The BBC’s Anti-Labour Bias
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Whatever was left of the BBC’s reputation for balance and neutrality has been totally destroyed by a number of “honest mistakes”, writes decades-long blogger, A Very Public Sociologist.
He concludes, sadly, that if the BBC weren’t so important to this country’s cultural life, it would deserve everything coming to it.
This article was originally published by A Very Public Sociologist on Wed 27 Nov 2019. Read the original here.
The BBC's Anti-Labour Bias
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the BBC have caved in…Johnson is to appear on Marr without a commitment to appear with Andrew Neil. Perhaps, Neil should take a leaf out of Channel 4’s book and put in a substitute for Johnson…a man in a chicken suit perhaps…but then Johnson would only send round his dad quicker than you could spell pinnochio…Solidarity with my Jews comrades.
Excellent article. I really object to subsidising the BBC.
The Editorial Director of BBC News, Kamal Ahmed, has an interesting history. I’ve just seen the film “Official Secrets” in which he does not come out well, although according Ed Vulliamy and Martin Bright the journalists portrayed in the film, the depiction in accurate. Along with the Observer editor, Roger Alton, Ahmed for five months before the 2003 Iraq War prevented Vulliamy from having published his finding that the CIA knew there were no WMD and that Bush had set up a parallel “Intelligence agency” to feed the government false information about Iraq as a result. Kamal Ahmed then vigorously backed up Alton in his initial refusal to publish the information that Katherine Gun supplied the Observer that GCHQ had been asked by the NSA to spy on the non-permanent delegates to the UN security council to get dirt on them in the run up to the debate on going to war. This is the main subject of the film. Ahmed is shown continuing to object even after Alton decides the benefits of a “good story” override the paper’s support for the war and is very explicitly portrayed as pushing Blair’s line. There is a claim in the Independent that he helped to edit Campbell’s dodgy dossier, that was so effectively pushed by the media as a reason for going to war.
I’m not sure that a person with such an apparently poor grasp of reality and gross political bias in defiance of the facts should now be deciding the editorial strategy for the whole of BBC news.
There is an hour long discussion of the events portrayed in the film with Katherine Gun, Ed Vulliamy, Martin Bright and the director on the Democracy Now YouTube channel.
It isn’t so much Tory bias, as a pro-government bias. The BBC always, always, reports with one eye on the licence fee. It’s just better at covering this up (usually, but the current Tory leadership is off the charts) than the likes of RT or PressTV.
When Jo Coburn interviewed Owen Jones about labour and anti-Semitism this week do you think that in terms of impartiality she should have made it clear that she is a Jewish woman and anti-Semitism something that perhaps affects her own community? Owen Jones looked embarrassed in a I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-but-they-don’t kind of way.
Both the BBC and the Guardian have sold their ethics cheaply.
Maybe a Labour government should introiduce a legal duty of impartiality on all the organs of the mass media, with the sanctions of imprisonment and/or large fines on senior executives who fail to follow the guidelines.
Muzzle the media? Most definitely “Yes”.
The one we have is failing our democracy by grossly misleading our demos or people.
It is high time it went and is replaced by something better.
The Tory party has been working on destabilising the BBC since 2010, when David Cameron appointed prominent Conservatives to serve on the board. Now everyone has noticed the results and people are turning away from the BBC. This includes Labour supporters and Tory supporters who still hold an out of date view that the BBC has a left bias. As the article says, few will support the BBC when there are further moves to privatisation. This has clearly been the Conservative plan as it follows the blueprint of other privatisations. The likely loss of the BBC is a terrible shame.
I’ve been noticing this lack of balance across a lot of the media and some newspapers for some time.I have raised it time and again and have yet to have a reply or notice any improvement in the lack of balance and as you say what seems to be bias.It is really worrying and all we can continue to do is highlight it at every opportunity to try and counteract it and make more people aware.It is not good for our democracy.One way to help is if labour gets voted in.All hands on deck.Lets hope for change December the 12 is key.
The blatant bias of the BBC has grown alarmingly and has now turned it into a joke! I have complained this week about allowing Boris Johnson to wriggle out of an interview with Andrew Neil, although he would have given him a much easier time than Jeremy Corbyn who he harangued to apologise for something he hasn’t done (anti semitism row) Corbyn has never been anti Semitic. Most of the top BBC political journalists have links, belonged to the Tory party.