Category Archives: BBC bias

You’re Fired

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“Trust is the foundation of the BBC. Audiences are at the heart of everything we do. We take pride in delivering quality. We respect each other. We are honest. We are impartial.”

The BBC Values, from the back of BBC Radio Devon presenter Graham Danton’s electronic entry card into the BBC building.

SUNDAY afternoon radio presenter Graham Danton has been abruptly sacked by the BBC after more than 20 years, leaving his loyal listeners confused at the lack of explanation.

In today’s Western Morning News there’s an article by Mr. Danton in which he reveals more. He begins by quoting Orwell’s “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

He feels his sacking was really because he “Highlighted uncomfortable topics”
“Every presenter has to obey the policy of BBC compliance. In effect, it means no presenter is fully trusted any more.”

Hosting a phone-in programme “two hours of never knowing what topic was coming next while having to play Devil’s Advocate, just me and a young lad who put the calls through to my desk”
“Now ( since Ross and Brand) it’s controlled by a producer… you go on air only if it’s approved by the producer…. some people say they’ll speak about the previous topic, be accepted, then speak their minds about something else……….. Little red warning triangles used to appear on my telephone screen……

“Since last autumn, a few minutes before my programme went on air a senior member of staff would question me as to what I was going to talk about…..by that time I was forbidden to talk about:

  • politics
  • crime
  • immigration
  • religion (on a Sunday)
  • the EU
  • Islam
  • health matters
  • even cats (would offend cat lovers)

“Since I left school in 1948 I have had eight employers…..the only one I am ashamed to have worked for is the BBC.”

His electronic entry card was deleted within two hours of his dismissal.

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Further fallout

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It’s been hard to avoid comment about the Beeb’s bias in the national press lately, but this article by novelist DJ Taylor on the Beeb’s US election coverage is worth flagging up:

While everybody in the room – party cheerleaders excepted – clearly wanted Obama to win, those in charge were doing a very good impression of studied neutrality. It was all a far cry from recent British general elections, where the anti-Conservative bias of certain BBC pundits… has been so flagrant as to make you wonder exactly how they got away with it… There is no great mystery, of course, behind this sudden excess of timidity. In the wake of the Brand/Ross disaster the corporation is simply terrified of offending anybody.

Worth mentioning, too, that Taylor’s a member of the Labour party, and this is from the left-leaning Independent.

And, sticking with leftist newspapers sticking it to the Beeb over the last couple of days, here’s Sue Carroll in the Mirror on Ed Stourton’s description of the Queen mother as a “ghastly old bigot”:

When the Queen Mother died, Ed Stourton condemned a tabloid newspaper for publishing details of her last moments, claiming the publication was “quite comfortable in the gutter”… Would his book about political correctness have made news without him shopping the nation’s favourite gran? In a word No.

Welcome to the gutter, Ed.

“The BBC was meant to be politically neutral, but …”

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Alex Deane, former aide to David Cameron, at the Social Affairs Unit blog, on a little vignette in a Telegraph Joan Bakewell interview.

(For post-diluvian readers, Joan Bakewell was the Kirsty Wark of her late-Sixties to mid-Eighties day, popping up all over the BBC either as presenter or pundit. Famously described by Frank Muir as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’).