Biased BBC reporting
YOU recently published a letter from a former BBC political director critical of Digby Jones’s views. We presume the writer is retired, but it is obvious that mentally he has never left the BBC bubble. Life after BBC employment seems to have done nothing to shake his unquestioning, devout belief in the righteousness of the BBC and its veracity when reporting current affairs; indeed, when reporting on subjects of any kind.
We are not alone in having learnt many years ago that, when viewing BBC ‘factual’ programmes, one must bear in mind that what you are seeing and hearing is merely a portrayal of the ‘facts’ or the world as the BBC establishment wishes you to believe them. Reporters hungry for promotion frequently slant their reports as they seek a ministerial scalp – apparently a sure way to advancement in their chosen job.
Like many of his former colleagues, he appears not to realise that there is a difference between aggressive and incisive, enquiring questioning. This difference is nowhere more evident than in the BBC’s political reporting, when it frequently looks as if the objective of the reporter is less seeking the truth than hoping to trip a politician up, or badger him/her into giving an impromptu response that can be reported in such a way that it can be quoted detrimentally to the person being interviewed. Can anybody remember hearing that a minister confirms any matter? In BBC language, it is always ‘admits’ – a word with guilty associations.
Many political reporters are obviously incapable of separating their personal political views from the subjects they are reporting on. Nowhere has this bias been more evident than in the BBC’s reporting of the 2016 UK referendum result and its aftermath. The greatest demonstration of UK democracy resulted in a majority voting in favour of leaving the EU, in spite of the government of the day patently seeking to fix the result. Yet the BBC’s subsequent reporting of the result and its aftermath has been, and still is, blatantly biased. We could quote countless examples and statistics to demonstrate this; suffice it to give just a few.
On 18 July 2019, the BBC broadcast Nick Robinson’s interview with the former French President. M. Hollande stated that ‘if we want to make an example, [British] blood must be shed’. The BBC, which prides itself on its linguistic capabilities, omitted this crucial part of his sentence and merely translated the more innocuous words: ‘there has to be a price to pay.’
Reporting on Boris Johnson’s appointments to his first cabinet, the BBC’s Vicky Young stressed that he had appointed a majority of Brexiteers and critically compared it with May’s cabinet, clearly saying that May had balanced her cabinet between Remainers and Brexiteers. This was either gross innumeracy or false reporting, because anyone in Young’s position must have known that, right from the beginning of her premiership, all May’s cabinets were overwhelmingly Remain-dominated.
Laura Kuenssberg, the reporter to whose defence your correspondent rushed, has been consistently biased in her reporting of anything to do with the UK leaving the EU. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words – the expression on her face when a pro-Brexit government was elected clearly encapsulated her views on the subject.
There was a time when we were naive enough to look to the BBC as our primary source of news, but those days are long gone. Unlike friends, who have given up watching BBC News in favour of Al Jazeera, because they consider it a much more reliable and factual source, we do still view some parts of the BBC’s output to see how the TV licence holders’ taxes are squandered and to keep abreast of fake news from one of its most experienced sources.
MICHAEL AND DIANE WARD
Torteval.