation surely never envisaged that the Corporation would, in effect, go rogue – as its approach to EU coverage and BBC Ideas shows – and become an enemy of the country and the culture which pays for it.  A dangerous enemy, too, because its goals appear increasingly to be the complete denigration and destruction of Western values.

A manifestation of its unassailability is that the BBC complaints process is not fit for purpose. It is designed to protect the BBC rather than to deal conscientiously with the concerns of audiences. The complaints process could be a shop window for BBC transparency, and for the further debate of matters of public controversy. Instead it has become another brick wall which the BBC hides behind and a vehicle to discredit opponents. An example of this is that New-watch has within the past month received a warning letter from the complaints unit (which is sub-contracted to facilities company Capita) warning us that we are making too many complaints and that they are too complicated to deal with so we are wasting Corporation resources.

A second manifestation is that the BBC refuses to produce any independent evidence to verify its impartiality. Instead, it relies on opinion polls. This is absurd and simply not good enough. News-watch reports into the BBC output are based on scrupulously-applied academic principles which can be seen and debated by anyone. By contrast, the BBC simply tells the world it knows it is impartial, and therefore it is. Yet the Corporation provides no evidence to support its position and claims it would be a waste of time to do so. That is an absurdly arrogant stance for an organisation in receipt of £3.5 billion of public funding to adopt.

In that context, as cries for reforms intensify, an acid test of the government’s intent will be whether the proposed structural reforms include such monitoring and an overhaul of the complaints system. Only when these operate on an independent basis and thus hold the BBC genuinely to account will BBC bias end.  As things stand, it is an obdurate, arrogant and unprincipled law unto itself.

BBC Ideas: an extravaganza of bias

BBC Ideas: an extravaganza of bias

BBC Bias | | by David Keighley

News-watch has completed its biggest-ever survey into BBC output. It is utterly damning. The focus is BBC Ideas, a group of 600 or so short factual videos for ‘curious minds’ aimed at 18-45 year olds. The project – launched in 2018 –  is the brainchild of former Labour culture minister James Purnell during his tenure in charge of BBC radio and education.

His bequest to licence fee payers can be best described as a bewildering cacophony. In my desk, I have a Christmas stocking-filler present, a book  called 1,339 Facts To Make Your Jaw Drop. BBC Ideas seems to be the video version. 

Having problems going to the lavatory? Don’t worry, BBC Ideas has an answer to smooth your passage.

Are you a woman with a beard, facing a barrage of nasty discrimination? Ditto.

Or, is it that you are a transgender person, trying to make sense of your sexual identity? BBC Ideas tries especially hard to help here, by suggesting that the solution is to refer to the principles of quantum mechanics . I  kid you not.

This is the BBC, and – as can already be gathered from the above  – the catalogue is not value-free. Around 250 titles can be regarded loosely as ‘neutral’. They tackle subjects such as tips for winning at Scrabble or sleeping better. That said, why the BBC wants to waste millions on covering such topics, which are already covered in abundance on You Tube or Ted Talks, could be the subject of a whole separate blog.   

The remaining 350 videos, though, are clearly political or contain political points  Balanced? All but two dozen have a blatant liberal-left or ‘woke’ agenda.

The major themes in this extravaganza of bias are climate change, feminism and gender, and discrimination against minorities of all kinds. The BBC Ideas catalogue can be regarded as a scatter-gun manifesto for the grievance culture. On route, it trashes British culture, history and achievements on a truly epic scale.   

it seems that the editors and producers have left no stone unturned in their quest to validate and propagate their values. The survey itself must be read to appreciate fully the extent of the woke propaganda – there is a summary and analysis of all the political content – but what follows gives a brief flavour.  The introduction to the report summarises:

‘Put bluntly, BBC Ideas casts its host nation as a continuing menace to the rest of the world and rotten to the core. As for the future, the main hopes are the abandonment of capitalism and a revolution, in line with post-modern critical theory and the most extreme demands of the Green lobby. The catalogue reveals, in sharp relief, that the Corporation is acting as a political campaigner, rather than a public service broadcaster bringing to audience attention a broad array of views and perspectives.’

On climate change, the videos project that unless there is the urgent action to end capitalism,  the use of fossil fuels, travelling by air, and all animal farming, Planet Earth is doomed. In their frantic desire to project this catastrophism, the producers see nothing wrong in using clearly terrified children in the videos, thus breaking child performance codes.  Around 50 titles feature environmental or climate change alarmism – with not a whisper of dissent.

On feminism and gender, the goal is to advocate that differences between men and women are a social construct, and that women – especially those who are not white – are heavily and unpleasantly  discriminated against in all areas of British life, with uncontested claims that such favouritism towards men is costing the economy billions of pounds annually (by  – who else? – Cherie Blair). The desire to sniff out evidence of the war against women also involved much sifting of history to unearth as many females as possible whose achievements had been allegedly disregarded. In BBC Ideas, there is no doubt who the real heroines of history are, and they include Simone de Beauvoir and the Greek poet Sappho. 

In the discrimination against minorities category, a main thread is  an unchallenged acceptance of what boils down to the Black Lives Matter agenda. Contributors tell us that the colonisation of America was genocide on an immense scale, probably bigger than that of the Holocaust. In this playbook, the Mercator atlas projection is an expression of white privilege; Muslim terrorism only exists because of economic deprivation; and those who do not support mass immigration are fascists. BBC Ideas editors have also bust a gut to illustrate how badly those who are physically or mentally disadvantaged are treated.   

Do the titles which contain what the report classes as ‘conservative’ content, go any way to balancing this deluge of bias? Jordan Peterson and his 12 rules for living are there; and so is a spokesperson from the Theos think-tank arguing  cogently that religion is still important. Another brave soul maintains that ‘populism’ is much maligned and is a valid and important expression  of democracy. But these are small drops in an ocean of BBC prejudice. 

News-watch has submitted complaints to Ofcom and the BBC about BBC Ideas, and the letters can be read here. But almost certainly, both bodies will find an excuse to reject them. BBC director general Tim Davie claims that his main priority is to ensure Charter obligations of impartiality are met. The evidence of this report is that he has an Herculean task, and that he is blind to the massive scale of the problem.  Depressingly,  there are no surprises in the report; it is confirmation of the scale of bias which has taken over all aspects of BBC output. The issue is why those charged by Parliament to oversee the Corporation, and the government itself are prepared to  do nothing about it. 

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.

BBC BIAS DIGEST 13 OCTOBER 2020

BBC Digest | | by David Keighley

UPHELD BBC COMPLAINANT ‘IN SHOCK’: Charles Moore (£ Telegraph 13/10, second column item) outlined how a correspondent was ‘in shock’ after a complaint she had submitted directly to director general Tim Davie – bypassing the usual complaints procedure – had been upheld in fewer than three weeks. Mr Moore said the woman had complained that BBC Parliament’s coverage of the Internal Market Bill (linked to Brexit) was usually free of running commentary by analysts, but on this occasion , the ‘information captions’ running below the live feed of the parliamentary proceedings had been devoted to ‘a series of condemnations of the man introducing the Bill’, the prime minister. He added:

 

‘This is what the BBC complaints team – not Mr Davie in person, but presumably acting on his orders – replied:

“We didn’t live up to our usual standards. The accumulation of detailed quotes condemning the Government’s plans… gave the impression that we were only interested in criticisms of the Bill. The proper purpose of the information captions on screen is to give supporting information to enable the viewer to understand the legal processes involved in legislation, as well as key information relating to the content of the debate… Where political comments are quoted from, these should be deployed on screen specifically where those comments are referred to by the Member speaking. We didn’t do this in this case and we understand your annoyance and apologise.”

‘I would be grateful to hear from other readers who may have had a satisfactory answer from the BBC. It is a genre with which I am not familiar.’