The BBC is trusted to provide an in-depth and unbiased account of the news. Does it fulfill this brief?
National and Public Service Broadcasters use five main techniques to impose bias. The most frequent bias is the omission of news from one side of a debate so that it appears as if a particular view is obvious. Another technique is anecdotal reporting in which they use people like glove puppets, interviewing erudite academics on one side of an issue and fools on the other side. A subtler technique is to attach news summaries to current affairs programs so that news can be divided into factual news and suspect opinions. The use of US news as if it applied to the UK is another method of hiding bias.
Perhaps the most unprofessional method of imposing bias is "Historical Presentism" where British history is trawled for unsavoury items and these are presented out of their historical context with modern moral judgements applied.
The BBC are the masters of subtle bias. Why they are biased will be discussed later but here are some obvious recent examples:
Stop press - Bashir and Diana - News Suppression: Lord Hall, future Director General of the BBC, ran the investigation that suppressed the truth about Bashir and he continued the cover up until he left office in 2020.
Meghan and Harry - Dividing the Truth: The BBC covered Meghan and Harry's complaint that their children would not be princes and princesses on the news and then had a commentator discuss whether or not this was a valid complaint. Great grandchildren of the monarch are not given the title prince or princess, this is the normal process and should have been said on the news, not included as an opinion of a commentator on royal affairs. This method of using news broadcasts attached to current affairs programs to divide the news into "announced facts" and "facts delivered as opinions" is very sophisticated.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) - News Omission: The BBC has suppressed/omitted any coverage of the change of name of BLM back to its original meaning of "Black Liberation Movement" (a Maoist organisation). The BBC still, incorrectly, uses the term Black Lives Matter for the Black Liberation Movement.
BLM - News Omission: The BBC omitted the actual rate of deaths of black people in police custody in the UK. In most years the rate is 1 or 0 and not due to police brutality.
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Police brutality on arrest does occasionally happen in the UK but, given that there are almost one million arrests a year it is exceedingly rare.
Eliding UK and US News: A typical example is shown in the clip below. The large number of police shootings in the US were discussed and then the UK seamlessly linked to the US position.
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| Shootings per million population pa |
Trade - Anecdotal Reporting: The BBC reported the recent trade figures with the EU as a disaster. In the context of overall UK-EU trading the figures were almost normal as can be seen from the graph below. To obtain bias the BBC announced the figures for January as a change from the previous, highly anomalous, COVID affected months.
The Race Report - Anecdotal Reporting plus news suppression: The "Report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities" is a long document filled with interesting, real data on discrimination and racism. The BBC omitted to report on its content and almost entirely relied on anecdotal comments by opponents of the Report.
Historical Presentism: There have been egregious examples of this in the past year. Perhaps the least professional was the attempt to force an apology out of the Government for the treatment of births to single mothers fifty years ago. This issue was complex 50 years ago and is still complex. See Public Apologies for Forced Adoption. Historical Presentism now seems to be accepted BBC practice, the attempt to implicate the current population of the UK in the slavery of over 200 years ago actually amounts to serious racism, akin to blaming all modern Jews for the death of Christ. Journalists and producers who indulge in Historical Presentism should be dismissed.
As we have seen above, Britain is bad: it refuses to grant poor Harry and Meghan's children princely status, its police kill black people all the time, its stupid lower classes voted for Brexit which has destroyed UK-EU trade, its government commissioned a race report that everyone says is a lie and it steals babies from mothers: and that is just in the past few months! The only problem is that all of these claims are due to biased news reporting and false.
Anyone who follows the news from multiple sources will listen to any BBC News broadcast and spot the manipulation of every other item. Why are they doing this when they have a corporate purpose that is supposed to impose impartiality?
The biggest clue about the motivation of the BBC staff is that, according to a member of the department that vetted BBC employees, it did not blacklist a single member of staff: "not one person was blacklisted after being screened in the 17 years that he worked for the company." (Daily Mail). This means that anyone with the right connections and a modicum of ability could join the BBC as an editor, producer or journalist. This lack of vetting might seem to be a "good thing" but the BBC is a magnet for anyone with strong political convictions. Since the 1990s the vetting department has been discontinued.
In the 1930s & 1940s the BBC was heavily penetrated by Communists, even employing Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge spies, and George Orwell, a self confessed communist at that time. It also employed very large numbers of foreign journalists in the World Service. Britain was a major power until the end of the 1950s and, like any superpower, gathered large numbers of enemies. The net effect of this mixture was to create an organisation that is anti-British.
Although some members of the BBC dream of revolution and others dream of "justice" for their country of origin and yet others look forward to global government (probably run by China) what they all agree upon is that Britain is bad. This is the common thread in BBC bias. They all agree that polarising society is the way forward to damage the nation.
Something must be done about the BBC. The obvious course of action is to cut the BBC back to two broadcast channels and transfer BBC global operations to an entirely separate company "BBC Global", run by the Foreign Office. Having done this the Charter should explicitly include the following:
The Corporation should:
Provide impartial, quality reporting of the news.
Regularly review the omission of news.
Recruit staff from across the political spectrum. Journalists and presenters should be recruited from the Times, Telegraph, Mail, Express etc. at well as from the Guardian and the Independent.
Where anecdotal reporting is used, whether by interview or by selection of data, it must be counterbalanced by fair coverage of the context of the reporting. The BBC currently selects interviewees to act like glove puppets for the views of its staff.
News broadcasts must be separate from current affairs programs and be self contained for the purpose of impartiality.
Coverage of important events and movements in other countries, especially in the USA, should be reported in a global context - for instance EU Racism, racism in the UK and genocide in China should be compared with US Racism.
The BBC should produce programming that promotes unity and enhances the national morale. This would have been useful during COVID.
Campaigning should be forbidden. The BBC must not campaign on any issue, even on issues that appear "good". Lord Hall's £100m campaign on ID politics is an example of Charter violation by campaigning.
It must not use any channel for 24 hour news.
The coverage of events from the distant past as "news" (Historical Presentism) should be banned. The appropriate place for such re-assessments is documentaries that fairly examine the context of the historical period. The correct moral judgement is "thank goodness we do not do that now", not "the current English are all guilty" which is naked racism.
The monitoring of BBC impartiality and standards should be removed from Ofcom and given to an independent panel of reviewers, which would include people from all walks of life and exclude ex-BBC staff. It would have a small number of permanent investigators who would probe the omission of news etc. after each broadcast, investigate concerted campaigning and other abuses. (See below).
These changes should lead to a reduction in the license fee and stop valid claims of unfair competition from competitors. The changes will also lead to the BBC being highly regarded as a source or truthful news coverage.
The Review Panel
At present Ofcom reviews the BBC but Ofcom has an appalling record in everything it does and is inappropriate to regulate the BBC. A new regulating panel is needed. This should consist of ten members sitting for eight year terms, five of whom are selected every four years plus one Chairperson appointed by the House of Commons with a four year term of office. The four yearly appointment process would involve a random selection of 40 applicants from those who have applied. The final selection of five members to be by a vote of 2000 randomly selected electors, based on the 40 candidates' CVs and a short presentation. BBC employees in the previous 10 years to be excluded from membership of the Review Panel.
The Review Panel members to meet monthly or at a frequency that they decide is suitable but not to exceed once monthly. Remuneration to be at a day rate applicable to senior servants for each meeting.
The Review Panel will create a subsidiary panel to oversee major events such as elections and Referendums six months before these events occur. The subsidiary panel will contain 16 members + chairperson and have representatives in proportion to the average opinion poll ranking of the major parties or viewpoints being tested in the Referendum or election. Representatives will be solicited from the groups representing these parties/viewpoints. The subsidiary panel will meet monthly until two months before an event and then meet as frequently as desired. The subsidiary panel will produce a public report one month after the end of the event.
The Review Panel should have permanent office space and appoint a minimum of three staff, two of whom will be investigators with a knowledge of statistical methods and one an administrator skilled at report production. Funds should be available to expand investigative staffing if this is required.
Investigations will involve checking for the omission of news, the analysis of the relation between anecdotal reporting and the context of these reports, the analysis of campaigning by BBC staff, investigating whether there is fair and contextual coverage of foreign events, the political and social profile of BBC presenters, editors and producers, whether all major viewpoints have been given a platform etc. The investigations will collect statistical data so that whether BBC News is denying a platform to certain viewpoints, whether the USA is reported on more than the EU or China etc. can be assessed objectively.
A report should be produced every six months with sections for News Omission/Suppression, Implementation of Contextual Reporting vs Anecdotal Reporting, Platform Fairness, Evidence of Campaigning (across all BBC content), Bias during elections/referendums, Party Political and General Political Bias, Investigations Requested by the Review Panels.
The Review Panel will have editorial control of the biannual Report. It may produce public reports and private reports for consumption by the BBC and government. Funds should be made available for these specialist reports. It would be the right of the Review Panel to publish any of its work and the right of reporters to have access to the Panel's data.
The Review Panel would appoint a representative to any selection board or committee for the recruitment of the CEO, Director responsible for standards and the Director General of the BBC and be empowered to request the formal review of the position of the CEO, Standards Director and DG.
The emergency
Although the BBC has ongoing problems with bias there is also an emergency due to the polarisation of society during the EU Referendum.
The EU Referendum showed that the staff at the BBC had no respect for the Charter. Whether we voted Remain or Leave the report by John Humphrys, a Remain voter, on the approach of the BBC to the Referendum should wake us up: BBC staff betrayed its Charter and fully supported Remain.
The BBC continues to support the EU against an independent UK. It regularly interviews people such as Ken Clarke, Lord Adonis, Dominic Grieve, Peter Mandelson etc. on a range of issues. These people are on the fringes of real power but at the core of the European Movement, a shady organisation dedicated to ending the independence of the UK. The EU has common external policies on trade, security and foreign affairs which means that it appears as, and is, a single nation on the global stage. From trade to the supply of vaccines the BBC is still campaigning for the EU. Indeed the BBC gives the EU a complete free pass on matters such as Racism, emissions etc., omitting any news that might damage its reputation. Supporting the EU against the UK means that the BBC staff are betraying our country as well as the Charter.
No country can have its National Broadcaster representing the interests of a foreign power. Something must be done. An emergency change of Charter is required.
6/4/2021 updated 21st May.
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