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Can you imagine what would happen if the BBC greeted a visit by a leading figure from the Muslim world with a poll about whether the teachings of the said imam were relevant, believed or liked by a sample of 500 UK Muslims? What would the questions be? Do you believe that those who become human bombers are granted access to an endless supply of virgins? Or, should Iranian women who conduct adultery be stoned, hanged or flogged? Should we treat women equally? Should all Muslims in Bradford compulsorily join next year’s Gay Pride march in Leeds?

Now I know there are thousands of Muslims who maintain that their faith isn’t like this – it’s the religion of peace and enlightenment, don’t you know – but the point is that the BBC would not dream of it. They know if that happened, they would be howled down with protests. So why, when the Pope comes to Britain for only the second time, do the BBC feel it neccessary to give themselves a carte blanche licence to lecture us about Catholicism? Putting aside that a poll of 500 people is not a properly representative sample (that number was no doubt chosen to keep down costs), and though I am not myself particularly religious, I do know enough people who are to respect that their faith is not something that can be probed or dissected or analysed by crude, mechanistic one-liners. The reality is that the boys and girls of the BBC hate – as a fervent tenet of their own secularist religion – Christianity of all shades, and they feel that any device that challenges the authority of the Church is fair game. Their opinion-poll approach reduces their coverage of Christianity to a moronic, agent provocateur, embarrassing charade.

I am sure that the hundreds of next of kin of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan will be tuning in to the BBC Radio 4 programme entitled “Have we won the war in Afghanistan”? Oops sorry, I misread the title, it is in fact called “Has the Taliban won the war in Afganistan”. Eddie Mair is your host and it starts right now. I won’t be listening. The Taliban must love the BBC – they do their work day in and day out.

I have not often written about narwhals, but the BBC’s continuing green obsession and failure to observe journalistic fundamentals takes me there today. Here, BBC eco-campaigner Matt Walker (formerly a writer for the warmist publication New Scientist) reports with bated breath so-called research from some of his fellow obsessives from California which claims that the said narwhals are under threat from climate change because they swim slowly and will not be able to breathe properly when they are surrounded by breaking, melting ice floes.

Now, I am not a scientist, but something that my junior school teacher called common sense nevertheless tells me that narwhals have been around for rather a long time, and that the amount of ice around in the arctic has fluctuated considerably over the millenia (glaciation and all that), so our marine friends must have learned to adapt. But don’t just take my undeducated word for it. Here, and here, a Portuguese blogger called Ecotretas, who clearly has studied deeply the ebb and flow of the Arctic, points out that there was more open sea seven thousand years ago and narwhals managed to survive.

In other words, the California story is alarmist tosh. Mr Walker, had he done even a smidgeon of good old-fashioned journalistic digging, could have found the papers that Ecotretas refers to. But balanced journalism is not on his agenda. Never let the facts get in the way of a good BBC eco-scare.

The BBC will go to any lengths to say it is not biased, as Mark Thompson has graphically shown this week with his faux confession that the corporation was guilty of bias in the past but not now. The Leviathan wriggles, it bends, it contorts, it grimaces in pursuit of that central tenet. We on this site know that such defensiveness is a load of hogwash, but it’s nevertheless very rare for anyone who has held a senior position to break ranks and come clean on the record.

September 5 is therefore a red letter day, because former Today editor Rod Liddle, writing in the Sunday Times (frustratingly, I can’t link to the article because of the site paywall),lays bare the pressures he was under in the early noughties. He tells how every week, he was summoned to the office of his boss to be lectured on the need for impartiality on topics such as the US election – by a man who had posters on his wall supporting the Democrats. He also relates a story about something I know something about, having been to some extent involved.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch – back in 2001, a Conservative peer, now of course, soon-to-be ex-leader of UKIP – commissioned a series of independent reports into the BBC’s coverage of the EU. This work, stretching back to 1999, is very detailed, systematic analysis of a range of BBC programmes, and has found – as readers of this site will know – that the BBC’s coverage of the EU seriously under-represents the eurosceptic perspective (to put it mildly).

Mr Liddle recounts how he was persuaded that what the reports said had substance, and he raised this at his weekly meeting with his Democrat-supporting boss. The response? He was told that Lord Pearson and “these people” (behind the report) were “mad”.

Adds Mr Liddle:

“Ah, that’s the BBC. Desperate to be fair, according to its charter, but never truly fair. its editorial staff are convinced that they are not remotely biased, just rational and civil and decent, and that those who oppose their congenial, educated, middle-class poiint of view are not merely right-wing, but deranged. They will not for a second accept that they are in fact biased at all…”

What Mr Liddle does not say is that when he was editor of Today, he was just as guilty of stonewalling complaints as his colleagues. He met Lord Pearson to discuss the issues raised by the reports about the EU back in 2001. Then, exactly like his boss, he resolutely defended his programme’s output and accused Lord Pearson in print of trying to define bias by stopwatch. This was a classic BBC diversionary riposte that conveniently glossed over that the reports were far more than measurement of the time devoted to the eurosceptic perspective. But at least our Roger has at last seen the light.

Peter Hitchens also looks today at BBC bias in the wake of Mark Thompson’s remarks this week. Relevant to what Rod Liddle says, he notes the recent admission by BBC reporter Jonathan Charles about the blind new-era excitement he and his colleagues felt when the euro was launched almost a decade ago. Lord Pearson also complained about that, and he backed it up with solid analysis of how biased the coverage had been. Like everything else, the document was pooh-poohed by BBC top brass as xenophobic fanatasy.

Update: I have been told that one of Rod Liddle’s bosses resorted to libelling the author of the Lord Pearson-commissioned EU reports as part of the BBC anything-goes approach to attacking its enemies. The then chief political advisor told Lord Pearson that the report writer was not to be trusted because he had been sacked by the BBC. This was an outright untruth which she was forced to retract following a lawyer’s letter.

The BBC Thompson unbiased mindset is made up of a complete set of nanny-state values that is based, in turn, on fantasy views of science and human development. One of the central axioms is that life in nature and the past was idyllic. People grew their own food, didn’t produce any carbon dioixide, didn’t burn nasty fossil fuels and lived in constant orgasmic stasis (or whatever tendy word is in vogue). Anyone who advocates such ideas is instantly elevated to sainthood, or at the very least, front page status on the BBC website. So it is today for this piece of moonshine, carefully crafted by BBC health zealot Jane Elliot. She talks admiringly of a group of behaviour police in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, who are touring schools telling long-suffering youngsters that if they eat like peasants (peasants, note, not the villanous landowners because they crammed themselves with expensive nasties) did in medieval times, they will not get fat and not taint their bodies with vile salt or – shock, horror – food from abroad.

That will be the medieval diet that meant in reality that there was a life expectancy of around 30-35, diseases were rampant and there was a dependence on local food that meant every period of bad weather or low rainfall spelled starvation for our ancestors. Not to mention the back-breaking labour involved. There’s an excellent critique of the food problems of the past here; the writer also brilliantly shows how the greenie obsession with localism and organic food is dangerous, self-indulgent nonsense. For the thought police of Mr Thompson’s unbiased BBC, of course, the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day.

Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, is an icon of BBC lefties, feminists and trendies, as this glowing tribute posted today on the BBC website makes clear. Reporter Howard Falcon-Lang shows his breatheless admiration for what he portrays as a saintly pioneer of Darwinian science (thousands of brownie points in the BBC lexicon)and ensuring that women should be “liberated” through sex manuals (another brownie point subject, especially for contemporary ones that denigrate men and are aimed at five-year-olds).

What Mr Falcon-Lang leaves out of his eulogy is a few other less savoury but rather more important facts about Ms Stopes. Like that her views on evolution led her to become an ardent admirer of Hitler, and that she wrote to him a month before the war broke out in 1939 telling him so. The reason? Well, she was a central figure in Anglo-US eugenics movement (along with leftie friends like George Bernard Shaw) and believed in every element of his views about race and selective breeding. This heroine of the left was as much a believer in racial superiority and getting rid of lesser races as most Nazis.

As with the inconvenient truths about Islam, the fanatics at the BBC airbrush out with wearying predictability the facts that don’t fit with their systematic bending of history.

Update: Paulo states (below) that the version of the Stopes story he saw mentioned Hitler and that I must have only skim-read the story. Not true; that’s never my approach. I’ve double-checked the edition I read when I posted the story and it definitely did not contain the reference to Hitler. Mmm…curious, that. This was the intro on the edition I have:

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) shook the world. She wrote a best-selling sex-manual for women and was a controversial birth control pioneer.

When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, all assumed that she had trained in medicine.

Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.

So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?

The Oz general election is on a knife edge. There’s no doubt who the BBC is supporting. Here’s the profile of Labour’s Gillard:

* Welsh-born former lawyer
* Taken to Australia as a child in 1966 for the warmer climate
* Known for her pragmatism and sharp tongue
* Seen as intelligent and determined
* Lives with her partner, a hairdresser
* Faced criticism from conservatives for not having children

And of Tony Abbott:

* Nick-named the “mad monk”, relating to his brief training as a priest
* Renowned fitness fanatic and former student boxer
* Socially conservative on issues such as same-sex marriages and abortion
* Known for gaffes and has frequently been caught swearing on camera
* Climate change sceptic

To decode: that nice Ms Gillard is pragmatic, intelligent and determined, is not married but has a nice boyfriend, and has been unfairly attacked for not having children. In other words, a BBC role-model. Horrid Mr Abbott is a nutter, a fanatic, dares to believe in traditional family values, is gaffe-prone, and – boo,hiss, worst of all in the BBC hate stakes – dares to challenge the climate change idiocy of Ms Gillard(who wants to cripple the Oz economy by introducing eye-watering green taxes). So, for the BBC, it’s we love Gillard, that lovely lady from Wales.

Laura Kuennsberg didn’t exactly cover herself in glory on Wednesday’s Newsnight, when she repeatedly interrupted Republican Brad Blakeman over the issue of the Islamic centre at Ground Zero, while not interrupting Mosque-supporter Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (She even called the latter ‘Nihad’).

Last night’s performance was if anything even worse.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/newsnight (beginning about nine minutes in).

After another completely one-sided report from Liz MacKean, which propagandized for keeping speed cameras and against government budget cuts, Laura interviewed speed camera enthusiast George Monbiot and speed camera naysayer Claire Armstrong of Safe Speed.

Mrs Armstrong faced constant interruptions from Monbiot. Not only did Laura Kuennsburg not even try to control Monbiot’s aggressive behaviour, she joined him in interrupting Mrs Armstrong. George Monbiot was merely asked a couple of half-hearted questions and then allowed to get on with it. Claire Armstrong, however, was challenged with several tough questions, all from the same pro-speed camera position advanced by Liz MacKean’s report and by George Monbiot:

“Claire Armstrong, you might be pleased that cameras are disappearing, but how can you be when the police say, quite clearly, this will result in more people being hurt and possibly killed?”

“Well Claire, isn’t it the case actually that the statistics overwhelmingly do show a change? Not just the Department of Transport. There are countless studies, one from UCL that showed a 67% reduction in speeding, another from a different place showing a 7o% reduction in speeding, one from the University of Liverpool…I mean, why continue with the small amount of statistics that appear to contradict the lion’s share?”

“Well Claire, where has that myth about them making money come from then, because if that was the case in these cash-strapped times, surely the government should be putting speed cameras across the land?”

“What do you say to women like that mother in the film who wanted a speed camera on her road? She believes in her heart that it could have saved lives if it was on her road.”

“Claire Armstrong, why is it socially acceptable to speed? Decades ago it was socially acceptable to drink and then drive and then to not wear a seat-belt. But why do you believe it’s socially acceptable to speed?” (Mrs Armstrong doesn’t, of course, believe any such thing).

It should be socially unacceptable for BBC interviewers and BBC programmes to take sides on controversial political issues.

Talking of Dumb BBC, via commenter D B, this tweet from “Justen” Webb :

As we celebrate record A-level results for the umpteenth successive year, let’s spare a thought for those BBC Online staff who don’t know the difference between fare and fair.

UPDATED – they’ve changed the page (but not the timestamp, natch)