John Humphrys has admitted the BBC is biased in favour of the EU….it has ‘bought into the ideal’
I thought the EU had been the one doing the buying….
The millions in EU funding the BBC tried to hide
John Humphrys says:
The BBC has not been sufficiently sceptical on the European Union or immigration, according to John Humphrys, who said staff had let liberal bias shape the corporation’s news coverage.
Humphrys, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, said the BBC had “bought into the European ideal”.
Critics have long accused the BBC of liberal bias and of failing to acknowledge public concerns about immigration or Britain’s membership of the EU. Humphrys is the first current affairs presenter to admit such bias existed, although he said the situation had much improved.
“We weren’t sufficiently sceptical – that’s the most accurate phrase – of the pro-European case. We bought into the European ideal,” he said.
“We weren’t sufficiently sceptical about the pro-immigration argument. We didn’t look at the potential negatives with sufficient rigour.
The bias, he said, was “understandable”….
“The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons.
“The sort of people we’ve recruited – the best and brightest – tended to come from universities and backgrounds where they’re more likely to hold broadly liberal views than conservative.”
But they’ve known that for years and yet failed to adapt their recruiting policies and procedures to try and change that…..and are not conservatives among the ‘best and the brightest’ then?
Next question of course is what exactly are the BBC going to do to rectify the situation as described by one of their most senior journalists who is surely most qualified to comment?
Wasn’t it the self-identified “best and the brightest” who got the US involved in and led it to defeat in Viet Nam? No surprises then that our “best and brightest” have led us into the EU and are leading the “fight” against
global warmingclimate changeI have never seen a job advert in the Mensa magazine for a BBC job.
From personal experience, I did notice that there was a middle-class minority who tended to have an arrogant arty type of personality, mainly female, they where as thick as a plank but got lots of O levels through having a kind of photographic memory.
These people tend to be the middle-class minority that votes Labour, buys the Guardian, and therefore get a job at the BBC.
“BBC was not sceptical enough over immigration, admits Today presenter John Humphrys.
“The BBC was not sceptical enough about immigration and the ‘European ideal’, according to one of its most senior journalists – John Humphrys.”
By Owen Bennett .
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/464235/BBC-was-not-sceptical-enough-over-immigration-admits-Today-presenter-John-Humphrys
” Last July a report commissioned by the BBC Trust found the corporation had been “slow” to catch up with public opinion on immigration and leaving the European Union.”
( from the linked article).
Just leads me to wonder, how enlightened would he now be, if it weren’t for the emergence and popularity of either UKIP or the EDL?
Admittedly the media had succeeded in demonising the EDL, but UKIP must surely stick in their gullet, and cause them to rethink.
The bbc keep using this ruse; one of the hive makes a half-hearted act of contrition and the gullible believe this will herald a policy change. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. They will never change their beliefs.
Yep – just another false flag operation, like so many others before.
Funny how everything’s always OK now. Only in the past might there have been bias.
Yes, Humphrys and other Beeboids deceitfully talk as though their pro-E.U, pro-mass immigration, pro-Islam, pro-Labour Party, pro-Obama, etc, massive political biases were only in the past, not the present; but these daily Beeboid biases are more blatant now than ever.
“The bbc keep using this ruse”
It is indicative of the essential duplicity of the Left. It matters a lot to middle class Labour supporters that the BBC is a source of employment and propaganda which massively distorts public debate in this Country. If they tell you that they think it is unimportant, they are lying.
It is all justified by the cause. Supposedly helping the poor, but in reality helping themselves. The reason Gordon Brown kept talking about his “moral compass” is that he manifestly didn’t have one, all he had was a bottomless pit of petty resentments, and a craving for power.
Even Tony Blair found Brown him creepy. It is almost embarrassing to have lived through a period when the BBC were constantly excusing and looking away from his incompetence. They are doing the same with Barraco Barner.
All an opponent of the Left has to do however is breathe for the BBC to denounce them as Satanic. As a young child I can still recall the endless hatred for Nixon, and the kid gloved way Jimmy Carter was treated. Desmond Willcox made a sympathetic documentary about the first lady, you know the sort of thing you can imagine the BBC doing about Barry O’Bama’s wife now.
It was obvious even as a child that the BBC was very partisan. I knew little or nothing about the merits or flaws in what they were arguing, but even children know when they are being spun. I knew for example that racism in South Africa was not the most important single issue in the world.
I keep on returning to this point but it is so revealing. When the BBC drama Causality was broadcast under a Conservative government the person pushing efficiency reforms at the hospital was portrayed as an uncaring bastard, but when the Labour Party came in pursing the same policy, there was a cast change, and a kindly, gay, Muslim took over the role, and it became all about hard choices.
That is not ideological, it is tribal. The BBC is a group of middle class Socialists who send people to prison if you do not fund their student politics. They think they are grown up because they affect great moral earnestness when justifying their thieving and hypocrisy. Alan Yentob (a man with no discernible talent) glides around with an air of entitlement that would shame a Renaissance cardinal.
I would not pay for it if I had a choice.
+ 1,000 !!!
Very well said, Wild, and I remember most of those happenstances too being of a certain age.
I’m guessing Humphrys is about to retire from the BBC.
‘I’m guessing Humphrys is about to retire from the BBC’
There’s a lot of it about.
Why is anyone’s guess…
http://tradingaswdr.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/years-roll-by.html
‘Could it have anything to do with changes to the lifetime allowance defining the tax-advantaged pension savings that an individual can accumulate over their career ?’
Got to say, when speaking for the nation, having your pot reduced to £1.25M has to really inspire empathy with the audience.
Yes there have been major changes – it used to be that immigration and the EU were never spoken of, now they are brought up by the BBC all the time, just as long as the massive benefit is always stressed.
Now and again, somebody in the BBC says something that reveals a lot about the mindset prevalent there, as well as the arrogance contained within.
I don’t doubt that Humphrys is being frank and expressing his honest opinion, though I don’t think he’s understood what he’s revealed, especially with this sentence: ]’BBC staff are more likely to be liberal rather than conservative because they are the ‘best and the brightest’ and tend to be university educated.’
His biggest mistake is thinking that a university education in itself conveys ‘best and bright’.
As the saying goes – Those that can – do; Those that can’t – teach; Those that can’t teach – administrate; Those that can’t administrate write about what everybody else is doing.
So if a journalists has self honesty, he/she’s actually quite a way down in the pecking order. What they have is a belief that without experience of anything their mind is clever enough to know what should be done.
Humphrys has displayed the inherent arrogance of his peers.
BBC = Best Brightest Chumps
Beyond getting away with a sweeping elitist generalisation that would have anyone not in the BBC hung, drawn and quartered by dawn from twitter to Today thru Vile up to the Newsnight slipshod, it’s simply a logical and factual fallacy.
I can only presume one created by the absolutely incestuous bubble world most in the BBC have inhabited since their pods were hatched.
I went to a pretty ‘conservative’ University, perhaps due to the emphasis on such as Engineering, Medicine and Law.
I did not sense that many around me were not bright.
Not to far away was the LSE. What that fine institution produced on occasion did not impress.
If he’s trying to conflate political preferences with intelligence, he appears to have been a) smoking the good stuff and b) doing so whilst being educated and informed by the deadbeat bozos he mixes with from some no name upgraded Poly ‘studying’ 3hrs a week some half-baked course, having the time spare to grab the levers of control whilst the rest of us were actually doing something productive. Cunning… ruthless… yes. Best and brightest? No.
And if one thing my degree taught me, it was during the practical sessions on sites that I learned the best and brightest were the guys at the sharp end who had more experience making things work in their little fingers than some snotty course unit undergrad like me. I learned to appreciate working as team with every single person who made the project tick from that moment on.
The BBC was recently described as a collection of rats in a sack who would sell their granny down the river to compromise a rival or seek a patsy for their own failings.
Jon, you are welcome to ’em.
Their inflated egos is the very reason I want to see the BBC privatised. Watching them shrink as they find their real worth – that’s priceless.
“John Humphrys and BBC bias”
By JOHN REDWOOD.
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2014/03/11/john-humphrys-and-bbc-bias/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JohnRedwoodsDiary+%28John+Redwood%27s+Diary%29
Some Beeboids are now openly confessing to their past propagandising for, e.g. mass immigration, and for the E.U; but so deeply engrained is their political core belief on such issues that they are psychologically incapable of actually drastically reforming their broadcasting output to put out anything resembling any sort of impartiality.
This is shown again this evening when Beeboids fail to put significant contrary views (but several pro-views) on the political positions which Beeboids approve, e.g.:-
1.) Labour Party not offering British people a referendum on E.U membership;
2.) the demise of one of their own considered political worthies, Mr Crow.