ANONYMOUS FORMER BBC STAFF MEMBER
A few months ago I wrote a piece for this site called ‘How Britain Sold Itself To The World As Paradise‘. It was about the experience of working for the BBC’s World Service and the foreign language services and how Britain was presented to the world as an ideal form of liberal and open society.
The latest debacle in the BBC’s troubled history has left me thinking a great deal. Throughout the 1980s and 90s I worked for BBC Radio News at, first, Bush House (World Service) and then at Broadcasting House on programmes such as The World At One, PM, The World Tonight and Newsbeat.
There was undoubtedly a sense of mission prevailing at both places, but that went hand in hand with a sense of importance and significance. There was a considerable amount of competitiveness amongst some of the reporters and a deliberate strategy to set the national news agenda. That’s completely normal for any news organisation but the BBC’s remit and reach elevate the stakes. It’s easy to see how the desperation to break the big story on a national stage could lead almost any ambitious reporter, or a programme editor, into overstepping the mark in a way that looks like bias.
Bullying was certainly not uncommon, triggered in no small part by the frantic competitive urgency of a live news organisation. There was a producer in one of the BBC’s overseas services whose behaviour today would have resulted in a peremptory sacking. His staff were cowed into terrified acquiescence, often while he ranted in screaming frenzies in studios in his desperation to have everything his way. He was later made an MBE by Blair’s government.
The Martin Bashir-Diana interview controversy epitomises the problem of the journalist in search of fame and prominence. But my recollections of those days are definitely not those of an institutionally-biased organisation. It was much more subtle than that. The whole tone of the BBC workplace was like a social club for a broad church of Left-leaning individuals.
It’s very hard to define this clearly, but the best example I can think of is that it was taken for granted back in those days that Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party were villains of the worst order. While I never saw this translate into deliberate editorial distortion, it meant that many individuals involved in the editorial content of news started from a position in which they personally saw contemporary British Right-wing politics as abhorrent in some way. This was reflected in everyday conversation in studios and newsrooms. It was bound in some way, however indirect, to be reflected in the tone of coverage.
This culture meant that anyone who tried to interject with nuance or balance was looked on with suspicion and was regarded as being a polar opposite. The result was that any dissenters usually kept their mouths shut.
However, I have a vivid memory of one news producer ranting because he’d been called by Dr David Owen, then one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). He claimed that Owen was demanding a news story was altered in the SDP’s favour. It’s a reminder of the fact that the BBC is also bombarded night and day by people desperate to manipulate the news agenda.
The BBC’s 24-hour operation mean very antisocial shifts. This provokes a sense of otherworldliness, cut off in isolation from the rest of the world. Long evenings and nights were, and today are even more, common. This contributed, along with a deliberately ‘inclusive’ recruitment policy, of helping the BBC’s news operations function as safe havens for those belonging to an array of minority groups. Their presence, in far higher proportions than would normally be the case in the workplace, naturally encouraged, and I imagine still does, the Guardian-esque atmosphere reinforced by a groupthink sense of an alternate reality.
It would be a falsehood to suggest that this was all bad. The BBC was, and remains, a progressive employer. In my time, for example, there were numerous women in very senior managerial positions who did outstanding jobs. The system was exceptionally accommodating to staff with families. It was unlike anywhere else I had worked in before or since.
Nonetheless, Harriet Sergeant’s article in the Telegraph about how she was cancelled by the BBC for trying to tell the truth about immigration as far back as 2016 seemed to cut right to the core of the problem. She interviewed two homeless British teenagers who told her, almost incidentally, about how every time they reached a hostel, they discovered all the beds had gone to migrants:
When I looked into their claim, I found migrants made up around half of rough sleepers in London and one in three elsewhere. The rise in the homeless and their overwhelmed facilities was a direct result of the rise in immigration. It was also an example of how migration has hit the poorest in society hardest. This seemed a crucial point to make in a programme on homelessness.
The BBC producer who checked my script thought otherwise. I only wanted a sentence or two as background. But she warned that any criticism of immigration would harm my future relationship with the BBC. I was astonished. Not even when I researched my first book on apartheid in South Africa or my second, in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, had anyone tried to censor me before. Yet here was the BBC, the BBC of all institutions, insisting I ignore a key fact.
Sergeant added that Andy Burnham, then an MP, was one of people the BBC’s researcher had identified who pinned the shortage of beds on Tory austerity and cuts, with no mention of migrants.
On the face of it, this looks like a deliberate BBC bias designed to suppress any negative news about migration. And perhaps it was. But I’d be inclined to attribute it equally to the BBC producer’s fear of being seen to divert from the mood and culture within the organisation.
The conclusion I’ve reached in recent days is that falsification of Trump’s speech had its remoter origins in, for example, the animus held towards Thatcher 40 years ago, but now exacerbated by a new level of arrogance, presumption and complacency of some editorial staff. They operate in an environment where they feel they can act as they please to reinforce a message that they are certain is merely reflecting what they imagine is an absolute truth.
This can be explained by a paradox. The hatred of Thatcher was regarded in my time at the BBC as ‘normal’, ‘correct’, even ‘morally right’, and thus was confused with the belief that it was an objective position to hold. Exactly the same mentality has now been applied to issues such as ‘climate change’, transgender issues and Reform.
No surprise then that Jonathan Monro, the new acting Head of News, is on record as regarding the editing of Trump’s speech as “normal practice“. If you are already convinced that Trump’s intentions are malevolent, and that everyone else thinks so, then perhaps it does seem only reasonable to edit a speech to reinforce that. Monro was, incidentally, the head of newsgathering at the BBC when a helicopter was sent to watch the police raid Cliff Richard’s home.
This blurring of polarised views with a delusion of righteous and reasonable objectivity is hardly unusual in wider society. Being genuinely objective is rarely intuitive for human beings. It’s why eyewitness evidence is so unreliable. Like the true mechanisms of scientific enquiry, objectivity requires constantly relearning. But believing in one’s reasonableness and that therefore any other reasonable person would be on the same page is common behaviour.
In an organisation like the BBC, which functions within fortress strongholds, it’s unsurprising that this blurring has taken hold in differing degrees. This amounts to it being all too common for BBC staff to be utterly convinced of their objectivity. Perhaps some would say that does equate to institutional bias. I would say the difference is that it is not generally deliberate, even if perhaps the effect is much the same.
However, amidst all the flak being hurled at the BBC, it’s worth pausing and remembering that Britain has changed a great deal since the 1980s. British society is more fractious, fractured, polarised, stressed and uncertain than it has been for generations. It is hardly surprising that the BBC in certain ways has succumbed to some of those changes, and perhaps even been actively targeted by members of certain groups who have sought and gained employment there with the purpose of promoting their causes or points of view. The BBC today is not the BBC I worked for, but the seeds and weak beginnings of this latest decisive debacle were in evidence decades ago.
This article (The BBC’s Delusional Belief in its Objectivity) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Anonymous Former BBC Staff Member
See Related Article Below
Broken, Biased, Corrupt
Bin the BBC
TOM ARMSTRONG
Today’s theme is betrayal, so of course we need to talk about the BBC, whose betrayal of those who pay for it mirrors exactly that of the British Establishment’s betrayal of those that pay for it.
I confess to not really knowing much about the BBC. I haven’t watched it much for over fifty years and not had a license for well over fifteen. I grew up with it; one of my earliest memories is listening to Billy Cotton on the wireless, and then Watch With Mother, Bill and Ben, and so on up to Steptoe & Son and Morecombe & Wise. But after that, very little except the World Service when I was at sea. But even to me the BBC’s betrayal and move to woke, anti-British globalism has been painfully obvious
And make no mistake, the BBC has betrayed Britain; it has deliberately turned itself into a propaganda outfit selling every facet of the sinister globalist agenda and presenting all opposition to is as dangerously extreme. And now it is exposed to the world as peddling lies and distortions, proving that we far-Right racist, thuggish conspiracy theorists are right yet again.
Trust in it has crumbled. Viewers are fleeing. Yet it clings on like a leech on an open sore, funded by force. The licence fee – £174.50 a year that props up this sham, fraudulent organisation – is often extorted by threats, bullying and ruthless legal action and by promoting the belief that if you have a telly, you need a license. You don’t. But now millions are legally dodging by not watching live telly. The increasingly desperate Beeb is pushing for funding from general taxation, which we must resist. Calls to defund the BBC roar ever louder. Join in and support scrapping it or making it subscription only and let the market judge.
Look at the dishonest reporting about Trump. A Panorama special, Trump: A Second Chance, doctored a clip of a speech he made to make it look like he was inciting a violent insurrection. He said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women” and later: “Fight like hell.” The BBC doctored them, omitting “peacefully and patriotically.”
A leaked memo called it “deliberate manipulation.” Michael Prescott, previously an independent advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, subsequently exposed “serious and systemic” bias. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt branded the BBC “100% fake news.” And now, gloriously, Trump is demanding a grovelling apology – or a billion dollars.
Tim Davie quit. Deborah Turness too. Turness admitted mistakes but, preposterously, denied institutional bias. Or maybe, like typical brainwashed Lefties, they really do think that their prejudices and the only reasonable opinions allowed and that all other opinions need to be suppressed. But that bias is in-built, and a few resignations will change nothing. Right on cue, Samir Shah, the BBC’s chairman, dismissed all accusations of BBC bias.
The bias is endemic and predictably woke, left wing, and globalist. On Gaza, the BBC swallows Hamas lies whole, downplays October 7 horrors and fans the flames of anti-Jewishness. Internal reviews found “systemic problems.” Michael Prescott nailed its anti-Israel slant, saying that the “executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all”.
That can only have been deliberate evasion. The BBC’s Arabic’s reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sharply diverged from even its biased support of all things Palestinian. The English language website posted nineteen stories about hostages taken by Hamas; BBC Arabic posted none. By contrast, all English language articles critical of Israel were also posted in Arabic.
The BBC Arabic coverage, for example, skewed the story of Fawzia Sido, a Yazidi woman captured by ISIS in Iraq at the age of 11 and forced to become a sex slave to a Palestinian, bearing two children before the age of 15. After her “husband” was killed, she was smuggled back to Gaza in 2020, remaining under the control of her “husband’s” family, as well as Hamas. She was liberated by Israeli soldiers. The BBC Arabic version, however, was markedly different and written almost entirely by Hamas. And so on, and on.
And needless to say, BBC bosses shrugged off all criticism, boasting of “unrivalled coverage” and “exceptional journalism” – such as that by Samer Elzaenen, who posted comments suggesting Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”, and Ahmed Qannan, who described a gunman who killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer as a “hero”. And then there is Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils”. I could go on, but you get the picture – which is that the BBC has systematically lied about and distorted its coverage of the Gaza conflict in favour of Palestinian terrorists, no doubt adding to the ill-informed, viciously anti-Jewish protests seen on Britain’s streets.
Leaving Gaza, we can skip the obvious insanity of claiming that men can become women if they want to and move on to its mendacious climate alarmist drivel. The BBC screams doom. Every storm is a catastrophe, and it’s all man’s fault. Inconvenient truths are ignored. Net Zero Watch tallied thirty lies in one year. Contrary to the BBC’s claims, wildfires are normal and made worse by ecostupidity. Heatwaves are routine, and Polar bears thrive. Glaciers come and go, as they always have done. Justin Rowlatt, the climate editor, was caught misleading thrice and Question Time was edited to push net zero lies. Reviews were promised, but nowt changes. Institutional alarmism reigns.
And it’s the same across the full spectrum of issues of concern to the British people: we get lie after lie, distortion after distortion by the same smug, self-satisfied organisation that routinely accuses opponents of ‘misinformation’.
The BBC’s obsession with race is grotesque, and wholly one sided: black skin good, white skin bad, and it never, ever, allows any real debate on the transgender issue it also obsesses about. And no opportunity to smear or denigrate Britain is lost. Davos and Brussels are much preferred. It’s laughably named ‘fact-checking’ mob, BBC Verify, is a nest of Lefties who peddled the preposterous notion that insurance companies are ‘racist’, citing no evidence whatsoever.
And the BBC’s output on immigration, held by most to be the most important problem we face is, egregiously one sided, with all concerns swept aside as racist. Illegal immigrants are reported as being mostly women and children, when the opposite is obviously true, and the connection of immigration and crime is taboo.
And the response by BBC apparatchiks to the bias scandal unfolding before them as all too predictable. Nick Robinson, Emily Maitlis and others weep into their ethically sourced, sustainable artisan coffee and dismiss it all as a right-wing backlash, an inexplicable attack on the holy BBC, probably by the English Defence League, or at least by Boris Johnson and The Telegraph!
The fact is the BBC is so infected with the leftist, woke globalist virus that reform is impossible, Even if was attempted it would fail, as it would be made by folk equally infected with the same, brain-sapping virus. So, it is up to us to demand that the BBC as we know and hate it be scrapped, the £174.50 licence fee abolished – but NOT replaced with a rise in general taxation. And if you haven’t sone so already, cancel your license immediately and kick them where it hurts.
As we know now, Trump has sent the BBC a letter before action, threatening to sue them in Florida for $1 billion if it does not offer a satisfactory apology for the lies it told about him. Tellingly, the equally woke, globalist Offcom has come to the BBC support, thus bringing the whole British state into the fight. If the BBC is wise – something that cannot be guaranteed, it will settle out of court and give Trump the grovelling apology he wants and deserves. But this way, of course, it will be the poor old British taxpayer who ends up paying. Could trump not sue the Board of Trustees and senior management as individuals, and with luck the Offcom mob as individuals, ideally followed by Lisa Nandy, who simply cannot be trusted with the review she’s just announced, a ‘consultation’ looking for a ‘sustainable’ way to fund the BBC. One thing is sure, she’ll not consult the British people, who no doubt will be forced to carry on paying for this sinister, Goebbelsesque organisation.
This article (Broken, Biased, Corrupt) was created and published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Tom Armstrong
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