Have any current or former BBC insiders ever accused the corporation of having a right wing bias? I can think of several who have said it’s full of lefties – see the front page of B-BBC.

@#1 “see the front page of B-BBC.” I’d rather hang on to my sanity.

“ConservativeHome discovered two years ago that there were eleven times as many liberals at the BBC as conservatives.”

I reckon a similar survey of every media/creative company in London would reveal exactly the same numbers.

Guess ConHome will just have to blacklist those organisations, too.

I blogged this on the other day, the problem as I see it, apart from the lack of evidence for Jeremy Hunt’s assertion, is that the BBCs desire to maintain their impartiality leaves those who harbour extreme views feeling dissatisfied. Apart from facile speculation disguised as News, the BBC still remains the news source of choice for the world.

I suspect ConHome see the Torygraph and Daily Mail as authoritative and impartial news sources.

[4] Probably not, in the case of the Telegraph.

I would expect better than Daily Mail-esque distortions on here.

http://www.localconservatives.org/blogshow.aspx?ref=199

“Yesterday at a lunch for the Broadcasting Press Guild, I was asked how the Conservatives would deal with left-wing bias at the BBC. I replied rather flippantly that they should recruit more Tories. Although it was meant light-heartedly, I was also alluding to what the BBC itself acknowledges as an issue…

However the Guardian chose to present this as a demand that the BBC recruit more people who support one particular political party – something that I would never support as it would clearly undermine editorial independence.”

I don’t think it’s a controversial thing to say that the BBC tends to have a liberal bias – indeed, I think it’s probably a majority opinion, it’s just that alot of people don’t see this as particularly offensive or worrying. As such, I would have thought that websites such as this would take pride in this fact. Indeed, I would have expected a robust defence of the BBC, and its cultural leaning, accompanied by arguments to the effect that this ‘bias’ (so-called) is precisely its strength, that it best represents its audience, that it’s reflective of common opinion etc etc.

And yet, no. Instead we tend to get silly articles claiming counter-bias and trying to argue black is really grey. This suggests a lack of confidence – Mr. Hunt has been allowed to define the terms of the debate, to shape the issue according to his own agenda. In this sense, I think this is rapidly turning into a win-win situation for him.

I believe the BBC does have a left wing bias. I don’t base this on what I watch or read as I hardly utilise BBC services any more, far better content available on-line these days that hasn’t been “dumbed down”.

I have many friends who work in the BBC at various levels whom have made it clear that there is a firm bias of culture towards the left where many employees have views that right is wrong and left is good, It’s not an issue in all departments though, people in sport based affairs don’t really care too much about politics, the BBC does after all want people who are passionate about the subject they are going to work in.

It’s mainly areas that relate to politics, news, current events etc, also there appears to be a larger than normal number of BBC employees with real Anti-Semitic problems that inevitably taint their work with those considered not having liberal , pro-palestine, anti-israeli, pro-feminist and anti-Tory toff feelings being subject passive aggressive treatment by the more militant employees who feel the BBC is charged with being the voice piece of a progressive liberal society and that if you are “wrong” then “just do you job, but make sure its done in the right way though, or we’ll treat you with an air of contempt”, who wants to work day in day out in a frosty atmosphere after all?

This being the case then there may be a balanced top rank but if the content being provided to them by the grunts has already been tinged with bias from the start then what it presented to them for distribution to the country will invariably not be without the taste of bias.

Once again the Conservatives are confusing impartiality with liberalism. Also isn’t Cameron projecting a Liberal Conservative image, or is this something that doesn’t stretch beyond himself?

Robtro,

“real Anti-Semitic problems that inevitably taint their work with those considered not having liberal , pro-palestine, anti-israeli, pro-feminist and anti-Tory toff feelings”

You make the classic mistake of amalgamating a series of unconnected attributes into a big fictional liberal bogey man. I spend a lot of time in what is the right wing dominated blogosphere – and it is tempting to, but no more correct to credit all of the the opposing sentiments to every individual right wing commentator.

I have worked on and off in Political publishing, and the main UK political periodicals have a serious and sinister right wing agenda – impartiality is scorned upon, as is the BBC.

Ask yourself one question, can a privately owned news media organisation ever be immune to the political agenda of their owners/management? News media owners, boards and management teams do not choose to be involved for altruistic reasons, they want to own a bit of the media – why? It’s not for direct profit…

If you think the BBC has a “liberal” (which is an Americanism in the circumstances) bias, then you’re a fool. This is standard right-wing operating procedure as seen in the US: Lie that the media has a left-wing bias in order to make it have a right-wing bias.

The issues I pointed out are a list of key views that that time and again come up as being what I’m told are culturally considered to be the “good” within the BBC if we separate differing views into a good and bad analogy. They may be unconnected but from experience there seem to be a number of people confused about these things, their views are based on what they think it means to be a radical but have completely conflicting views. Best example in my mind is an example of a young gay female militant Marxist who was feverishly pro-palestine but when tackled on how can she support a particular group, that I forget the name of, who promote violent acts against homosexuals went on to retort that “they could eat babies for all I care as long as they are free…”

If I’m not mistaken, and I’m pretty sure I’m not, the BBC is not a private company but a public institution, with that comes a whole set of expectations that completely decouple its acceptable behaviour from what is common in the private sector.

If an individual doesn’t like the views of a private media product then they have the choice not to buy it and provide funds to the company, there is no such choice with the BBC. Also I couldn’t care less about the differing agendas of the private media houses, they can say what they want as long as it’s legal, the BBC doesn’t have that luxury, as a provider of content funded by the public it has an obligation to be impartial and to not actively promote one view over another as best it can!

I recognise that it many cases that being completely impartial is impossible as it is expected to take things from a British view point, but then it’s British funded so basic cultural norms are to be reflected in that.

My argument is that as the culture within the BBC is not impartial then causality seems to imply that this will affect the output. How to fix this? I guess there has to actively be a way to make sure the make-up of employees in the company is actively balanced, overly interfering? maybe… but being a public body that may mean its essential.

Yes I also think the BBC has a liberal bias, but I have nothing authoritative to support that other than some dodgy polls, words twisted out of context by one former employee, and my continual frustration it doesn’t reflect a right wing view of the world. Obviously whatever lefties say is complete lies (as evidenced by the expose of that socialist Damian McBride) so why is the BBC giving them space?

Sunny – I seem to remember you were going to start a lefty version of the Biased BBC blog.

As they are so right-wing, according to you, that should be like shooting fish in a barrel….

Somehow, I think you’ll struggle more than you think!

“The media is a liberal conspiracy”… says nine of the country’s top ten newspapers by circulation, its only satellite broadcaster, and a majority of its blogs. You have to wonder who’s left to be running the conspiracy.

On Sept 10th, Guido Fawkes writes a blog post entitled ‘Who Will Ask the Prime Minister?’, writing:

In the context of all this speculation and his manifest physical unease, surely somebody in the Lobby has to publicly ask the question at the PM’s next monthly briefing: “Prime Minister, have you been taking medication that may affect your judgement?”

Not at a lobby briefing, but nonetheless, 17 days later, Andrew Marr obediently asks Gordon Brown:

A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through; are you one of those people?

And what is the reaction from the rightwing blogosphere? Iain Dale not only thinks this line of questioning was appropriate: he lauds Marr in a post today, saying he has proven he ‘has some big, fat, hairy ones.’

For the record, I have said that, in my own view, despite individual examples of unbalanced coverage in both directions, on the whole the total output from the BBC is remarkably fair and impartial. But the hypocrisy emanating from the right today over the Marr interview is simply astounding.

Agreed. I know it’s a little off-topic, but I thought the Marr question was inappropriate and disrespectful, and didn’t real serve any useful purpose other than to try and get some sort of pathetic ‘scoop’ – nonsense, and unnecessary.

Iain Dale, TotalBollitics and his acolytes – according to my latest poll of the contents of my freezer and my budgie, is right wing biased. Somebody should do summit about it…

The staff of the BBC is, I would say, significantly unrepresentative of those who watch it. A third of the population of the UK is over 50. Is a third of the BBC workforce over 50? I think not.Then there is location. BBC employees are predominantly, if not overwhelmingly, based in London and live in or near London. London itself it highly unrepresentative of the UK, both in its age profile (greater proportion of young people in London) and culturally. And are any BBC jobs advertised in newspapers other than the Guardian?

Trofim @ 19

And your point is?

@19: Does the BBC have the correct representation of blonde hair, flat feet, support for Portsmouth FC, love of cheese, back-pain sufferers, mountain bikers or collectors of 1950s comic books? Probably not. Does that matter? Nope.

Considering London-centrism, the BBC is doing what it can to spread out. Many programmes now come from studios in Bristol, Manchester etc. Also, be careful about putting too much hope in ‘representation’ making the BBC less ‘Londoner’. Despite taking up only 0.6% of the area of the UK, Greater London provides 14% of the people. Of course, you could choose representation by area, but then 33% of BBC employees would have to be Scottish, despite only forming 8.4% of the population. Perhaps representation is more complicated than it looks. Unless, of course, what you were really getting at with “culturally” was that you feel the BBC isn’t white enough.

Ah, Kentron. so you agree that the BBC is London-centric, but when you say that Londoners provide 14% of the population of the UK, you should more accurately have said “Londoners provide A MERE 14% of the population”. And as for your “Unless, of course, what you were really getting at with “culturally” was that you feel the BBC isn’t white enough”. That’s classic insinuation, a favourite crude ploy much employed by lefties.

As regards representation, is it not the left who are the main proponents of the principle that organisations should be representative of the communities they serve? London, I understand, does indeed have around half of all the ethnic minority population of the UK, which means that it is highly unpresentative and atypical on that parameter.

As for age, young people are more likely to have left-wing views than mature people. Given that the age profile of BBC staff is younger than the TV-watching population at large, BBC staff are therefore statistically more likely to be left-of-centre than that of the population in general.

@22: I believe the BBC is somewhat London-centric, but (as mentioned) it appears to be taking steps to reduce that. Also, considering the importance of London in economic, political, social and other terms (which was the case long before the BBC existed), it’s not entirely lacking in merit.

Regarding “culturally”, you’ll find that I didn’t “insinuate” anything. To insinuate is to ‘gradually introduce an idea in a subtle or indirect way’, whereas I directly questioned what you said. I notice that, in rebutting my statement, you neglected to explain what you meant by “culturally”. If you have a sensible argument then I would obviously retract my point, but you have yet to provide one.

Reacting to what you considered a personal attack, while attempting to smear me as a user of “classic ploys” and a “leftie” (which I presume you consider a negative) is somewhat strange. Of course, if you asked around here you might find that I am certainly not considered a “leftie”, but why bother with relying on facts

“is it not the left who are the main proponents” – As mentioned, I am not “the left” or a representative of the same, so don’t have to concern myself with alleged ideological purity.

In the UK, children (under 16) form 19% of the population, and pensioners another 19%. Together they clearly constitute an important chunk of the television-watching public. However, this does not infer that the BBC should be 38% comprised of children and pensioners. While we may argue over the definitions of “child” and “pensioner”, as a society we have broadly concluded that there are certain ages when, for various reason, it is best to not work. It appears to be a good idea that we don’t expect 9 or 90 year olds to do a day’s work. Therefore, unless you are advocating the return of child labour, or the mass employment of 65-100 year olds, it seems that most large businesses will end up using employees of a narrow age range (16-65) to serve a public of 0-105.

If you prefer to abandon representativeness and concentrate on the mean figure (an entirely unexplained jump in your analysis), then that has its own problems. For example, how might we achieve it? Banning anyone under 35 from working at the BBC might bump up the average, but this is hardly practical. Should we enact discrimination in favour of the over 50s? More importantly, to use one piece of information (i.e. age) to ‘prove’ that the BBC is more left-wing is flawed, as you don’t know if the employees of the BBC also have above-average adherence to trends that promote right-wing tendencies. For example, perhaps BBC employees come from, on average, richer households than the general population, which one might expect to push them in a rightward direction. Have you controlled for such factors?

In general, as might have been deduced, I am not in favour of enforcing a more ‘representative’ BBC along such narrow lines. However, at least population and area can reasonably accurately be measured. If you wish to claim that ‘the BBC is more left-wing than the country’, you need (at minimum) two pieces of data: an accurate measurement of the BBC’s political tendencies, and an accurate measurement of the country’s. I am unaware of such data existing in either case, and if you know of such perhaps you could provide it. This is, of course, before we even begin the highly complex task of defining what constitutes ‘left-wing’ by any meaningful national criteria.

So, has anyone got any evidence whatsoever that the BBC is ‘biased’ one way or another, and if so, how does this ‘bias’ manifest itself? I thought the BBC made programmes, not propaganda for the mindless population.

This is fun: watching LibCon defending an institution Sunny wants shut down.

There’s paranoia on both sides here, as well as good old confirmation bias.

http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/

posts individual examples of what they see as lefty bias – some of which ring true

(health warning – comment threads not for faint hearted)

@ cjcjc:

Perhaps we think that their most recent example rings true: the BBC is biased because Gabby Logan thinks that Barack Obama is a bit of alright.

Honestly…

Kentron @23:
To insinuate is to ‘gradually introduce an idea in a subtle or indirect way’, whereas I directly questioned what you said.

In English generally, questions are indicated by certain criteria, such as word order inversion or use of the auxiliary verb “do”. Orthographically, they are conventionally terminated with the use of a question mark.
Your sentence ‘Unless, of course, what you were really getting at with “culturally” was that you feel the BBC isn’t white enough‘ shows no evidence of being a question.

Anyway, be that as it may, I have no access to BBC data on the demographics of their employees, my information is indeed anecdotal. But I seem to remember several cases of employees over 50 saying that they lost their jobs essentially on the grounds of their age (Moira Stuart, Anna Ford) and was there not an outcry when the BBC announced that it was relocating some of its staff to Manchester? And Andrew Marr has not denied saying “The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias”, as displayed on Biased BBC.

The Tories are clearly trying to freak the BBC into giving them better coverage. That doesn’t mean that the BBC is lefty, however. It just means they want to get more pro Tory stories.

And what was Andrew Marr doing peddling the stuff from right wing blogs about Brown’s health?

@27 – no,not that one!!

they do overegg their pudding (but quite a long way sometimes)

On Brown’s health, I seem to recall that the first people to suggest he had “psychological flaws” were T Blair and A Campbell…

They are not right wing bloggers as far as I know.

Shamelessly Campbell is criticising Marr on his blog today!

We all know that there is now medical evidence that recreational drug use may cause mental problems in later life. Given that, David Cameron’s alleged use of drugs during his 20s could well have caused some level of – currently hidden – brain damage that may become apparent should he be subjected to the stresses and rigours of the PM’s job. Given the questioning Gordon Brown was given yesterday about his health, balance requires Andrew Marr to ask Mr Cameron whether: (a) he ever did take drugs; and (2) if he did, whether he has had medical tests to ascertain whether there has been any damage done.

Can anyone tell me whether the BBC advertise jobs in any national newspapers apart from the Guardian?

Minor example just now on today’s One O’Clock News – apparently Merkel’s likely new coalition partners (FDP) might, we were breathlessly told, even want to shrink the size of the state , in an incredulous tone of voice.

Looking forward to the CDU-FDP coalition myself, anyway.

The greens and lefties did OK too, though the fall in SPD support seemed to go 50% right 50% left.

Europe continues to move (gradually) rightwards…

cjcjc, this was in context of the previous coalition, not in context of our current government.

Cjcjc @ 26

That little blog neatly illustrates the type of mindset the Tories and the ‘bias’ they find on the BBC. What the Tories don’t like are the fact that the facts do not support their silly prejudices. Too many to mention in great detail, but look at the type of thing they complain about, Climate change, Israel/Palestine, Race. These are the hobbyhorses the Right tend to concentrate on. The Tories don’t want these stories reported ‘fairly’, they want the stories report in a way that backs up their prejudices.

It turns out that climate change deniers think the BBC is ‘biased’. Well good, that means the BBC is in the right.

Looking down the list of the ‘bias’, I stumbled onto this little beauty. If anything better illustrates the mindset of these sad, no life fuckwits, it surely is this entry, labelled “pro Brown”:

THE WONDER OF AIDS
BBC lead story @ 6am concerns Obama rebuffing Brown’s desperate attempts for a formal meeting. One hour later, lead story changes and instead we get the good news about a putative breakthrough in the AIDS vaccine. BBC new running this as THE big story. Meanwhile Sky News does not appear to have received the memo and runs with the Obama snub as lead. BBC – just doing what it can for the Dear Leader.

Of course it’s interesting to know where the Tories stand on getting rid of the ‘fair balance’ rule on news broadcasting (which James Murdoch thinks is an attack on freedom of speech). Will they allow the equivalents of Fox News & ‘Hate Radio’ here?

cjcjcjcjcjc

you’re on fire when it comes to linking to shit.