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MUNCHETTY ‘WARNED FOR MOONLIGHTING’: Andy Halls (Sun 10/8) reported that BBC1 Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty – whose salary from the BBC was £195,000 – had been warned about potential ‘conflict of interest’ after she appeared in a corporate video promoting the Aston Martin car company without prior permission of her bosses or declaring her earnings.  Mr Halls noted that the BBC’s editorial guidelines allowed journalists to carry out external speaking, or chairing, at private engagements as long as they maintained ‘objectivity and impartiality’, though he also reported that politicians had called for an end to the practice, and that Aston Martin was in the midst of a cost-cutting exercise which could result in the loss of 500 jobs.   Mr Halls added that  last year, Ms Munchetty was found to have breached the BBC’s impartiality guidelines by the corporation’s complaints unit after she condemned President Trump for telling some female politicians to “go back” to where they came from. That ruling had been overturned by Director-General Lord Hall, who said the BBC was not neutral on racism.

‘WOKE” BBC PRESENTERS ‘GET AWAY WITH MURDER’: Dan Wooton (Talk Radio 14/8), interviewing commentator Rod Liddle about his Spectator column describing BBC ‘woke’ issues (see BBC Bias Digest August 14), also picked up the Naga Munchetty story. This was part of the exchange (transcribed by Craig Byers, of Is the BBC BIased?):

Dan Wootton: If you are one of their woke stars – and I’m noticing this increasingly with BBC News. I know we’ve spoken about Emily Maitlis before but now Naga Munchetty as well – if you’re one of those woke news presenters you can get away with murder at the BBC. This week it was revealed by the i newspaper and The Sun that Naga Munchetty had been moonlighting making corporate videos for Aston Martin. She hadn’t declared the fact that she was doing this. She hadn’t told the Beeb how much she was being paid. For many presenters that would be a sackable offence at the BBC. And she got a very minor slap on the wrist.

Rod Liddle: They all get minor slaps on the wrist. Emily Maitlis…has consistently, almost with a deliberation, broken the rules every single week, either through her Twitter feed or occasionally live on Newsnight, and nothing ever happens. It is true…I think there are a few people at the BBC in senior positions who are genuinely worried about the grandstanding wokeness of these presenters but still nothing seems to get done about it. It’s remarkable. And the desperately sad thing is that that vast tranche of middle England remembers the BBC for good things. It remembers all the great stuff the BBC did to draw the nation together and now it’s being foisted with this agenda which has no relevance beyond NW3 frankly.

BBC ‘NOWHERE NEAR’ ETHNIC MINORITY TARGETS:  Katie Weston (Daily Mail 13/8) reported that June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, was aiming for a BBC mid-level and senior management structure made up of 15 per cent of people from a BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic)background, compared to 12 per cent in the population as a whole.  Ms Weston quoted her as saying that the corporation was ‘nowhere near’ hitting its own targets and claimed it would take longer than had been hoped to attain them.  Ms Sarpong had said:

‘I think the BBC, like many big media organisations, is diverse at sort of entry level.  But certainly not diverse enough in terms of mid-level and senior leadership, not at all. I think anybody would agree and accept that. If you look at the targets that we’ve set ourselves, we’re not hitting them in the way we would like and so there’s a concerted effort being made to try and address that.’

BBC ‘IS ASTRONOMICAL UNITS’ AWAY FROM VALUES OF ITS AUDIENCE: Rod Liddle (£ Spectator 14/8), noting that the BBC had staged a Radio 4 play in which the male lead character of Albert Camus’s The Plague had been transformed into a woman engaged in a lesbian marriage,  said that the only reason he now tuned into BBC output was ‘in the expectation that its wokeness will give me a belly laugh’. He added that the distance the corporation travelled each day from the values of its audience ‘would soon be measurable only in astronomical units’. He noted that ‘woke’ values had now affected pronunciation to the extent that Angela Merkel was now delivered in a ‘ludicrous, hyperbolic manner’. He declared:

‘We are British and pronounce things phonetically, the way we see them. It is not a slight to foreigners that we do this; they do the same thing with us. It is especially galling with place names: Catalonia and Andalucia are both articulated by BBC reporters as if they were auditioning for the part of a waiter in Fawlty Towers.’

He concluded: ‘I suspect it is a case of the BBC telling us that the world should not be seen through a British prism – and is allied to the corporation’s far more egregious policy of replacing British-born foreign correspondents with (sometimes unintelligible, often simply not very good) locals. Whatever, it is another milestone on the BBC’s exciting journey away from its audience’.

BBC’S N-WORD APOLOGY ‘UNHINGED’: Tom Slater (Spiked! 12/8), commenting on the use of the ‘n’ word in  a report about a hit and run accident in which the perpetrators had shouted the word at the victim, a black NHS worker,  by BBC reporter Fiona Lamdin  said the suggestion now being made, that the use of the word was ‘de facto racist’ was ‘unhinged’. Mr Slater noted that more than 18,000 people had complained about the use of the word,  a BBC DJ had resigned in protest over it, and InfluenceHers, a group of black professional women had called for a 24-hour boycott of BBC content. He asserted:

‘But apparently the desire of a journalist and a victim’s family to plainly present the facts of a suspected racist attack is irrelevant. The BBC, having originally stuck by the report, has now said it was a mistake and apologised. ‘The BBC now accepts that we should have taken a different approach’, wrote director general Tony Hall in an email to staff. Inevitably, this statement has been met with outrage that he didn’t cave in sooner.’

Mr Slater concluded:

‘InfluencHers, the professional group calling for a BBC boycott, has genuinely said the report’s use of the n-word could itself ‘constitute a race hate crime’. What an absurd, and telling, accusation. The great and the good seem to have spent more time expressing outrage at Lamdin quoting the n-word than they have about K-Dogg having it spat at him while he was run over by a car. This shows just how screwed up your priorities become once you buy into the idea that words really do wound’.

Gary Oliver, also discussing the developments following Ms Lamdin’s use of the ‘n’ word (Conservative Woman 10/8), concluded:

‘Director-General Tony Hall has now overruled the BBC’s earlier justification and issued a mea culpa, but heaven only knows what nonsense will result from his nebulous promise. One can only laugh at BBC bosses. They obsess over internal Diversity and Inclusion, persistently impose the corporation’s metropolitan mores on the rest of the country, yet continue to upset the minority groups to whom they constantly pander.’

BBC DROP ‘RACIST’ KIPLING POEM FROM VJ DAY PROGRAMME:  Sebastian Shakespeare (Daily Mail 13/8) claimed that the BBC had dropped a sung version of the Rudyard Kipling poem Mandalay being included in a special programme  being broadcast this weekend (15/8) to celebrate VJ day, after the singer Sir Willard White – who was due to have performed it – allegedly objected that a line in the poem was ‘racist’ and refused to sing it. Mr Shakespeare said the line in question was, ‘an wastin’ Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot’, adding that Sir Willard’s agent, Julia Maynard, had confirmed that he had been due to sing it, though had declined to say whether he had voiced any objections to the poem.  Mr Shakespeare  said that Phil Crawley, of the Burma Star Association, which still had 1,400 members who had served in the war against Japan, had commented that the poem Mandalay had ‘intense emotional significance’ for members and was a favourite marching tune. He had also noted that Charles Dance had read the poem in a BBC programme about the 2015 celebrations to mark the 70^th anniversary of VJ Day. Mr Shakespeare said the BBC had declined to say why the poem had been dropped.

ROBIN AITKEN: ‘BBC WILL PAY THE PRICE FOR FAILING TO TACKLE BIAS’: Author and former BBC journalist Robin Aitken, writing in the Spectator ( £ 10/8), argued that the BBC had ‘only has itself to blame’ for ‘the [over-75s] licence fee mess’ by getting itself into an argument it doesn’t want to have – especially as ‘more and more younger people’ are ditching the BBC in favour of web-based streaming channels and ‘growing numbers of people on the right of politics’ are ‘withholding payment of the licence fee because of BBC bias’.

His contented that the BBC – despite the Hutton Inquiry – remained an essentially Blairite institution with ‘scant regard’ to ‘the sensibilities of Tories’ – a situation veiled, he claimed, by the ‘Tory-lite’ administrations of David Cameron and Theresa May, but made ‘evident’ by the administration of Boris Johnson. He asserted: ‘The BBC’s heartfelt opposition to Brexit represents an unbridgeable chasm’.

Mr Aitken contended that Dominic Cummings was a sworn enemy at the heart of government who believed the BBC was permeated by leftist ideology. He argued that despite his key role, the corporation had inflamed matters by broadcasting a documentary about Mr Cummings as ‘a sinister manipulator of public opinion for unsavoury political ends’, and then had launched  an ‘obsessive pursuit’ of Mr Cummings over his ‘notorious trip to the North’, culminating in a BBC2 Newsnight introduction in which presenter Emily Maitlis had decided she was ‘entitled to speak to the nation’; in condemnation of him. Mr Aitken argued that this amounted to ‘a forceful attempt to unseat the Prime Minister’s senior adviser’, and left Downing Street ‘incandescent with rage’ in a relationship already poisoned ‘by decades of covert hostility to the Conservative cause inside the BBC’.  He further argued that there was now strong sense in all this of a reckoning and of chickens coming home to roost.

Turning to the licence fee, Mr Aitken also claimed that there was an ‘irony’ in the BBC imposing a charge on a ‘vulnerable’ group (old people), the very people it used to berate governments for not supporting’. He said the licence fee decision had landed the corporation with ‘hard choices’: ‘Perhaps that half a million quid a year for that newsreader is a bit high? Perhaps that ex-footballer bloke doesn’t need a million for fronting Match of The Day? Perhaps some of those pointless middle-managers could be let go?’ Mr Aitken further contended that the decision to save money by sacking large numbers of ‘frontline journalists’ while failing to ’tackle the ‘rampant bias’ which stemmed from a total lack of political diversity among the staff was an error of judgment. He asserted: ‘Until the Corporation admits to that problem and starts doing something about it, the rift will not be healed’. 

He concluded: ‘Auntie needs more than cosmetic surgery; she needs to re-discover the meaning of ‘impartiality’ if her relationship with the government is to be repaired. A BBC that was once again trusted by all would not only be a great national asset but also the best guarantee of the Corporation’s future. As things stand the BBC has made an enemy of the government and will pay the price.’

’93 PER CENT SUPPORT LICENCE FEE STRIKE’: Emily Ferguson (Express 11/8) said that a poll  among readers had found that 93 per cent of respondents would support a strike by over-75s against paying the BBC licence fee.  Ms Ferguson reported that comments by the respondents included:  ‘The Bully Boy Corporation must be brought down. They are treating pensioners in an appalling manner and spending huge amounts of our money on attempts to modify public opinion on multiculturalism.  These are people who are out of control, providing rubbish services and think they know best. We must insist that the Government no only sorts out the no-charge licence for the over-75s but also provides a referendum on the licence fee.’

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. To suggest ‘privilege’ is primarily based on skin colour is overly simplistic and, frankly, somewhat racist. That’s precisely what the BBC commissioned John Amaechi to say on its educational outlet, BBC Bitesize, last week. Worse, when called out by Andrew Neil on Twitter, John Amaechi acted as if his words were not his opinions after all, but indisputable facts.’

He added:

‘The BBC is obliged by its charter to ‘bring people together… and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the UK’. Instead, it is producing divisive material and fanning the flames of racial unrest, all while wanting a ‘greater role in children’s education’. It’s a scary prospect, and we cannot let it happen. It’s time to defund the BBC.’

LORD HALL ‘APOLOGISES FOR USE OF N-WORD’: Jemma Carr (Mail 9/8) said that, after a meeting with senior colleagues, Lord Hall, the BBC director general, had told staff via email that  the use of the ‘n-word’ in a report about a suspected racist attack on a black NHS worker had – though well-intentioned in journalistic terms  – been a mistake. Ms Carr, who reported that more than 18,600 complaints had been received, said the word had been used by BBC reporter Fiona Lamdin in an item about the hit-and-run attack on the BBC News Channel on July 29.  She said Lord Hall had said:

‘We are proud of the BBC’s values of inclusion and respect, and have reflected long and hard on what people have had to say about the use of the n-word and all racist language both inside and outside the organisation. It should be clear that the BBC’s intention was to highlight an alleged racist attack. This is important journalism which the BBC should be reporting on and we will continue to do so. Yet despite these good intentions, I recognise that we have ended up creating distress amongst many people.

‘The BBC now accepts that we should have taken a different approach at the time of broadcast and we are very sorry for that. We will now be strengthening our guidance on offensive language across our output.  Every organisation should be able to acknowledge when it has made a mistake. We made one here. It is important for us to listen – and also to learn. And that is what we will continue to do.’

Miss Carr also reported that June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, had welcomed the decision, saying she was ‘glad’ that Lord Hall has ‘personally intervened to unequivocally apologise’. She added that Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy praised Lord Hall for the move, adding: ‘But once again it has taken a direct intervention by the DG to overturn a mistake on race previously defended by the BBC’s editorial policy managers.’

Miss Carr said that BBC Senior Digital Reporter Ashley John-Baptiste had posted on social media:

‘Every black member of BBC staff I’ve spoken to is tired. Plain and simple. From new recruits to the seniors – we just cannot fathom how it’s editorially justifiable for a white person to say the N word – period.  We get into this work to represent our communities and tell their stories. In instances like the one we’re witnessing, it’s hard to feel like we have any agency to bring about positive change.’

BBC ‘SIDES YET AGAIN WITH WOKE MOB’: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 10/8), suggested that Lord Hall‘s intervention in the ‘n-word’ row meant that yet again, he had sided with the ‘woke’ mob on Twitter to overrule the older, traditional BBC hands trying to uphold the Charter requirement for impartiality.  Mr Byers said:

‘After previously vetoing their ruling against Naga Munchetty for going against BBC norms and openly venting her personal distaste for Donald Trump’s ‘racism’ on BBC Breakfast, Lord Hall has now overruled his editorial colleagues again.  They had originally defended a white, female BBC News Channel/Points West reporter for using the n-word in connection to a vicious racist attack on a black man on the grounds that the (black) victim’s family wanted the word used in the report to highlight the racism behind the attack. They’d also noted that the report had flagged up the use of offensive language.

‘Regardless of that, over 18,000 people complained – after an online campaign encouraged them to – and Lord Hall evidently decided to play to the ‘Twitter mob’ gallery by apologising and saying they were right that the taboo word should never have been used because of the “distress” it causes – regardless, it seems, of any context.  With Lord Hall going, what’s next? Will his ‘woke’, Blairite protégé James Purnell keep on pushing in the same ‘woke’ direction, or will Tim Davie step in and restore sense?’

ANDREW NEIL ‘LINED UP’ TO BECOME BBC CHAIRMAN:  Steven Brown (Express 9/8) suggested that as part of a bridge building with the BBC, Boris Johnson was lining up former Sunday Times editor and BBC presenter Andrew Neil to succeed Sir David Clementi as chairman of the corporation. Mr Brown also said that Mr Johnson had reportedly held peace talks with Lord Hall, the outgoing director general, following a year of ‘tough exchanges’. He added that other frontrunners to succeed the current chairman when he retired in February included Nicky Morgan, the former culture secretary, Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, former Chancellor George Osborne, and Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, although the latter was likely to be opposed by senior Boris Johnson aide Dominic Cummings. Mr Brown quoted a senior government source as saying:

“The Prime Minister believes the BBC is one of Britain’s best assets, with the soft power projects abroad. He thinks it can do more of that.”

Tim Shipman (£ Sunday Times 8/8) also reported that Mr Neil was being considered as the next BBC Chairman. Glen Owen (Mail on Sunday 9/8) said that it could be revealed that Lord Hall, the BBC’s director general who was retiring at the end of the month, had held ‘peace talks’ with Boris Johnson, and was believed to have argued that number 10 should adopt a ‘less aggressive’ stance to Tim Davie, his predecessor.   Mr Owen said the prime minister was said to have adopted an ’emollient’ tone, saying he wanted to use the BBC’s global reputation to project British ‘soft power’ around the world, but stressing the need for ‘efficiency and savings’. He added that both Downing Street and the BBC had declined to comment about the talks.

BBC WHITE PRIVILEGE ‘DEATH WISH’: Tom Slater (Spiked! 7/8) said that ‘in its latest expression of its apparent death wish’, the BBC had put out in its schools education Bitesize section a clip on social media of psychologist and former basketball player John Amaechi ‘waxing lyrical’ on the subject of white privilege. Mr Slater, observing that the corporation – barracked by accusations of bias and campaigns to defund it – appeared to want to troll its critics, claimed that the Aamechi video seemed ‘particularly cheeky’ in that teenagers ‘can now get woke one the same site as they revise for their French GCSE’, and in showing how orthodox ideas around identity politics and privilege have become at the BBC.

OVER-75s ‘BEING PUSHED BY BBC INTO OVER-PAYING FOR TV LICENCE’:  Rosamund Urwin (£ Sunday Times 9/8) claimed that poor design on the BBC licence-fee website was pushing over-75s into paying for their TV licences  in six months rather than the 12 that they were allowed.  She said Caroline Abrahams of the charity Age UK had stated that it was ‘alarming just how clunky and counterintuitive the TV Licensing website is turning out to be’. Ms Urwin also reported that requests under freedom of information laws had revealed that more than a million Britons had been prosecuted for licence fee evasion since 2014, with nearly three-quarters of those prosecuted last year being women.

Glen Owen(Mail on Sunday 9/8)said that Tory MPs had warned the government about the ‘palpable anger’ of voters of the BBC’s decision to scrap free television licences for the over-75s after figures had shown that in some of their seats, nine out of 10 constituents who currently enjoyed the perk would have it taken away. Mr Owen said that in a total of 110 Conservative-held seats, at least 85 per cent of over-75s households would have the perk taken away.  Mr Owen quoted the MP Julian Knight, chair of the Commons DCMS committee, who had said: ‘It shows the scale of harm the BBC decision has caused to our voters. The question will be does the BBC get it in the neck or the government?’

CORRESPONDENT NICK BRYANT ‘BIASED AGAINST TRUMP’, RULES BBC:  The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (6/8) upheld a complaint against BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant. The single complainant had claimed that an online article by Mr Bryant in March 2020 headlined ‘Coronavirus: What this crisis reveals about US – and its president’ ‘reflected bias against President Trump on the part of its author’ in its use of phrases such as “ridiculous boasts”, “mind-bending truth twisting”, “particularly vicious assault”, “pettiness and peevishness”, “narcissistic hunger for adoration” and “the tricks of an illusionist” in its descriptions of his behaviour.

The ECU, upholding the complaint, ruled that Mr Bryant’s ‘tone and approach’, especially in some of his ‘phrasing’, passed beyond ‘professional judgements’ towards ‘the language of personal views’.  It added that in terms of impartiality this ‘was not offset by the limited, and relatively restrained, criticism of the Democrats, Joe Biden and Congress’, saying that ”a great deal of alteration’ would have been needed, ‘as would normally have happened as a result of the process of editorial oversight applied to such pieces’, to bring it into alignment with the BBC’s editorial standards.

The ECU continued, ‘Whether or not Mr Bryant was in fact expressing a personal view of President Trump, some of his observations were couched in terms which might well have led readers to conclude that he was’. This, it concluded, amounted to ‘a departure from the BBC’s standards of impartiality’.

Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 7/8) suggested that maybe Roger Mosey’s claim that there was battle going on within the BBC was reflected by their Executive Complaints Unit’s unusually trenchant criticism of BBC New York correspondent Nick Byrant.

Mr Byers said:

‘The ruling criticises Nick Bryant’s “tone and approach” and says some of his “phrasing” passes beyond “professional judgements” and comes “closer to the language of personal views”.  It even calls out the usual fake sops to impartiality that you often find in such reports, saying that this “was not offset by the limited, and relatively restrained, criticism of the Democrats, Joe Biden and Congress”. Ouch! The ECU says that only ”a great deal of alteration” would have brought it into alignment with the BBC’s editorial standards, and seems to suggest (“as would normally have happened as a result of the process of editorial oversight applied to such pieces”) that editorial oversight had been noticeably lacking.

‘They continued, “Whether or not Mr Bryant was in fact expressing a personal view of President Trump, some of his observations were couched in terms which might well have led readers to conclude that he was” This, the ECU concluded, amounted to “a departure from the BBC’s standards of impartiality”. What’s striking is that it’s a clear ‘Upheld’, not a partial one.

‘A ruling against Nick Bryant has frankly been a long time coming. He has been getting increasing out of control ever since his time as the BBC’s Australia correspondent.’

‘COURTS COULD BECOME CLOGGED BY TV LICENCE CASES’: Paul Revoir (Daily Mail 8/8) said that Julian Knight, chairman of the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee, had warned that the amount of court time taken up by TV Licensing cases could ‘rise exponentially’ in the wake of the ending over free licences for the over-75s.    Mr Revoir reported that tens of thousands affected by the change had said they were determined never to pay and were willing to ‘go the whole hog’ and fight cases in court, even risking prison. He added that Mr Knight had pointed out that many of the over-75s might end up wanting to appear in court in person.

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 offence – as was being considered – bailiffs could be sent into the homes of the over-75s to seize and sell their possessions.

Paul Baldwin, in a comment article for the Express (5/8), argued that in forcing pensioners to pay for their television licences, the corporation was currently pursuing them ‘like a grubby loan shark’. He also attacked the BBC’s ‘lefty politics’ as ‘sneaky and insidious’, and noted that John Humphrys, after his retirement as a presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, likened them to ‘out of touch Kremlin commissars’.

BBC MIDDLE-EAST REPORTING ‘DISTORTS HISTORY’: Hadar Sela (Camera UK 4/8) in an analysis of how the BBC had been presenting the framework of Israel-Palestine peace talks since the Oslo accords in the 1990s – when the potential terms were first set down by the US administration – said that the BBC continued to repeat wrongly that the accords had stipulated a ‘two-state solution’ involving reversion to territorial lines shown on the map before the 1967 Middle East war. Ms Sela said that BBC correspondent Paul Reynolds had first suggested , in 2007, that the Oslo accords had ‘implied’ a Palestine state.  She said the reality was that the first time it became an aspiration in the framework of formal negotiations expressed by Palestinian and Israeli representatives had been in  the Annapolis joint statement of 2007.  Despite this, Nick Robinson had said in July on Radio 4 that the two-state solution had been talked about ‘for decades’.

BBC STAFF HEADCOUNT ‘FALLS BY JUST 2 PER CENT’:  Freddy Mayhew (Press Gazette 30/7) reported that despite the BBC spending £500m in severance pay and restructuring costs in the past 11 years, the headcount had shrunk from 22,874 to 22,401 – only two per cent. He said the Corporation’s annual reports showed that the BBC had been engaged in ‘constant drives to cut back on staff numbers’, including in 2009, a pledge to reduce its headcount by 10 percent (1,800 posts) and in 2017 to cut 2,600 jobs to make £750 million in savings. He quoted a BBC spokesman: “As ever, our staffing numbers and redundancy figures don’t tell the full story here.

“During this time, the Government awarded the BBC a grant as part of the biggest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s, we launched the BBC Scotland channel and developed our digital services, all of which could not have happened without taking on staff according to our changing business needs. We have also taken a value for money approach to contracts by bringing resources and some teams in-house whilst reducing the number of back office and support roles. As such, an independent report by Ernst & Young found the BBC among the most efficient 25% regulated and non-profit organisations in the UK.”

NEWSNIGHT ‘NONSENSE’ ABOUT LOCKDOWN ANNOUNCEMENT:  Guido Fawkes claimed (31/7) that BBC Newsnight policy editor Lewis Goodall had been responsible for spreading the ‘nonsense’ doing the rounds that health secretary Matt Hancock had announced the new North-west semi-lockdown via his personal Twitter account.  The article asserted that the imposition of new measures was actually released by the department of health  in a pooled television interview. It dismissed the idea picked up in some newspapers that the measure was designed to be ‘anti-Eid’.

BBC IS NOW ‘STUBBORN PET SHOP OWNER SELLING DEAD PARROT’: Joe Ventre (Taxpayers’ Alliance blog 30/7) argued that the BBC – in demanding that the licence fee should be retained – was selling the equivalent of a ‘dead parrot’ by pretending its services had unique value in a television environment which now contained rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Mr Ventre argued that the licence fee, which was being defended on the same terms as 35 years ago despite a massive explosion of choice,   should be replaced by subscription funding.  He stated:

‘When arguments around content inevitably fall away, Auntie’s admirers will turn to the supposedly unbiased and accountable nature of the broadcaster. Leaving spurious claims of impartiality aside, the fact of the matter is that the BBC leaves much to desire when it comes to transparency. Unlike most public bodies, the Beeb is granted special exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act (2000). This means that taxpayers have no recourse for finding out how much of their money is spent on material used in creative content. We’ve previously covered this topic when news broke of Holby City holding (and subsequently donating) real ventilators to fighting coronavirus. One issue with trying to find out if the BBC offers value for money is it won’t tell you how it’s spending the money!’

OFCOM SURVEY FINDS “MORAL DISLIKE” OF THE BBC AMONGST YOUNG:  Craig Simpson,  Daily Telegraph (£ 30/7), said that a report from Ofcom had found that younger audiences ‘are flocking to streaming services like Netflix to find shows with a “talkability factor”‘ and that BBC programmes ‘fail to provide “watercooler moments”’ for young people. The report found that, with attitudes to the BBC,  younger audiences are “more likely to be indifferent” than hostile to the BBC and many value the “societal glue” of the public service broadcaster. But it also said that a minority “cohort” of viewers from largely poorer backgrounds held a “moral dislike” of the corporation ‘over licence fee issues’, including ‘resentment that over-75s will have to pay for it, and because “they feel that the BBC lacks relevant content for their cohort, or that there is bias in the news.”

Mr Simpson reported that a BBC spokesperson responded: “This research highlights the importance of providing world-class, easily-accessible and universally available content that includes an impartial and trusted news service, alongside high quality, distinctive UK programming to bring the nations, regions and diverse communities of the UK together. Despite huge changes in the market, the BBC remains the most-used media organisation among young people with 80 per cent of 16 to 34 year olds using the BBC every week.”

BBC GUILTY OF ‘BREATHTAKING BIAS’ IN MURDOCH SERIES: Stephen Glover (Daily Mail 30/7) argued that the BBC Two three-part series Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, which had concluded on 28/7, was a hatchet job which showed the BBC was ‘incapable of balance’.  He said that the case against Rupert Murdoch was put ‘one-sidedly by inveterate Murdoch-haters (such as Max Moseley and the actor Hugh Grant) whose own discreditable pasts were overlooked, while Mr Murdoch was treated as ‘low-grade Mafia’ with his achievements overlooked.  Mr Glover asserted:

‘the case against the tycoon was made at such length and so tendentiously that it was hard for this viewer to keep calm — particularly so when Murdoch’s hysterical accusers were wheeled out.’

Mr Glover noted that the programme made no mention of – for example – Max Moseley’s support for the South African apartheid regime; of former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson’s championship of Carl Beech, who had wrongly accused leading politicians of being part of a paedophile ring; or that Hugh Grant was a member of the ‘fanatical’ anti-press lobbying group Hacked Off.

BBC ‘HORROR’ REPORT ‘DENIGRATING WINSTON CHURCHILL’: Commentator GP Taylor, writing in the Yorkshire Post (29/7)  said he had ‘sat in horror’ when Huw Edwards introduced on the BBC One News at Ten a piece that condemned Winston Churchill and his role in the 1943 Bengal famine. ‘It was as if the contributors had been selected on the basis that they believed Churchill to be solely responsible for three million deaths from starvation’, he wrote, adding ‘It doesn’t take a genius to search the internet to find out the background to Churchill and why famine relief was not forthcoming.’ He describe the attempt to ‘blame one man’ as ‘a total disgrace’, calling it an ‘attempt to suck up to anti-establishment agitators’. Mr Taylor quoted LSE Professor of economic history Tirthankar Roy, who said that Churchill had not been a factor in the famine. It had been the government of Bengal, which could have imported grain from other regions but had not done so.

BBC GIVES MURDERERS MORE AIRTIME THAN CLIMATE ‘SCEPTICS’: Eric Worrall (What’s Up With That 28/7), reviewing ‘How they made us doubt everything’,  a 10-part  BBC Radio Four series about climate change, noted that the final two episodes were devoted to ‘vilifying’ astrophysicist and climate change analyst Dr Willie Soon, and then did not present Dr Soon’s response to allegations against him.   Mr Worrall concluded:

‘Regardless of whether you think Dr Soon is right or wrong….(he)  deserves better than this one sided gutter press assault on his reputation from the BBC.

‘Even dictators and murderers are often given an opportunity to argue their case on the BBC. But this is a courtesy the BBC “How they made us doubt everything” series has so far failed to extend to a mild-mannered law abiding climate scientist, who was unfortunate enough to be a prime target of their latest ugly smear campaign.’

Mr Worrall said the programme had set out to compare climate scepticism to rejecting the link between tobacco and cancer, but said this was ‘irrelevant to the climate debate’.

Comments on the article included:

‘The programme is comically and aptly named ‘How they made us doubt everything’. The ‘THEY’ is the BBC. The propaganda, bias and distortions dished up daily by the BBC and their fellow travellers have made us doubt everything. They could have called this programme ‘An example of how we at the BBC produce fake news and destroy trust in the media!’.’