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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

If this was covered on B-BBC at the time, but I can’t find it. Maybe I missed it.

LEFTIES Wednesday 17 May – Friday 19 May 2006 In this three-part series, Vanessa Engle revisits the turbulent era when the extreme Left was a serious and significant political force that believed it could change the world for the better. Weaving together interviews and archive footage, each film relives a different aspect of the Left in Britain in the 1970s and 80s.
		1. PROPERTY IS THEFT BBC Two: Monday 10 July 7pm-8pm Fascinating story of a squatted street in the 1970s, where the residents lived by the unconformist ideals of the time.
		2. ANGRY WIMMIN BBC Two: Monday 17 July 7pm-8pm The rise and fall of an extreme strain of feminism, that called on women to become ‘political lesbians’.
		3. A LOT OF BALLS BBC Two: Monday 24 July 7pm-8pm The story of the News on Sunday, an attempt by a group from the far left to launch a left-wing, mass-market Sunday tabloid.

There was a similar Radio Four programme in 2004 on “The Revolutionaries”. At the time I pondered the likelihood of the BBC displaying its legendary balance with a matching programme about the far right.

There definitely was a far right in the 70s and 80s – I was involved in demonstrations and other activism against it in various Pennine mill towns. I think we may wait a long time before we see a series of reminiscences by grizzled National Front activists, now tenured professors or running armed compounds in Montana, on those days when “the extreme Right was a serious and significant political force“.

UPDATE – Commenter Will points out this review at the SAU :

One episode in the series, A Lot of Balls, includes a detail that is beyond parody. The programme concerns the ill-fated left-wing newspaper News on Sunday, which appeared briefly in 1987. Alan Hayling, one of the founders, is portrayed as largely blameless for paper’s demise. However, BBC4 leaves it to the final credits to point out that:

Alan Hayling is now head of documentaries for the BBC.

as they present The Conspiracy Files this week on 9/11.

The Editor’s blog has some interesting comments that the BBC have left up:

Comment 44:

Anyone who has read and absorbed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” will know it is all part of their megalomaniacal plan to give us a one world government. They are using events like Sept 11th, July 7th in London (another government sponsored terror event) to fear us all into giving up our liberties! The sheep need to waken up and smell the coffee. The British are as bad as the US, they are run by the same group of Zionists. Blair and the cash for honours scandal? He was under growing pressure from it and BANG, a “plot” to behead a muslim soldier and an apparent pandemic of Bird Flu put that story firmly to bed. Waken up people! We had few problems with terrorists pre 9/11, now it seems the goverment on both sides of the atlantic are hell bent in creating this monster that is Islam against us when the whole concept was made up in one of their think tanks !

Apparently “Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them”. The editor being Mike Rudin.

Monday’s Radio Four had something for everyone’s blood pressure. The Today Programme opened with American claims of Iranian involvement (RealAudio) in attacks on US and British troops in Iraq. The story was pitched in terms of America ‘raising the temperature’ (as it was described on the news bulletins). Web coverage continued the theme of ‘what are the Americans up to ?‘ – as Paul Reynolds says “Blaming Shia Iran for supporting Iraqi Shia militias makes it easier for the US to sell that policy (attacking Shia militias – LT) at home and abroad. Then there is the old tactic of blaming someone else for your own problems.”

This strikes me as showing the same kind of lack of perspective that we see when the slaughter of Iraqis by terrorist bombs is described purely in terms of its effect on George Bush’s domestic poll ratings. Note that the BBC don’t claim that the US information is false. It just seems to be irrelevant to the British state broadcaster that British and Allied soldiers are being killed with Iranian-supplied weapons. Hi-tech shaped charges are difficult things to knock up in a garage. Similarly the killing of soldiers with Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles, sold not long ago to the Iranians for fighting drug-smugglers, is off the BBC radar.

It’s half term in the UK, and children are off school (my nine-year old daughter was still in our bed reading at 10 am, with Radio Four on), so what better time for the Radio Four Woman’s Hour programme to open with a fifteen-minute discussion of sexual fantasies ?

Next week on Woman’s Hour : “How those nasty capitalist advertisers are sexualising our kids” followed by “Britain has Europe’s highest rate of sexually transmitted infections – Why ?”

And to finish the evening, the World Tonight offered a nice interview with freed Red Army Fraction terrorist Astrid Proll, during which she was asked to give her views on modern Germany, and expressed sentiments to the effect that ‘we’ve all done things we regret in our youth’.

Next week – the Shankill Butchers talk about the Northern Ireland peace process.

Scott Burgess- in one of his usual perspicacious posts- notes a BBC Radio 4 beaut on the recent snow in Britain:

“The most obvious sign that snow had come was outside.”

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.

The Rottweiler Puppy on the BBC, corporations and the environment, citing this BBC report.

“Really, this isn’t journalism. It’s caricature, demonisation.”

The BBC tread carefully around issues of race, culture and demographic change. So it’s not surprising that the report on Sir Keith Ajegbo’s ‘Diversity and Citizenship’ report reached sixteen revisions in four days.

The headline and the main thrust of the story itself is not an honest reflection of Sir Keith’s main findings and recommendations.

Schools in England should teach “core British values” alongside cultural diversity, a report says.

In fact the phrase ‘core British values’, used in quotation marks by the BBC, appears nowhere in the report (pdf). The document’s ‘vision’ is ‘for all schools to be actively engaged in nurturing in pupils the skills to participate in an active and inclusive democracy, appreciating and understanding difference’, a slightly more flexible and loosely-defined aim. Neither do the 23 recommendations of the report, headed “Education for Diversity”, include the word ‘British’ or anything about teaching British values. Instead we read that “all schools should be encouraged to audit their curriculum to establish what they currently teach that is meaningful for all pupils in relation to diversity and multiple identities“, or that “the QCA should work closely with awarding bodies to ensure, wherever possible, that education for diversity appears in syllabuses and exam questions” – a recommendation which I look forward to seeing implemented in Mathematics.

Among the background information in the report was that “the 2001 census shows that nearly 1 in 8 pupils are minority ethnic. By 2010 the proportion is expected to be around 1 in 5.”

This statistic was quoted by Education Minister Alan Johnson in version 1.

“By 2010 one in five pupils in our schools will be from an ethnic minority – this is a challenge but also an opportunity to instil a culture of understanding and tolerance at an early age.”

By version 7 this statistic had vanished.

Commenter DG writes:

http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/8577/bbc1mt9.jpg

The above link is to a screenshot of a BBC Football webpage. Please do not view the image if you are offended by four-letter swear words.

Sport isn’t covered on B-BBC very often but, certainly in Scotland, the most frequent examples of BBC Bias are in this area, nearly all aimed at Rangers FC (the above being just the latest example).

The article concerns the recent transfer of Kevin Thomson from Hibernian to Rangers, and displays a picture of Thomson in his first outing for his new club. The issue is that the image’s filename contains his first and last names with a choice obscenity in between (which I doubt will be found on his birth certificate).

The obscenity was on the filename on that page for about 12 hours before being changed, but the original filepath is still valid!

Despite hundreds of complaints, no apology has so far been issued or disciplinary action confirmed.

The BBC in Scotland has a history of rank indiscipline as far as Rangers are concerned. Not only are they ultra-sensitive to the actions of Rangers and their (considered un-PC) supporters, they have consistently used the airwaves and website as a platform for snide digs and outright insults poorly disguised as humour.

I could also discuss the travesty of their many undertalented sports reporters setting themselves up as social commentators, but that’s for another post…

The BBC story is here.

UPDATE: The Sunday Mail has a story about this.