It’s not easy being a Tory at the BBC

The Daily Telegraph, Saturday May 14th:

In 25 years as a BBC correspondent, Robin Aitken covered terrorism in Northern Ireland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Monica Lewinsky scandal; he was also a specialist economics correspondent of the Today programme during the Iraq crisis.

He is a famously dogged television and radio reporter - yet for many years, he kept quiet about a story he did not know how to break. “I considered leaking it to newspapers, but I would have felt like a traitor,” he says. The story involved political and cultural bias. “There is a centre-Left consensus within the BBC which colours its entire output and undermines its solemn pact with the public to present the news impartially,” says Aitken.

Only now having taken a redundancy package from the BBC, is he ready to make his case publicly. He has written a book provisionally entitled Taking Sides: Bias at the BBC, that he says will provide detailed examples of distorted coverage. It will be the first expose of bias by an ex-BBC man.

Yet it is also, in a sense, a last resort. In the late 1990s, Aitken became so troubled by the “extended honeymoon between New Labour and the BBC” that he confronted the director-general John Birt (now a Labour peer). Later, he complained to his successor Greg Dyke, and then — unprecedentedly, for a staff reporter — he submitted a dossier to the BBC governors. On each occasion, his objections were shrugged off.

Aitken’s last posting was as a reporter for Today during the build-up to the Iraq war. “The whole tone of the programme was hostile to the notion of a war,” he says. “It was not presenting a balanced view of the situation and explaining the reasons why intervention might be justified.

“I made a point of arguing this case in the morning editorial meetings, and that put me in a very bad odour with Kevin Marsh, the editor.”

Why did BBC journalists feel so strongly about Iraq? “They cannot bear President Bush because he’s a Republican and an evangelical Christian. The sight of a Labour Prime Minister going into battle alongside such a man was more than many BBC people could stomach.”

Dislike of Republicans is close to being a BBC article of faith, say Aitken. “I remember being in the Washington office during the Lewinsky affair and saying that I rather sympathised with the Republicans. I think it would have gone down better if I’d confessed to being a paedophile.”

Another article of faith is belief in the moral authority of the United Nations. “That is something that the BBC holds very dear. I long for the day when I hear a reporter say something sceptical about the UN.”

Aitken looks like an off-duty army officer in one of the tougher regiments. He lives in north Oxford with his wife, Sarah, and describes himself as a “middle-of-the-road Conservative”, though he never belonged to a political party while he was employed by the BBC.

“I was surprised to discover how many of my colleagues were active members of Labour or the Liberal Democrats - it seems obviously inappropriate,” he says.

He joined BBC Radio Brighton in 1978, and moved to Edinburgh as the BBC’s Scottish business and economics correspondent in the early 1980s. That was when he realised his own free-market convictions were at dramatic variance with his colleagues’ views.

“It was a time of tremendous industrial dislocation in Scotland, and of course the loss of jobs was an important story.

But our entire coverage was seen through the microcosm of job losses, and the case was never put that you cannot prop up failing industries with state money without damaging the rest of the economy. The prime minister was portrayed as a ruthless, heartless Englishwoman. I began to realise that, presenting such a one-sided picture, we were doing a real disservice to licence-payers.”

The next few years involved stints on the Money Programme, Breakfast News and regular reports from Northern Ireland. Gradually, Aitken gained a sharper understanding of the BBC’s mindset. “There were no secret instructions to distort stories. Reporters did not set out to be unfair - far from it,” he explains.

“What we are talking about, to adopt the language of the Macpherson report into the Metropolitan Police, is a sort of unconscious, institutionalised Leftism. And when so many people working together share a particular world view, groups who do not share it are bound to be marginalised.

“Take the Ulster Unionists who, from the BBC’s point of view, tick all the wrong boxes. They are old-fashioned, wear unfashionable clothes, are deeply religious and enthusiastic monarchists. So they were never given the benefit of the doubt, always treated as baddies — and that used to infuriate me intensely.

“As a reporter in Belfast, I found it very difficult to persuade the BBC to run a story which ran counter to its assumptions. For example, I did an interview with Sean O’Callaghan, the former IRA terrorist turned MI5 informer, who told me on tape that Pat Finucane [the Belfast solicitor murdered by loyalists in 1989] was a senior figure in the IRA. That was a good story, but I was never able to get it on the air.”

Aitken believes that the BBC is the most powerful cultural force in the country — and, therefore, that its bias has a profound and sometime malign effect on public life.

“One of the few real crimes in the BBC canon is racism, and so it gave enormous coverage to the Stephen Lawrence case,” he says.

“Don’t get me wrong. What happened was an awful crime and the perpetrators of the murder fully deserved to be punished — which, in the event, they weren’t. But the BBC went beyond pointing this out. It seemed determined to prove, and deeply wanted to believe, that the Metropolitan Police was a racist organisation.

“Yet, if you take the related area of street crime in London, the BBC will do its level best not to point out the uncomfortable truth that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by black youths. That seems to me entirely wrong-headed, because by suppressing the truth, you make the problem worse.”

Aitken decided to voice his anxieties to senior executives in the late 1990s, when he began to suspect that New Labour scandals were being soft-pedalled in comparison with the peccadilloes of the Major administration. “John Birt just seemed nonplussed. It was the same with Greg Dyke - an absolute refusal to consider even the possibility of institutional bias,” he recalls.

Eventually, I went to the governors, who asked me to put together a dossier of evidence. So I produced chapter and verse. I cited, for example, the way Radio 4 employed to successive political editors of the New Statesmen as stand-in presenters of The World Tonight, without revealing what their jobs were and that they were therefore Left-wing pundits.

“The governors thanked me for such a well-written submission, which was charming if a little patronising, and passed the dossier back to BBC management, who replied that there was nothing to worry about. At no point was I asked to make my point in person or given the chance to respond.

“Can you imagine what the BBC would have had to say if, for instance, that was how the Metropolitan Police had responded to allegations of racism?”

If Aitken is right, what are the implications for the next highly sensitive subject the BBC will cover - such as next year’s proposed referendum on the European Constitution? “Europe is one area in which there has been some improvement, thanks to constant pressure from critics,” he says.

“I am sure that pro- and anti- constitution voices will be carefully balanced. The content of news reports will be beyond reproach. But it’s much harder to monitor the tone adopted by presenters and interviewers, so many of whom are supporters of further European integration.

“In a way, it doesn’t bother me that so many BBC journalists do hold political views. The scandal is that Left-wing voices are not balanced by Right-wing voices. If that is not reformed, then it’s hard to justify allowing the BBC to hold on to its monopoly.

“In 25 years, I met only a smattering of Tories in the organisation. I stood outside the prevailing centre-Left culture, and that was an uncomfortable place to be.”

Now that he has left the BBC, however, he can take a mischievous pleasure in those moments when the corporation finds itself wrong-footed by events. “Last autumn, Today sent Jim Naughtie over to Washington to cover what they imagined would be the defeat of America’s knuckle-dragging President,” he says.

“And what did we hear? Jim reporting Bush’s re-election through gritted teeth. Honestly, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh.”