A few months ago, I was enjoying a pint or two in my local with a few fellow villagers when the conversation, depressingly, turned to politics. It was the usual “migrants creaming it off the state, claiming generous benefits and living in luxurious hotels” nonsense. My constant reminders that actually migration soared under the last Conservative government, and especially under Boris Johnson, that asylum seekers could neither work nor claim benefits and the only reason they were in hotels was because the Tories put them there and bragged about it fell on deaf ears. When the subject changed, we found ourselves on the subject of the BBC. “BBC News is a disgrace,” one of them said and here I found myself agreeing, though not in the way he was expecting. BBC News is, indeed, a disgrace. Here’s why.
For some years, the BBC hierarchy has been stuffed with the right wing friends of Nigel Farage. That’s not an opinion: that’s a fact. Conservative supporter Robbie Gibb is a highly influential board member and it shows. Far from being some left wing playground, as some described it, the BBC’s editorial position is well to the right of British politics.
The former political editor Laura Kuenssberg was known, unaffectionately, as Tory Laura, as her clear bias towards them became clear in almost every to camera piece she made. Tories always got an easy ride in her interviews and her opinion pieces were straight out of Tory Central Office. Fiona Bruce barely tries to conceal her own political preferences on the wretched Question Time which – surprise! surprise! – features fascist boy Nigel Farage more than any other British politician. News bulletins, too, have included even more opinion pieces since Chris Mason became political editor and he appears to be closer to Reform UK Ltd. He’s an embarrassment when the BBC is supposedly neutral politically. His constant attacks against Labour in general and Keir Starmer in particular are nearer to right wing propaganda than journalism.
Where better to explain what’s going on with the case of Angela Rayner’s honest cock-up failing to pay the right level of stamp duty on her new house, a sum of £40,000 and Nigel Farage’s failure to declare 17 sources of additional income coming to nearly £400,000? With Rayner, the BBC and Mason relentlessly tried to take her down, using the same right wing language as the gutter press and eventually they succeeded. Well, she is a working class woman, isn’t she? We can’t have her sort in politics. But privately educated, ex city trader, multimillionaire grifter Farage and establishment career politician Farage? Oh, it was just an honest mistake, wasn’t it? Who hasn’t forgotten they received £400,000? It’s just a few coppers, isn’t it? No ferocious questioning of Farage, indeed no serious reporting. I can hear the suits saying: “Look, just put the Farage stuff just before the shaggy dog story and the weather forecast on tonight’s news. He’s one of the chaps – and he’s on Question Time again next week.”
It is not as if I am coming from an extreme position on the left when I query BBC bias. Hell, I’m a card-carrying Blairite, as I always have been, long before Tony had even been heard of. I don’t even like the hard left of politics, many of its main players having been little different from their distant cousins on the far right. I like to consume news so I can make my own mind up about it. Today’s BBC News does no such thing. The likes of Chris Mason don’t report on anything: they give their always right wing opinion on it.
Sky News is the same, with many of its top journalists seemingly believing that we want to hear what Beth Rigby, Sam Coates and Jon Craig think about anything, rather than what’s happening. The major British news organisations have lurched towards the far right – and it is very far right – GB News, the loss-making pro Farage non-news station, perhaps fearful of the competition on the right. It makes for seriously unedifying TV.
You can see it with Donald Trump, too. Everyone, including his supporters, know he is insane, likely in cognitive decline, and they never question him, effectively sane-washing what he comes out with. If he does and says something mad, it’s never Trump being demented and mad. It’s a blow for Keir Starmer, who, like him or not, is the sanest man in the room. No one from the BBC or Sky, and certainly not the gutter press, ever calls Trump out. They have decided his madness is totally normal. Why do they not report on what we can all see? The leader of the free world is a complete nutcase. How hard can it be?
Farage has not even been called out for his consistent support for Trump when his actions damage every aspect of our lives. When Trump supports his fellow fascist, the war criminal Vladimir Putin, why is the media not calling out Farage’s lack of patriotism, always supporting Trump and not his own country? This isn’t journalism: it’s propaganda.
I could go on. The BBC, the envy of the entire world, is in a hole, yet the very people who want to get rid of it are – yes, you guessed – the very people who do it down, Farage, Trump, the gutter press; the far right establishment in general. I find it incredible.
Whoever steps up to lead the corporation as director general following the departure of Tim Davie, yet another Tory at the top of the Beeb, needs to address the news department as a priority. Do we want actual news or tabloid gossip, because the latter is pretty well all we are getting at the moment? I know what I want. More news, less opinion. If that means acting Reform UK Ltd puppet Chris Mason, then so be it. There are plenty more like him. I guess he could always find a job at the Daily Mail?
