Bias at the Beeb

Fairness, impartiality and objectivity are the essence of public service broadcast journalism. This understanding is enshrined in the BBC’s charter and provides a key justification for the licence fee.

Now, however, an explosive insider’s account threatens to blow this cosy assumption clean out of the water as a fraud upon the public. Robin Aitken, who spent his entire career as a BBC journalist, has written a book accusing the BBC of institutionalised leftism.

This is by no means the first time such an accusation has been levelled, but generally such critics have been dismissed as parti-pris. This is why Aitken’s book, ‘Taking Sides: Bias at the BBC’, is so significant.

For 25 years he chalked up solid experience across the board as a BBC reporter, covering some of the biggest stories of the day. In other words, he is BBC man through and through. So when someone like this lifts the lid on newsroom culture, it carries weight. And his message is that BBC journalism is as bent as a corkscrew.

In Aitken’s words, there is a centre-left consensus at the BBC that colours its entire output and undermines its impartiality. Dislike of US Republicans, he says, is close to being an article of faith. The flagship Today programme failed to present a balanced view of Iraq; it was hostile to the very notion of a war simply because it couldn’t bear the fact that President Bush was both a Republican and an evangelical Christian.

Its unshakeable belief in the moral authority of the UN means it will not entertain any scepticism about that corrupt organisation. And its prejudice against Ulster Protestants meant that when a former IRA terrorist who turned informer told Aitken that Pat Finucane, the Belfast solicitor murdered by loyalists, was a senior figure in the IRA, he could not persuade the BBC to run the story.

This picture of a corrupted BBC culture that is ideologically skewed towards the left is blindingly obvious to anyone who does not share those assumptions. It is a far deeper problem than the political partisanship recently let slip by Today presenter Jim Naughtie when he inadvertently referred to the Labour Party as ‘we’.

With a few honourable exceptions, the BBC views every issue through the prism of left-wing, secular, anti-western thinking. It is the Guardian of the air. It has a knee-jerk antipathy to America, the free market, big business, religion, British institutions, the Conservative party and Israel; it supports the human rights culture, the Palestinians, Irish republicanism, European integration, multiculturalism and a liberal attitude towards drugs and a host of social issues.

Every day, its relentless bias rolls across the airwaves to shape the assumptions of our society. Who can be surprised at Britain’s current anti-Americanism when the BBC starts from the premise that President Bush is a dangerous extremist?

Thus it describes Republicans opposed to his controversial UN nominee John Bolton as ‘moderate’. On News 24 the other night, after scenes of ecstatic Georgians praising President Bush for supporting their quest for freedom, the presenter declared that America was interested in Georgia only in order to grab its oil.

Who can be surprised at Britain’s visceral hatred of Israel when, having all but ignored such atrocities as the two decades of genocide in southern Sudan or the systematic Muslim persecution of Christians worldwide, the BBC obsessively transmits a twisted view of the Arab war against the Jewish state which presents genocidal Hamas terrorists as heroic freedom fighters and Israeli attempts at self-defence as unwarranted aggression?

On issue after issue, the BBC throws impartiality to the winds. When abortion recently resurfaced as a controversy, TV’s Newsnight featured a discussion between two pro-abortion campaigners — Sir David Steel, the architect of the current Abortion Act, and the feminist writer Suzie Orbach — with no-one to put an anti-abortion view.

On another occasion, when Prince Charles sounded off about an educational culture which encouraged everyone to think they could all achieve the dizzying heights of fame and fortune, Newsnight not only sneered at his own privileged background and education but also misrepresented what he had said to put him in the worst possible light. And so on, and endlessly on.

The terrifying thing is the BBC’s inability to acknowledge that there is a problem. Senior BBC executives appear anxious to produce impartial journalism. But presented with example after example of bias, they are baffled. They can’t see the prejudice — because they themselves share it.

Even more alarmingly, they think their position represents the centre ground. They therefore think that those who oppose it are extreme. So their idea of balance is utterly unbalanced, and they subscribe to a thought system that is closed.

That is why the BBC can produce such grotesque aberrations as the Today programme item last year about definitions of terrorism, which involved a discussion between Leila Khaled, the erstwhile Palestinian plane hijacker, and Danny Morrison, the erstwhile Northern Ireland Republican terror detainee.

I write this as someone who is often asked onto such programmes to provide ‘balance’. But with the exception of the Moral Maze on which I am a panellist, where a cross-section of opinion is essential to the format of the programme, such appearances amount to little more than tokenism.

It is quite common for BBC discussions to pitch two or three participants against one —or indeed, no-one at all — on the other side with the dissenter presented as an extremist.

On programmes like Radio Four’s Any Questions or TV’s Question Time, such a hapless participant may be up against not only an unbalanced panel and a hostile studio audience but the Dimbleby brothers each subtly conveying supercilious distaste.

The obvious remedy is to bring on presenters and journalists who do not share the closed thought system of the left. Flagship programmes like Start the Week or other current affairs programmes are rarely fronted by anyone outside this consensus.

The BBC regards its departing political editor, Andrew Marr, as a star although his apparent closeness to New Labour too often made him seem like a mouthpiece for Downing Street.

His departure is an opportunity to replace him by someone outside the left-wing tent. But the gossip is that the job may go to someone very much inside it, Newsnight’s Martha Kearney, because the governing imperative is apparently to ‘get a woman’.

The BBC chairman Michael Grade appears to be genuinely concerned about lapses in journalism standards. In a lecture last week, he passionately upheld the BBC’s ethic of impartiality.

To his credit, he set up a review of his journalists’ attitudes to the EU which found that they were unbalanced, and he is setting up a similar review dealing with the reporting of the Middle East. But he has an uphill battle to get his senior managers to put this right, because so few are themselves outside this all-embracing consensus.

BBC journalism is trusted around the world — which is why its bias is of such momentous importance and has such potentially devastating consequences. Mr Grade needs to insist on changing the faces the BBC presents to the world and thus levering open its closed thought system, if its tattered kitemark of impartiality has any chance of being restored.