(for instance Stephen Pollard, Clive Davis, Harry’s Place, etc.) about the dreadfully biased studio audience selected to appear on last week’s BBC news special, Questions of Security (surely Questions of Terrorism?), the BBC has admitted that “there was a deliberately disproportionate number of Muslims in [the] studio audience”. Truly astonishing.
‘Disproportionate’ hardly begins to describe the situation – according to the BBC, “around 15% of the audience” was Muslim, “as opposed to 2.7% of the country as a whole” – in other words, Muslims were more than five times over-represented. Judging from the aggressive self-righteousness of so many of the apparent Muslims among the questioners, they weren’t even representative of British Muslims as a whole.
In the BBC’s admission, Anger at news special audience, hidden away in their Newswatch graveyard, Sue Inglish, Head of Political Programmes, says:
Huw Edwards explained at the start of the programme [that] the studio audience was made up of a variety of people from a range of communities, particularly those most affected by the questions we were discussing in the wake of the bombings of 7 July and the incidents on 21 July.
Unsurprisingly, Inglish is being more than a little disingenuous. At the beginning of the programme, after a long preamble, Edwards did slip in: “well now, our audience tonight includes representatives from some of the communities most affected by the recent events in London and of course elsewhere in the United Kingdom” – but that is a long way from saying “oh, and by the way, we’ve loaded the audience with five times more Muslims than you might expect”, which is how Inglish now expects us to interpret Edwards blather.
Moreover, it’s rich to imply that Britain’s Muslim population constitutes “some of the communities most affected” – leaving aside the fact that the community most affected by the appearance of Islamist terrorists (sorry BBC, bombers) in the UK happens to be all of us (as potential victims) – Muslim or not, the communities “most affected” surely start with the victims, families and friends of the 7/7 atrocities, followed by those who use London Transport and those who live and work in and around London.
This scandal of loading the Question Time audience (even more than usual), without admitting so up front in the programme, has shades of the nationally embarrassing Question Time following the 9/11 atrocities, which was so bad that Greg Dyke, then Director General, apologised to offended viewers and personally to Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, for his treatment on the programme. Was the selection of that audience similarly loaded? Is the BBC going to be honest and tell us?
The time has come for transparency in the selection of audiences for Question Time and other political programmes with audiences. No longer should it be down to the programme makers to screen audience members, selecting those who will participate, those who will get to ask questions and the questions themselves. Audience selection should be carried out by respectable independent organisations, by lottery from the electoral roll if need be, accountable only to the BBC’s governors, so that the producers and researchers may not skew the audience or influence the questions, intentionally or otherwise. And then perhaps Question Time will once more be for the people of Britain to ask questions of our leaders, rather than for the selectorate of the BBC to promote their perception of what matters (or what they think should matter) to the ordinary telly-tax payers who are forced to pay for the BBC.
One last point, just to add insult to injury, for those of us who are as proud to be British as our English comrades, when Inglish says “But the rest of the audience – around 85% – included representatives of a number of other different ethnic and religious groups, including Christian, Hindu, Sikh, African Caribbean, English, Irish, Kashmiri and Turkish”, she makes the classic BBC faux-pas of conflating English with British, whilst remembering to name just about every other ethnic group of any size in the UK. Typical.
You can view the programme and its loaded audience for yourself here:
Real Video format: Standard 34kbps or Higher quality 224kbps
Windows WMV format: Standard 34kbps or Higher quality 224kbps
Request: Does anyone have any links to or recordings of the dreadful edition of Question Time that followed the 9/11 atrocities? Thank you.
Update: This story has since been picked up by the Daily Express, a national newspaper in the UK. See above for updated Biased BBC coverage.
I’ve sent the link to O’Reilly, John Kasich (Heartland) and Cal Thomas – all Fox News guys.
Pete, thanks for the link.
Galloway – The first great Scotish pan-Arab leader. He should be called Salah a-George.
I rather liked Harry’s Place’s tag for Georgeous George – McHawHaw!
Miam: “Like a cancer it spreads into nearly all areas of ‘global broadcasting’ eg BBC Worldwide’s businesses include international programming distribution, TV channels, magazines, books, videos, spoken word, music, DVDs, licensed product, CD-ROMs, English-language teaching, videos for education and training, interactive telephony, co-production, library footage sales, magazine subscription fulfilment, exhibitions, live events . . .”
Well said Miam. Not only does the BBC matter; it is decidedly relevant.
In fact, this continual brainwashing(from the BBC), which happens in the 21st century, is in my view the thing that matters most; and which must be completely destroyed.
if the feckless rupert murdoch would make sky more like fox then the bbc would end up losing a fair share of its audience.
the bbc should understand that the guardian has a circulation of 400000 only.60 million britons do not want to see the guardian on tv.
Robin,
Muslims don’t need Jews or Christians as an excuse for mayhem. Muslims of all stripes have been murdering eachother for centuries. So by what logic should they even care about terrorists in Iraq blowing up anyone in their path? Let the BBC point this out to their fellow taxpayers!
abd-el-bari atwan the bulging eyed editor of al quds al arabi based in london is a long time favourite of the beeboids.
as the bbc lefties well know he is sweet reason(sort of) on the bbc but spews venom when he is on al jazira.dr jekyl and mr hyde of the television world
Just one more take on that QT.
“rest of the audience – around 85% – included representatives of a number of other different ethnic and religious groups, including Christian, Hindu, Sikh, African Caribbean, English, Irish, Kashmiri and Turkish”,
But every single one of the Turks I know, and I live in a very Turkish area, are muslim as are 97% of their countrymen , Kashmir is 70% muslim, Africa is 40% muslim – so just how many non-muslims were in the audience Ms Inglish (with the I)?
Excellent point. I’d really like to get an answer from the BBC on that one.
All i will say is that the bias on Question Time is typical of the last 8 years.
Every audience appears to be extreme left wing, and almost “set up” dare i say.
Not only that the producers of these shows seem to be the same, and consistnently discriminate against centre-right views.
Personally, i think like Tony Blair, the BBC will soon be under much more pressure than it thinks
This is very late in the day, but it may be some comfort to know that the next day’s comments on the BBC’s “Have your Say” site were far more balanced – at a guess I’d say pretty representative of the population. The site says the comments are representative of those received – which suggests either that those in the QT audience don’t have inernet access (yeah sure!) or that the QT audience is as biased as previous commetns on this site suggest. I know what I believe.