The Guardian has been running a series of features which claim to give an overview of the BBC’s state of health. They are emerging as text book examples in biased, vacuous analysis.
Latest up by Clare Higgins is an overview of the BBC’s journalism – an purported audit of the health of its journalism.
The Guardian, of course, is the most-bought newspaper by the BBC (more than 200 copies a day!) – in effect, according to some, its ‘house organ’.
The verdict of Ms Higgins? Rather predictably, she decides the Corporation’s biggest problem is not ‘institutional bias to the left’. The possibility is dismissed in a single sentence.
She provides no analytical evidence to back this up. Her sources for deciding are figures such as two former senior BBC news executives, Richard Sambrook – now a professor of journalism at Cardiff University (which receives project money from the BBC) – and Mark Damazer, now an Oxford don, along with correspondents such as Jeremy Bowen and Robert Peston.
Sambrook sums up their approach to Higgins’ questions: ‘It is a wonderful news organisation. It does fantastic journalism every day.’ So that’s OK, then. With 5,000 staff in the field and £1bn of funding, who would expect anything less?
Peston complains about the pressures that correspondents are put under by editors pursuing the agendas of newspapers, and claims that if anything, the bias in BBC output is towards the Daily Mail.
He reveals only that he, the Guardian and his BBC colleagues – present and past – are totally trapped inside an illusion of their own making. Oh, and that the journalism of he and his Guardian colleagues is risible.
