Accuracy, impartiality and fairness lose their way with BBC mentality
In a memorable skit, the late British comedian plays a sanctimonious television journalist on assignment outside the locked gates of a country estate.
“I hate rich people,” an immaculately coiffed Hill tells his fawning producer as he gestures towards the property.
“I believe in a fairer distribution of wealth. That’s why I’m a socialist, you see.”
As Hill outlines his vision of realising economic justice for the impoverished, an old tramp asks him for a cup of tea.
“Piss off,” says Hill.
It was a clever depiction of the progressive mindset at its most insufferable – smug, insulated, driven by animus, and refusing to entertain different views. And above all, incapable of acknowledging its hypocrisy. ‘Rules for thee but not for me’ and so on.
In short, the mentality that prevails at the BBC.
That is not to say the organisation is without its rules. For example, and as per its royal charter, it is responsible for delivering news “firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness”.
But British values somehow have been conflated with BBC values. Ideally, they should interweave, but the latter has contempt for mainstream concerns.
The public broadcaster also suffers from the intellectual malaise known as “my truth”, or in the institutional case, “our truth”. The subjective pretensions of its dominant factions determine what constitutes accuracy, impartiality, and fairness.
The BBC’s doctoring of a speech given by US President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, to give the impression he was fomenting a riot on the Capitol, is its most blatant example yet of the truth phenomenon in action.
The real truth is the BBC’s reputation is in the toilet. The doctored video was just one of many examples outlined in a leaked 19-page memo originally sent to the public broadcaster’s board by Michael Prescott, formerly an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.
It describes an organisation that, depending on the issue at hand, is either agitating or asleep.
Take the case of unlawful immigration, which everyone in Britain, except for the BBC, knows is out of control. As Prescott documents, September 2023 saw the highest number of unlawful migrants cross the English Channel in a single day. But of the 219 push notifications that month sent to the seven million users of the BBC app, only four concerned unlawful immigration and asylum-seekers. And of those four, “three centred on the poor conditions or mistreatment of migrants”.
But there is no BBC blindness when it comes to gender and sexuality. The public broadcaster, said Prescott, “too often views” those topics “as a celebration of British diversity rather than exploring the complexities of the subject”.
And then there is self-imposed censorship in the form of the alphabet police, otherwise known as the LGBTQ desk in the BBC news division.
“Stories raising difficult questions about the ‘trans agenda’ were ignored even if they had been widely taken up and discussed across other media outlets,” wrote Prescott.
Conversely, there was a “constant drip-feed of one-sided stories” speaking effusively of “the trans experience”.
As for educating Brits about their history, the public broadcaster instead shames their heritage by race-baiting. Reviewing the historical content of four BBC programs, a group of eminent historians deplored the message.
“The main conclusion was this was caused by producers seeking out non-expert academics who would give good quotes, primarily about racism and prejudice,” noted Prescott.
“This was producing an overly simplistic and distorted narrative about British colonial racism, slave-trading and its legacy.”
And nothing says accuracy, impartiality, and fairness like the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. As the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom determined last month, the BBC-commissioned documentary ‘Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone’ failed to disclose the 13-year-old narrator was the son of a senior Hamas figure.
As they say, you shall know them by the company they keep. Consider the case of Gazan journalist Samer Elzaenen. He has repeatedly appeared as an expert contributor on the BBC’s Arabic channel, claiming that Israel was using starvation as a weapon against Palestinians. But as the Telegraph reported in September, Elzaenen’s social media posts revealed he had not quite grasped the principles of unbiased reporting.
“When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything,” he wrote in 2022.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organisation in Britain, yet the BBC refuses to use that term to describe its members.
“We don’t take sides,” wrote BBC world affairs editor John Simpson just days after the October 7 attacks.
He could have fooled me. This is the same organisation that broadcast live in June (and initially retained footage of on BBC iPlayer) a punk act leading chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF (Israel Defence Forces)” at the Glastonbury Festival.
The ABC’s reaction to the BBC’s debacle has been telling.
“It’s one of those classic lessons for all of us broadcasters and people in the media that the best thing to do is say ‘Look, we got this wrong’ … and apologise when we do,” said ABC global affairs editor Laura Tingle, who lamented the story had been seized on by “the conservative media who would like to see public broadcasters around the world close down, in a competitive way”.
This completely misses the point. The issue is not one of honest mistake. It is about a culture that appropriates a public broadcaster as a means to effect social change.
For example, it is no mere “mistake” when ABC journalists sign a petition that effectively demands the Middle East conflict be reported from a Palestinian perspective.
It is no mere mistake when ABC journalists propose an in-house “climate crisis advisory group” to frame reporting on climate change.
It is no mere mistake when ABC journalists embrace without question the revisionist and fantasist claims of Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.
It is no mere mistake when ABC journalists failed to cover the closure of London’s Tavistock clinic, which was shut down in 2022 following a review which found treatment was “not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender-related distress”.
Yet the senior executives of ABC and BBC will continue to deny, as they have long done, that their respective broadcaster is captured by systemic bias.
Cue the Benny Hill theme.
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Benny Hill said it best about the BBC.