The BBC has always had left bias and has been accused of it many times throughout the years...From what I see, there are many more newspapers catering to the left and staying PC than daring to go to the right.
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Full disclosure.
I, a product of the BBC, stand before you as a Guardian reader. I also do so as a Telegraph reader. One of my first jobs was producing The News Quiz.
Scanning every newspaper every day for weeks on end made me instantly aware that no one newspaper told the whole story. The closer I peered at the page, the more holes I looked through. So it’s become a habit to get The Guardian and Telegraph every day, to get something approximating to both sides of the story.
And our favourite game each morning over breakfast is to compare the photos on the two front pages. The Guardian frequently has something uncompromising, a picture of sludge or an abattoir, while The Telegraph goes out of its way to feature a photo of a smiling blond woman in her twenties, even if it’s under the headline, ‘The sister of the man who died’. You soon recognise their tics.
The BBC is not allowed to have tics. It has to remain impartial. But impartiality shouldn’t mean dull. It has to feel fearless, questioning, pushing against the established view, from whatever party. That’s why Nick Robinson, Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Neil, are so good at what they do.
But hang on, Nick was once chairman of the Young Conservatives, Paxman has since outed himself as a one-nation Tory, and Andrew Neil has had a very close association with Rupert Murdoch.
Add to that former chairmen like Lords Grade and Patton, two Conservative peers, and you have a very convincing case there’s a pretty clear, very deliberate right-wing bias in the BBC.
Except I don’t see it that way. Because Robinson, Paxman and Neil are professionals, they hold to the highest professional standards. For my money, Andrew Neil gets more surprising admissions and squirming revelations out of politicians on a daily basis than anyone on television, and long may he do so.
The question shouldn’t be, do these people have a political past, but what do they do with their knowledge and experience of politics?
Anyone with a passion and understanding of the subject, is bound to have engaged with it: the alternative is to have a parade of political eunuchs on our screen, just reading out what’s put in front of them, with no personal connection to the subject.
You’d might as well have Siri read the news.
And just as, when I see Michael Portillo present Great Train Journeys of the World, I don’t look out for him making subtle suggestions that the journey would be a lot better if the line were privatised, so too should we stop assuming that any presenter who has historically come from the political left would be equally biased.
To view those who privately have left-wing views as more prone to bias than those who privately hold right-wing ones, is itself a bias, and an insult to the professionalism of all.
We see bias and imbalance from our own prejudice.
We can have fun charting an exaggerated right-wing history of the BBC as easily as a left-wing one.
For every ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ there was a ‘Dallas’ glorifying capitalism, a ‘Trooping of The Colour’ and ‘Songs of Praise’ re-asserting the permanence of old Establishment ideals.
For every drama about homelessness, there’s ‘Antiques Road Show’ weekly and literally enforcing the Thatcherite principle of selling off the family silver.
For every left-wing comic, there’s an army of business and economic experts reinforcing the views of the banking community as accepted fact.
And by God, how can a Corporation be left-wing when it has perpetuated the career of Ann Widdecombe?
The wisest words I’ve read on all this, come from Toby Young, who wrote, recently in The Spectator, prior to appearing on Question Time: “I’ve often heard Conservatives complain that the BBC packs the audience with lefties. Not true.The makers of the programme bend over backwards to try to ensure the audience contains a broad cross-section of political views. By definition, a majority of them won’t be Conservative voters. But that’s the country’s anti-Tory bias, not the BBC’s.”
That’s the point. The BBC is funded by and speaks to the country. The country is not the Government.
More people pay for the BBC and watch it than vote for any one political party.
-Armando Iannucci