HALL FLOATS ‘HOUSEHOLD TAX’ TO FUND BBC: Paul Withers (Express 28/8) said that director general Tony Hall had said on the Radio 4 Media Show that progressive alternatives to the licence fee were interesting and should be examined, including a compulsory ‘household tax’ which would require richer families to pay more. Mr Withers reported that he had explained that the …
BBC BIAS DIGEST 10 AUGUST 2020
BBC IS ‘PROMOTING DIVISIONS OVER RACE’: Calvin Robinson (Spiked! 10/8) observed that, despite clear evidence which showed that white ‘working-class boys’ were the most consistently disadvantaged social group in the UK, the ‘identity-obsessed left’ (including the BBC) was peddling ‘white-privilege theories’. He asserted: ‘For the BBC to be further perpetuating the critical race theory myth of ‘white privilege’ adds insult to injury. …
BBC Bias Digest 7 August 2020
BBC ‘RECEIVES 18,000 COMPLAINTS OVER N-WORD’: Darren Boyle (Daily Mail 8/7) noted that the BBC had received 18,000 complaints over a report about a hit and run accident on July 29 in which presenter Fiona Lamdin had used the n-word in a quote attributed to the perpetrators of the accident, who were believed to have been racially-motivated. Mr Boyle said the …
BBC Bias Digest 6 August 2020
BBC ‘THREATENS PENSIONERS WITH BAILIFFS’: Continuing coverage of the BBC’s decision to charge 4.5 million over-75s for their licence fees from August 1, William Cole (Daily Mail 6/8) said the corporation was spending an estimated £38m this year on extra measures to make sure that they paid. He added that if ministers decided to make non-payment a civil rather a criminal …
When will Team Boris wake up to BBC bias?
ACCORDING to weekend press reports, Boris Johnson’s director of communications Lee Cain has had a lightbulb moment. He has told Downing Street staff that appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme is a ‘waste of time’. Well, golly gosh. An old saying about a pikestaff rushes to mind. In reality, it is hard to believe that the Johnson administration wants …
A figleaf swept away in the torrent of anti-Brexit bias
In BBC Radio 4’s Feedback on Friday, host Roger Bolton introduced a classic edition of Corporation Complaints Stonewalling. The subject? Primarily coverage of Brexit. The message? As always, the BBC is getting it right. The full transcript is below. Element one, carefully orchestrated by Bolton, was to convey that the BBC was receiving complaints that its Brexit coverage was biased …
BBC put Rees-Mogg under fire
The morning after being ‘caught up in a scuffle’ at the University of the West of England (a scene that BBC Somerset’s James Craig described as ‘very aggressive and unexpected’), found Jacob Rees-Mogg being interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme. The purpose of the interview was not, though, the previous night’s headline-making attack on him, which was sufficiently intimidating …
BBC Chiefs defend anti-Brexit ‘balance’
Two very senior voices from within the BBC bubble – David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, and Ric Bailey, the BBC’s chief political adviser – have penned a rare and important joint piece for a somewhat out-of-the-way pro-public-broadcasting media site called journalism.co.uk headlined Impartiality and the BBC – ‘broad balance’ in a two-horse race. It concerns the BBC’s …
BBC SPINS FRUIT FARMS MIGRANT LABOUR ’SHORTAGE’
This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased? A couple of mornings ago Today sent a reporter to a fruit farm in Godalming and brought back a large punnet of Brexit-related gloom. Nick Robinson introduced the report with these words: Zoe Conway’s report included various hard-working, efficient migrant workers (as she portrayed them) worried about …
News-watch survey of BBC Article 50 survey shows deep anti-Brexit bias
The latest News-watch detailed analysis of BBC output, covering the UK’s Article 50 letter and its aftermath, shows heavy bias against the case for Brexit. The report, which included more than 73,000 words of programme transcripts, can be found in full here. Coverage of the survey’s findings is in the Daily Express here. In the week of the filing of …