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 …
BBC BIAS DIGEST 8 AUGUST 2020
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’ …
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 …
BBC Bias Digest 31 July 2020
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 …
BBC Bias Digest 30 July 2020
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 …
Craig Byers: Supporters of BBC becoming campaigning organisation ‘are winning’
This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased? If you subscribe to it, you may well have read former Head of BBC Television News Roger Mosey’s interesting piece in The Sunday Times last week where he claimed that there’s a “battle” going on at the BBC between older hands who want to stay true to the Corporation’s long commitment …
Tom Mangold: BBC’s embrace of woke culture is ‘fatal act of self-harm’
This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased? Tom Mangold’s Mail on Sunday piece headlined “I fear that my beloved BBC’s bizarre obsession with a toxic culture of wokeness will end as a fatal act of self-harm” ought to matter to the BBC because Mr Mangold isn’t just any old BBC veteran. He was Panorama‘s lead investigative reporter for …
BBC Bias Digest 26 July 2020
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 …
News-watch Launches BBC Bias Digest
BBC Bias Digest is now a key, regularly updated feature of the News-watch website, and a central focus of our efforts. To try and hold the BBC to account in the public interest To facilitate reform in its governance. Each day, we are combing newspapers and the web for stories about the BBC relevant to its Charter obligation to deliver …
BBC Bias Digest 16 July 2020
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 …