Author Archives: Andrew

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, by Robin Aitken, a well respected former BBC journalist is due out this week.

There is a long extract in today’s Mail on Sunday, What is the loneliest job in Britain? Being a Tory at the BBC, that is well worth reading. To whet your appetite here’s the introduction:

Working at the BBC can be a strange experience. On occasions during my 25 years as a journalist with the corporation it was jaw-dropping.

In 1984 I returned to BBC Scotland after covering the Tory conference in Brighton. The IRA had come close to assassinating Margaret Thatcher with a bomb and the country was in shock.

Apart, that is, from some of my BBC colleagues. “Pity they missed the bitch,” one confided to me.

For three decades I was that rare breed – a Conservative at the BBC. In my time working on programmes such as Today and Breakfast News I couldn’t have formed a cricket team from Tory sympathisers.

As one producer put it, you feel almost part of an ethnic minority.

We all know the cliched critique of the BBC: a nest of Lefties promoting a progressive agenda and political correctness.

Depressingly, that cliche is uncomfortably close to the truth: the BBC is biased,and it is a bias that seriously distorts public debate.

In the past 30 years, ‘Auntie’ has transformed from the staid upholder of the status quo to a champion of progressive causes.

In the process, the ideal at the heart of the corporation – that it should be fair-minded and non-partisan – has all but disappeared.

Do read the rest of the article. Can we trust the BBC? is available from Amazon.co.uk for £9.89 plus delivery (free if you spend a bit over a fiver on something else!).

Another recent book about the BBC that is on my current stack of books is Scrap the BBC! by Richard D. North (no relation to the Richard North at the excellent EU Referendum blog). This is also available from Amazon, cost £15.95 with free delivery, though can be bought at a discount from the publisher, The Social Affairs Unit (omm-sau), for £10 plus £2.75 postage via Amazon Marketplace.

Update: Some interesting comments on the original Daily Mail story, particularly the second and third ones:

Yep, wholeheartedly agree. I don’t look at the BBC website, and avoid their news programmes like the plague.

Steve, New Zealand

My son worked at the BBC until recently – he always felt it wise to keep quiet about the fact that I am a senior Tory activist, as did the daughter of another Tory Association chairman – and neither of them worked on the front line.

Sjm, London, UK

I was a coal miner one of many that voted for Mrs. Thatcher, I never had any regrets. I agree with your take on what has happened to the BBC, it angers me so much. Ideas are more deadly than bombs and the end of this dictatorship of the left in our country will be very bad. When it comes to it these liberals have no guts when it comes to a scrap. Well done to you, this from an ordinary bloke.

Frederick Mee, Rhyl North Wales

Well done to this author. A book like this is vital in the discussion.

Lmo, Notts, England

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

reports BBC Views Online’s children’s CBBC Viewsround (or should that be ‘cbbc newsround’ in the dumbed down world of BBC News?), concluding with:

Important

When troops on the same side fire at each other, it’s known as friendly fire, or blue-on-blue.

Although accidents like this do happen in war, this is seen as very important because it could show the Americans aren’t being honest about what happened.

Well, paint me cynical, but that headline is extremely misleading, as if the attack in question was deliberately and intentionally targeted at the British troops. At best this is a case of extremely poor headline writing (perhaps CBBC means it’s written by children rather than intended for them). At worst it’s a case of deliberate and intentional spin by someone straining to paint the US and the Iraq war as negatively as possible. I think it’s clear from our experience of BBC news spin which of these is the more likely case.

Likewise, the concluding paragraph is a great example of malicious BBC news spinning. From my reading of this case, neither the US government nor the UK government have behaved honourably in dealing with this tragic incident, however, that is the nature of governments (and large institutions in general), rather than evidence of specific dishonesty solely on the part of the Americans as the BBC Viewsround journo suggests.

Hat tip to commenter pounce for the link.

on our earlier coverage of Newsnight, (here, here, here and here, for example) Peter Barron’s mention of Biased BBC can also be seen online in How green should we be? on the BBC Editors blog. Further to the excerpt quoted by Natalie, Mr. Barron goes on to say:

But if Newsnight stands for anything it should certainly stand against group-think, so while the broad thrust of our coverage accepts the orthodox view, we are also open to dissenting opinions. Indeed, Justin Rowlatt’s latest film looks at how the production of food may be doing more damage to the environment than burning fossil fuels.

In this I tend to agree with him – Newsnight is indeed better than most BBC News programmes at covering current affairs from different viewpoints, in contrast to the strict dumbed-down political correctness of the main BBC News bulletins and BBC News 24. That is not to say that Newsnight is anywhere near perfect (see below!), but it’s certainly one of my favourite BBC News programmes. For those who missed it, it’s worth catching Friday’s show online for Justin Rowlatt’s film on food production – most thought provoking.

Whilst I’m handing out praise, I must also commend Andrew Neil and his teams on the Daily Politics and This Week as highlights of BBC current affairs coverage. Both are well worth viewing for Mr. Neil’s well-briefed no-nonsense approach to political interrogation (although I could do with a bit less of Diane Abbot and Michael Portillo on This Week).

P.S. Peter Barron has replied to my follow-up questions re. the Newsnight ‘cripple’ email “misjudgement” linked above. More on this later.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

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Now, let’s see… violent politicised Islamists are out to kidnap and kill a soldier from what they see as an occupying army…

So if it was Hamas or Islamic Jihad out to get an Israeli soldier, we could rely on the BBC to refer to “militants” “seizing” a soldier.

For example, way back last July we had:

      Cpl Gilad Shalit was seized by Palestinian militants

      in an attack on an Israeli border post on Sunday

Do read the rest. Personally, I haven’t seen enough references to terror on the BBC with regard to this deranged nutter plot, but it does indeed highlight the BBC’s double-standards elsewhere, including their long troubling description of the kidnapping and disappearance of Israeli soldiers by armed invaders as them being ‘captured’ by ‘militants’.

There was similar evidence of BBC hypocrisy over the kidnap and evil murder of Ken Bigley and his two American colleagues. On the BBC the murder of Bigley was generally reported as murder, whereas the murders of the two Americans were generally reported as ‘killings’.

writes Jason Deans in yesterday’s MediaGrauniad, reporting on an article by Jeremy Paxman in the BBC’s internal magazine Ariel (known satirically inside and outside the Corporation as Pravda!). Some excerpts:

Jeremy Paxman has accused the BBC of hypocrisy over climate change, saying it takes a “high moral tone” in its reporting of the issue while at the same time pursuing environmentally irresponsible policies…

“I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour,” Paxman said, writing in this week’s edition of in-house BBC magazine Ariel.

“I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago. But it strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible,” he added.

Emphasis added above, and:

He added that when he asked Yogesh Chauhan, the BBC’s chief advisor, corporate responsibility, why the corporation did not practice what it preaches in its climate change coverage, the reply was: “The biggest impact we can make is through our programmes”.

“The problem is that no one has yet worked out how to generate electricity by hand
wringing,” Paxman added.

Do read the whole thing. It looks like Jeremy is very much sold on the idea of man made global warming, and, more significantly, that he recognises and acknowledges the BBC’s lack of impartiality in pursuing and promoting that agenda.

It’d be really great if Jeremy and the rest of the BBC would recognise that, to paraphrase Jeremy, there are also “people who know a lot more than [the BBC] do [who] may be right when they claim that it is [not, or substantially not, a] consequence of our own behaviour”.

The greatest service the BBC can do for mankind in this debate to actually ensure that there is a full and proper debate and a full and ongoing exploration of all the issues from all rational viewpoints, rather than their current, virtually unchallenged, wholesale promotion of the views of a) those involved in the climate change industry; and, b) those with a political axe to grind (e.g. sundry anti-capitalist greens, wishy-washy lefties etc.).

As for piddling away the licence fee on ‘offsetting’, in itself a controversial ‘solution’ to the alleged problem, if the BBC feels it needs to address the problem, it’d be better just to minimise their carbon footprint, rather than waste tellytaxpayers money as a way of salving their troubled consciences.

Update: More on Paxo in The Times. (Is that how you spell ‘moron’? 🙂

P.S. For his honesty Jeremy has gained a coveted spot on our sidebar!

Hat tip for the links to commenters dmatr & will.

Ben Brown, BBC News 24 headlines at 9pm:

“Nine men are in custody in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap a British Muslim soldier and film his execution”

Note to all BBC journalists (and some at Sky News too):

‘Execution’ implies a legal or judicially sanctioned killing. You cannot be charged with conspiracy to ‘execute’ someone. These people are being held on suspicion of conspiracy to murder (along with conspiracy to kidnap and torture).

Update:I was pleased to see at the end of the BBC 10 O’Clock News and at the beginning of Newsnight that Fiona Bruce and Jeremy Paxman, respectively, used the word ‘murder’ in their headlines. It’s a shame about all the other journalists who’re too biased or, more likely, too ignorant to realise that ‘execution’ is not a synonym for ‘murder’.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.