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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!’.’

BBC VETERAN ATTACKS ‘SPITEFUL AND VENOMOUS’ REPORT ABOUT CHURCHILL:  Writing in the Mail on Sunday (26/7), veteran BBC investigative reporter Tom Mangold – who joined the Corporation in 1964 –  expressed ‘sadness’ at the BBC, provoked by watching ‘for the tenth time’ an ‘outrageous’ News at Ten report which branded Winston Churchill a racist responsible for the 1943 Bengal Famine. He described the six-minute report as ‘biased, partial, unbalanced and filled with the spite and venom of the worst of toxic woke culture now pulsing through the heart of the Corporation’, adding ‘Viewers were left in no doubt that the reporter agreed with her own preferential report’.

Mr Mangold said that had led him to wonder ‘what on earth has happened’, given that the BBC’s charter remains ‘unequivocal’ about its statutory commitment to impartiality.  He added:

“Today that holy contract is well and truly broken. And so it is that News at Ten is allowed to use Huw Edwards’s authority and credibility – and the Corporation’s reputation for truth – to call Churchill a racist killer. The protester who sprayed graffiti on the statue of the wartime leader during the Black Lives Matter protests, accusing him of racism, must be overwhelmed with gratitude at the BBC’s vindication”.

Mr Mangold attributed the breach in obligations  down to ‘the BBC’s bizarre obsession with youth, diversity and the ever-growing pressure of woke argument’. He suggested that it ‘threatens to become its final act of self-harm’ because the movements the BBC is seeking to appeal to ‘still represent in total only a very small part of Britain’, a ‘minority audience’.

He continued that,  though ‘the BBC at its best is the most wonderful public service broadcaster in the world’, now suddenly, the Twitter trolls, the social media addicts, the young, the immature and the often daft have become the BBC’s recruitment and audience target.’ He concluded:  ‘If you believe Winston Churchill was a racist killer, sit back and enjoy the product. If not, try to help the BBC leap off the greasy slope down which it is sliding faster every day.’

BBC ‘NOT HELPING’ NOSTALGIA TV SERIES: Simon Heffer , discussing the nostalgia TV service Talking Pictures (£ Daily Telegraph, 25/7) -which was run from a garden shed and claimed to have up had 6 million viewers a week  –  reported that the BBC had refused to sell founder Noel Cronin the rights to the 1960s TV series Z-Cars and Dixon of Dock Green.  Mr Heffer speculated that ‘either [the BBC] is being the dog in the manger, or perhaps its executives realise they have misjudged the viewing public, and have retro plans of their own’. He added that the latter would be better, as the Corporation was continuing ‘to force upon viewers programmes pandering to the right-on, metropolitan prejudices of the small but noisy minority they meet at dinner parties’. Mr Heffer  concluded: ‘If it really does think such nonsense, then the sooner the licence fee is abolished, the better.’

JOHN HUMPHRYS: ‘EU IS WONDERFUL ORGANISATION’: The Sunday Times (£ 26/7) reported comments made by former Today presenter John Humphrys during a Times Radio interview in which he said he was  ‘not a fan’ of Boris Johnson, claimed not to remember who he voted for in the 2019 general election and expanded on his Remain vote in the EU referendum. Mr Humphrys had said:

‘I felt fairly strongly about it. But I did my job, which was to question both sides with equal vim and vigour. I was born in the war. I believed one of the ways to stop it happening again was to join this wonderful organisation where the countries in Europe would be friends. That was what drove me to vote remain.’

The article also noted that Mr Humphrys had been accused of ‘seeming (to be) Eurosceptic’ in interviews by critics.

‘CREATIVE DIVERSITY’ AT THE BBC: The Observer (26/7) interviewed June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, quoting her saying that she had ‘rarely’ been on sets ‘where there were other people of colour’.  The article  also noted that the corporation was spending £12m of its commissioning budget ‘to making diverse and inclusive content’ for the next three years, devoting £100m of the current television commissioning budget to ‘on-air inclusivity’ and bringing in a mandatory off-screen target for ‘20% diversity across the networks for new commissions’ from April 2021.

BBC ‘GIVING NICOLA STURGEON A ‘PLATFORM TO SCORE PARTY POLITICAL POINTS’: The Sunday Times (£ 26/7),reported claims by opposition politicians that the BBC in Scotland hasd given Nicola Sturgeon an ‘unacceptable platform to score political points’ by continuing to broadcast her hour-long Covid-19 briefings on the BBC’s main Scottish channel while they ‘struggle for airtime’.  It was reported that the Labour Party has requested a breakdown of how much airtime has been given to Ms Sturgeon and Scotland’s other political leaders but it was said that the request this has been ‘declined’ by the BBC.

Labour party deputy leader Jackie Baillie had said:

‘The BBC’s refusal to answer these extremely significant and important questions is highly disappointing. The BBC has a duty to ensure that it remains an impartial broadcaster and that important broadcasts such as the first minister’s coronavirus briefings do not degenerate into the party political sniping and grandstanding we have seen in recent weeks. I urge the BBC to seriously reconsider its refusal to answer these very simple questions. If we cannot rely on the national broadcaster to be straightforward in its dealings, then serious questions around impartiality and professionalism will be raised.’.

ESTHER MCVEY ATTACKS OVER-75s LICENCE FEE DECISION: Former minister Esther McVey, and leader of the Blue Collar Conservatism group (Sunday Express 26/7) had warned that the BBC ‘could be mortally wounded’ by its decision to go ahead with requiring over-75s to pay £157.50 for their licence fee from August 1. She had asserted:

‘I think the best thing that you could do to keep the public on board is to actually be a public service broadcaster and look after the people in this country who pay £5billion a year for the service.’

The article noted that Ms McVey was one of 66 Conservative MPs in her BCC group who had written to BBC director general Tony Hall last week questioning the need to penalise over-75s when savings could be made elsewhere.

LICENCE FEE IMPLEMENTATION ‘DISTINCTLY AMATEURISH’:  Media correspondent Rosamund Urwin (£ Sunday Times 26/7) warned that the BBC was in danger of making a ‘complete hash’ of the implementation of the decision to force over-75s to pay for their licence fees. She reported that Caroline Abrams of Age UK had claimed that implementation was  ‘distinctly amateurish’ because the TV Licensing unit would only start issuing the 4.5 million ‘payment invitation’ letters on August 1 – the date the new fees were due –   and they would be  posted in batches, ‘so many pensioners face a longer wait’. Ms Abrams claimed the approach smacked of being a last-minute decision,  of a last-minute decision’ and added that it did not give much confidence that it would be well- administered.

BBC ADMISSION ABOUT ‘EGREGIOUS TWEETS’  WAS ‘JAW-DROPPING’: Mick Hume (Daily Mail 16/7) said that the admission to the House of Lords communications and digital committee by David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial standards, that Corporation staff had been guilty of sending ‘egregious’ tweets, was a ‘jaw-dropping’ moment for those like himself who had been complaining for years about ‘the pernicious impact of Auntie’s recent displays of bias’.  Mr Hume noted that Mr Jordan had also admitted that the BBC ‘had issues’ with tracking the rise of Euroscepticism and the growth of concern about immigration, and claimed this was unsurprising  because it was what happened when reporters and newsreaders became more interested in promoting their own political leanings and agendas and increasing the number of their online followers than unearthing facts.  Mr Hume opined:

“By seeking validation on Twitter, BBC staffers confine themselves to an echo chamber where their minority worldview is reflected and reinforced. According to its warped narrative, Leave was bound to lose the EU referendum, Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for U.S. President and Boris risked being thrashed by Corbyn in the 2019 election. With such an unrivalled gift for misreading public opinion, it’s clear that many of its journalists simply don’t understand who their audience is.”

Mr Hume suggested that some senior journalists had ‘flagrant disregard’ for BBC impartiality, and instanced as the prime offender Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, as well as BBC One newsreader Huw Edwards.

Breitbart London (15/7) also covered David Jordan’s evidence to the House of Lords. Victoria Friedman, noting that Mr Jordan had acknowledged ‘issues’ in the coverage of Euroscepticism, said he was perhaps the most senior BBC figure in post ‘to admit the broadcaster’s bias’. Ms Friedman reported:

“However, claims of political bias are nothing new. In 2010, former BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said that 30 years prior when he joined the organisation, it had a “massive bias to the left”.

“The organisation did struggle then with impartiality. And journalistically, staff were quite mystified by the early years of Thatcher, Mr Thompson had said. Recently retired journalist John Humphrys, a veteran of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, had said the BBC had failed since the 1990s to adequately cover people’s increasing concerns about rising immigration. Mr Humphrys said that during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, BBC bosses “could simply not grasp how anyone could have put a cross in the Leave box on the referendum ballot paper”.

“Leave had won — and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted,” he said in 2019.

She added:

“Breitbart London has reported on studies that found by analysis the BBC elevated anti-Leave bias in their news coverage.

“News Watch said in 2017 that the Today programme, BBC radio’s flagship news broadcast, was “strongly biased against Brexit” in the week when the UK triggered Article 50, the mechanism for formally leaving the EU. In one example of bias, analysis by the news monitoring group found that only eight out of 124 guests on the subject of Article 50 were allowed to articulate the benefits of leaving the bloc. Think tank Civitas concluded in 2018 that the Today programme had suppressed Eurosceptic voices between 2005 and 2015, with only 3.2 per cent of guests being pro-independence. The broadcaster had also kept listeners “in the dark” on the left-wing and Labour arguments for Leave, angling the question of Brexit as a purely conservative position.

“When opinion in favour of leaving the EU has featured, the editorial approach has – at the expense of exploring withdrawal itself – tended heavily towards discrediting and denigrating opposition to the EU as xenophobic,” the authors had written.”

BBC ‘DENIES AXING ANDREW NEIL’:  Jack Wright (Daily Mail 16/7) reported that the BBC – which had cancelled Andrew Neil’s BBC Two interview show in a round of financial and job cuts – had denied axing Mr Neil and had said he was in talks over a new television presenting role which could be in the schedule of BBC One.   Mr Wright highlighted tweets which suggested that the decision to cancel Mr Neil’s BBC Two show showed that the Corporation was now fully dominated ‘primarily by left wing pro Remain establishment elitists’. Mr Wright quoted Fran Unsworth, the BBC director of news. She said:

“During this crisis audiences have turned to BBC News in their millions and I’m incredibly proud of what we, as a team, have been able to achieve. But if we don’t make changes, we won’t be sustainable. This crisis has led us to re-evaluate exactly how we operate as an organisation.”

Mr Wright also reported that Ms Unsworth had also announced that BBC News – which was cutting 520 jobs – would concentrate on fewer stories, with journalists pooled in centralised teams rather than working for specific programmes.

BBC ‘APPOINTS CORBYNISTA’: Guido Fawkes (16/7), noting that the BBC had appointed Rianna Croxford as a community affairs correspondent, claimed that she had in the past been a ‘diehard campaigner’   for Jeremy Corbyn at the 2017 general election, and had called on Theresa May to sack Boris Johnson as foreign secretary because he was ‘a clown’.  The article said that Ms Croxford’s tweeting record suggested she believed the entire press was a ‘pro-Tory echo chamber’ and saw that righting that was her mission.

BBC LICENCE FEE PAYMENT ’TO BE DECRIMINALISED’: David Maddox (Sunday Express 12/7) said that, following a public consultation announced earlier this year, government sources – said to include ‘a minister’ –  were suggesting that payment of the BBC licence fee would be decriminalised, meaning that the Corporation was facing a ‘black hole’ in its finances of up to £1 billion over five years. Mr Maddox, also noting that a Defund the BBC campaign had attracted thousands of followers, said that critics of the Corporation believed the figure could be even higher. He also suggested that the government could be ready to act because of the outrage generated by the decision by the BBC this week to renege on its  pledge to provide free licence fees for the over-75s.

Mr Maddox also noted that the Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns, writing in the Sunday Express, had outlined wider concerns about the BBC amid continuing  allegations of biased news coverage. She had said:

“Arguably the single biggest threat to the BBC is not it going back on its word about the licence fee, but rather its own internal bias. The BBC is meant to be an impartial organisation, but despite this, even figures that we consider faces of the BBC acknowledge this is not the case.

“The BBC’s handling of recent events has only served to reinforce this further. Who can remember a time where the majority of a Question Time panel voted to leave the EU, despite the majority of the British people voting to do so? Who can forget the openly biased attack launched by Emily Maitlis against the Government on Newsnight a few weeks ago?”.

FARAGE: ‘BBC’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED’: Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, had warned in a social media video that the BBC’s days were numbered because trust in it was collapsing, according to a posting on Breitbart Europe (11/7).  Victoria Friedman reported that Mr Farage had said:

“. . . trust in the BBC, according to the Reuters Institute, has fallen by another 20 per cent since 2018. There is a massive change going on in this country. Whilst the BBC may be respected all over the world. . . the BBC with every crisis that we face shows it to be totally London-centric, as far away from middle England as ever it could possibly be.

“I think its days are numbered. I think the idea that we’re all going to go on paying over £150 a year for this thing is for the birds. It’ll take time for it to go because the status quo is a very powerful thing. Trust in the BBC is disappearing. I think what you’re going to see are media challengers to the BBC and others that will spring up over the course of the next year or two.”

Ms Friedman also reported that most Britons now said they do not trust BBC journalists to tell the truth, with some two-thirds thinking the broadcaster was biased. She added that a Civitas study (by News-watch) from 2018 had found that Eurosceptic voices had been suppressed over the years on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme. `further, half of Britons thought  that the BBC should earn its own money either through advertising or a subscription service, while another poll had said that nearly three-quarters of Britons want the TV licence abolished entirely.

BBC ‘HASTENING ITS OWN DEMISE’: Madeline Grant, writing in the Telegraph (£ 12/7) under the headline ‘The BBC decision to snub its core audience will only hasten its demise’, attacked the Corporation’s ‘mind-boggling priorities’.  She instanced a range of problems, including the decision to slash local and regional journalism jobs, announced on the same day as the spending of £100m extra on diversity targets, even though BAME contributions onscreen were already at 23 per cent when the proportion of BAME people in the national population was only 14 per cent; a No Country for Young Women podcast – said to be part of a ‘vapid identitarian drift’ – which had featured three millennial contributors advising white women how to avoid being ‘Karens’ by ‘educating themselves and avoiding being loud’;  the decision to scrap free licence fees for the over 75s and focus instead on ‘yoof’, exaggerating the sense of skewed values; and a sense of sanctimony in news and current affairs, drama and comedy, with Newspeak masquerading as impartiality, for example in the description that a bus ‘exploded’ (rather than being the subject of a terrorist attack)  during the 7/7 London Islamic terrorist attacks. Ms Grant concluded:

“Is the BBC beyond redemption? Appointing Tim Davie as Director-General – a conservative numbers man, not a typical programme-making exec – suggests some, at least, in the corporation understand the scale of the problem…Ironically, supporting robust local journalism would probably do more to foster the type of diversity the BBC lacks (ideological, regional and class-based) than any number of gimmicky internal audits. The corporation’s London focus has already created a mandarin broadcasting clique that tends to play to its peers, rather than to the rest of the country. The cushion of the licence fee, though designed to protect public service journalism, has more often generated complacency and given producers carte blanche to ignore majority opinion. Insiders may claim that, like the NHS, the BBC still enjoys an iconic place in the national psyche. They forget that, to endure, loyalty and respect must continue to be earned.”

BBC NEWS “AGGRESSIVELY BIASED: Stephen Daisley (£ Spectator 10/7) argued that, in its reporting of race in particular’,  the BBC had become openly and  aggressively biased and the mouthpiece for ‘one side of a culture war’. It was not merely taking sides, but also ‘failing to realise that there is another side’. Mr Daisley laid out that this was especially manifest in an episode of the podcast No Country for Young People (also mentioned above), in which it was asserted (without balance) that white women who were ‘Karens’ – whose greatest sin was that they were white – wanted to be treated in a special way and should refrain from attacking black voices. He also noted that the historian Dinyar Patel was part of a series in which ‘white privilege’ had gone from campus supposition to the status of a ‘universal truth’.  Mr Patel had also asserted that the current crop of Asian MPs included ‘recalcitrant Brexiteers with muddled perspectives on Britain’s imperial history’.   Mr Daisley concluded that unless the BBC changed, it would end up alienating the mainstream with the result that support for the licence fee would be lost.

BBC SERIES ‘TRASHES MURDOCH”: Chris Hastings (Mail on Sunday 12/7), in an article about a three-part BBC Two documentary series about the Murdoch family due to be shown from July 14, said that the Corporation was under fire for ‘allowing three controversial critics of Rupert Murdoch to trash his reputation’, without including balancing opinion from figures more sympathetic to the media tycoon or explaining properly the dubious backgrounds and track records of his critics.  Mr Hastings said the critics were former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, Max Moseley, the son of fascist politician Oswald Moseley, and the actor Hugh Grant.

GERVAIS: ‘BBC TOO POLITICALLY CORRECT”: The comedian and writer Ricky Gervais, speaking on Talk Radio, has said that programmes like his 2001 mockumentary series The Office would no longer be commissioned by the BBC because – as a result of pressure from Twitter and social media ‘outrage mobs’ – it had grown more ‘politically correct and cautious’.   Kurt Zindulka (Breitbart 12/7) said that Mr Gervais had also hit out at online ‘fascists’ who were shutting down freedom of speech on the false pretext of preventing so-called hate speech, and had noted that someone who was mildly conservative was now branded as Hitler.

BBC ‘SOWS HATE: Academic David Sedgwick, whose latest book about the BBC is called ‘The Fake News Factory’,   claims that the Corporation , which sees itself as a ‘national unifier’, is actually more concerned with sowing dissension and hatred in its blatant partisan support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Under the headline ‘ Can Britain endure seven more years of the BBC?’ on Comment Central (July 6, 2020),  he compares the BBC’s current zeal for multiculturalism with McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the 1950s.

OBFUSCATION: On Breitbart London, James Delingpole, attacked what he called (among other words)  ‘a mealy-mouthed, evasive, slimy, politically-correct, issue-ducking’ tweet issued by BBC South-east, in which it was said that a victim of the 7/7 London terror bombings died ‘when the bus he was on exploded’.  Mr Delingpole noted a comment under the tweet which asserted: The bus did not explode. The rucksack being carried by an Islamic lunatic high on religious zeal … exploded on his back’.

BBC ‘BLACKMAILS GOVERNMENT’: Guido’s blog (July 7) suggested that the decision by outgoing BBC director general Tony Hall to spend £100m on a cultural diversity drive has led to exert alleged ‘blackmail’ on the government by threatening to axe Poilitics Live and also to dispense with the services of presenter Andrew Neil.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY: Fraser Myers, writing on Spiked! , claimed that in culling one in six regional programme and local radio staff and threatening to axe Politics Live, the BBC had lost the plot.  Like Guido (above), Mr Myers linked the decision to the increased concentration on cultural diversity, and pointed out that this was despite the fact that internal surveys showed that employment levels at the Corporation of ethnic minorities were above the percentages in the population as a whole.  He noted that a clutch of programmes that were an embodiment of public service broadcasting were being chopped. Mr Myers asserts:

“It’s been clear for some time that the BBC has struggled to marry its coverage of the culture wars with its commitment to impartiality. But its output in recent weeks has been extraordinary, and the lines between reporting and analysis versus opinion and activism seem to have disappeared entirely.”

WOKISM “DOMINATES BBC OUTPUT”: Doublethinker, on Biased BBC (9/7), claims that no area of BBC output – not even Gardeners’ World, of Antiques Road Trip – is now free of ‘nauseating levels of Wokism’.

NEW TODAY EDITOR: The BBC corporate press office has announced that Owenna Griffiths, currently editor of BBC Radio 4 programmes PM and Broadcasting House, has been appointed to be editor of the Today programme in succession to Sarah Sands. The press release says that Ms Griffiths has spent most of her career at the BBC, including a nine-year stint as a Today producer. She is the daughter of Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach,  a Conservative politician and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher.