BBC bias is nothing new

Interesting comment on X from journalist and historian Mark Urban:

The BBC has a young, progressive, workforce and an older management that has tried, often in vain of late, to maintain old standards of impartiality. Not only *can* these two things be true at the same time but this divide is central to the current crisis.

Urban joined the BBC in 1983. He had a brief spell at the Independent, where he was defence correspondent from 1986 until 1990, before rejoining the BBC as a general reporter on Newsnight. From 1995 to May 2024 he was the programme’s diplomatic editor, and now works for The Sunday Times.

Shortly before the resignation yesterday of both the BBC’s director general and the CEO of BBC News, he also wrote a substack (Liberal bias? Us?) which is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in this ongoing story.

Urban knows a thousand times more about the culture within the BBC than I do, but I have to query his reference to ‘old standards of impartiality’. How far back are we going, because in my experience the BBC has demonstrated clear evidence of political and cultural bias for decades.

First, let me take you back to an interview I had in 1980 for a place on the BBC news trainee scheme. I understand there were 3,000 applications and I was one of 50 candidates chosen for a first interview in front of a panel of five or six BBC bods.

The first question I was asked was, “What do you know of Tibetan politics over the last 20 years?”, to which I answered, somewhat glibly, “Not a lot”. I realised immediately that I was out of my depth, and I wasn’t in the least bit surprised that I didn’t get a second interview, so no complaints.

It’s worth noting, however, that at the time Tibet was of interest to a relatively small number of people, most of them on the left, and it never occurred to me I would be asked about it. Had they asked me about the Soviet Union or the Cold War I could have given a half decent reply, but no, my future rested (not entirely, perhaps) on a question about a remote corner of China.

Six years later, in 1985, I was recruited to research and publish a series of reports that examined perceived political bias on current affairs programmes on the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 (the latter having launched in 1982).

The Media Monitoring Unit was founded by Lord Chalfont, a former Labour cabinet minister, and Julian Lewis, who was then a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party. (Today he is Sir Julian Lewis, MP for New Forest East, and one of the longest serving members of parliament.)

At the time there was a strong feeling that, in the wake of the 1983 general election that saw the Conservatives win a landslide victory, some people within the BBC considered the Beeb to be the unofficial opposition to the Thatcher government.

I was employed therefore to watch hundreds of hours of current affairs’ programmes across all four terrestrial channels, and judge them according to fairly basic rules of impartiality.

Funnily enough, the serial ‘villain’ was Granada’s World In Action. Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, rated poorly in our first report, published in December 1986, but improved thereafter. (Coincidence? I think not!)

A few years later we were commissioned by the Daily Express to monitor Radio 4’s Today programme over a random two-week period, and the result was fairly damning. The furore led to a four-page feature about the MMU in the Independent on Sunday, plus a front page headline that read, ‘BBC's right-wing critic failed to secure trainee's job’. Ouch. But at least I shared the front page with a report about my hero, Margaret Thatcher.

The reason BBC programming came under greater scrutiny – and rightly so – was because of the licence fee (which every viewer is forced to pay under threat of prosecution and a criminal record if you don’t), and the BBC Charter which demanded impartiality, not in every programme, but across a series of programmes. As far as I’m aware, that principle stands today – in theory, at least.

I don’t doubt that Mark Urban is right about the BBC’s current ‘young, progressive, workforce’ – which I’m sure is replicated in many newsrooms – but, let’s be clear, political and recruitment bias is nothing new. As I said in a speech at a conference organised jointly by the BBC and Granada TV in Manchester in November 1989:

Finally, a word about another MMU project concerning the placing of television recruitment advertising. Research highlighted a huge disparity favouring the media section of the Guardian at the expense of similar sections in The Times and Independent.

There would of course be no guarantee of fair recruitment even if the BBC and ITV advertised impartially in all three newspapers as, given their obligations, they ought to. Nevertheless the favouritism that is shown towards the Guardian-reading left is symptomatic of an attitude of mind and it certainly merited being exposed.

Far more worrying is the existence of what I call a 'media mafia', a clique of cross-fertilisation between left-wing campaigning journalists and television current affairs appointees which is not matched, so far as I can see, by parallel practices on the right.

I particularly have in mind the recent flurry of appointments to Thames Television’s This Week [not to be confused with the much later BBC programme of the same name presented by Andrew Neil] and Granada's World in Action, programmes that already exhibit far too much bias to the left. This Week has just recruited the left-wing campaigning journalist X from the Observer, whilst World in Action has picked up his former colleagues Y and Z.

What are centre-right politicians to expect in future when approached by programmes run by these gentlemen? Z, for example, has a track record of hostility to the Special Branch and MI5, whilst X has made such a speciality of attacking people he regards as on the right of the political spectrum that, within the last twelve months alone, no fewer than three libel actions have successfully been brought against him and his former newspaper as a result of articles written either by him alone or jointly with Y.

One thing is certain, so long as there are impartiality rules that radical broadcasters deliberately distort or ignore, and as long as there are investigative political programmes that recruit their staff from the campaigning left, there will always be a role for bodies like the Media Monitoring Unit.

Funnily enough, a friend messaged me this morning: ‘Time to resurrect the MMU? I’m sure you could get some MAGA funding’. I won’t repeat my reply, but it’s not a bad idea. My media monitoring days may be over, but it could be a job for someone else.

Meanwhile, Lord Hannan (former Conservative MEP Dan Hannan) writes:

You’d think from the BBC’s coverage of itself that this was purely a row about a single doctored Trump speech. The Corporation’s line is, more or less, “Yes, we made one error, but we are an outstanding impartial news service”.

In fact, the Prescott Report highlights structural biases across the entire news and current affairs department.

He adds:

The BBC shows no sign of acknowledging the problem, let alone addressing it. It is still trying to deflect into a story about a nasty plot against public service broadcasting - precisely the attitude that has doomed it.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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