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BBC Bias and Charter Violation in the past month

The Charter charges the BBC with having a higher standard of journalism than its competitors and performing in depth analyses. 

This, albeit weak, directive means that the BBC must not use anecdote to attack real data and it must not undermine one side of the debate by omitting it from coverage.  As will be seen below, the BBC is routinely violating the Charter and the best solution is to trim down BBC News broadcasting so that it deals in mature, fact based reporting.

The most outrageous example of Charter breaking occurred after the publication of the "Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report" where the data from the Report was suppressed and countered with anecdotal reports from activists.  The BBC behaved like a political organisation which, when faced with a carefully researched truth, responds with anecdotes and personal attacks.  It cannot be the role of the BBC to campaign on any issue.  It has even failed to use the current name of the "Black Lives Matter" movement which has been switched back to the original meaning of "BLM": the Black Liberation Movement (a Maoist group).

The BBC has been abusing its position as a National Broadcaster by openly campaigning.  In both the BLM and Reclaim the Streets protests the BBC failed to present the real data for the UK with any prominence.  If, like me, you ask people how many black people die in UK police custody every year they generally give an answer between 10 and 50.  The correct answer is 3 in the 2019/2020 period (out of 18 deaths in c. 900,000 arrests).

Source: Deaths following police conduct

This was a high figure, most years 1 or 0 black people die in police custody and not as a result of police violence.

Click on image to view.

In the case of the Reclaim the Streets protests only about 14 women had been murdered by a stranger on the streets on Britain in 2019 out of 671 homicides in the year:


Source ONS
Yet the BBC acted as a campaigning organisation throwing petrol on the fires of protest.

The BBC also reported the balance of trade between the UK and the EU for the first time since 2016.  The poor figures released for January were taken to be a disaster for the UK.  The BBC pointedly suppressed any reference to historical data.

Or any note that what is a bad trade imbalance in 2021 must have been a bad trade imbalance in 2016.  We see the normal BBC method of putting anecdotal evidence (one month's figures) as the news whilst suppressing the context.

The BBC reporting of the WHO study of the origins of COVID19 suppressed important information such as their principle scientific advisor, Dr Daszak, being deeply involved in the finance and running of experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the fact that most of the earlier SARS outbreaks had come from Chinese labs and that the WHO had warned that China had a problem with poor biosafety:

“The possibility that a SARS outbreak could occur following a laboratory accident is a risk of considerable importance, given the relatively large number of laboratories currently conducting research using the SARS-CoV or retaining specimens from SARS patients. These laboratories currently represent the greatest threat for renewed SARS-CoV transmission through accidental exposure associated with breaches in laboratory biosafety." WHO 2003

Yet the BBC happily passed on the message from the WHO in China that a lab escape was a remote possibility.  Again suppressing the context and prioritising an anecdotal version of the news.  This was very much against the public interest given that before the COVID19 outbreak the risk of lab escapes of genetically modified viruses from virological laboratories was a major issue. (See Lipsitch (2014)).

Something must be done about the BBC.  It should employ quality, impartial researchers to provide a balanced background to stories and must not campaign.  The BBC has settled into a pattern of attempting to generate a moral panic every week or two when the role of a National Broadcaster must be to consider the news in a mature and calm fashion.

The solution to the rogue BBC is to trim its news output so that it is limited to mature, well researched, factual news broadcasting, four or five times a day. The 24hr News Channel should be terminated, BBC Global output should be handed to a branch of the Foreign Office and the BBC trimmed back to two channels.

1/4/2021

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