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Electronic Communications

I am a supporter of the BBC and value its history. I had intended to spend some time talking about the great contribution that the BBC has made to this country and the world over many years. That was until I heard Sir Michael Lyons this morning on the radio, so I will take all that good stuff as read. On Radio 4 he suggested that if Parliament stopped the rise in the licence fee, it was a recipe for curbing the independence of the BBC. What absolute nonsense. It strays dangerously into politics. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) was right about that, and Sir Michael should have stayed well away from the issue, because the public no longer trust the BBC rigorously to enforce balance as it once did and was once famous for. The latest reported indiscretions involve the complaints that the BBC Trust upheld about the accuracy and bias of Jeremy Bowen in an article that he published marking the 40th anniversary of the six-day war. The trust said that Bowen""should have done more to explain that there were alternative views on the subject which had some weight"." That breach of impartiality guidelines underlines the BBC's failure in recent years to stop its innate liberal bias from turning into unbalanced reporting. The BBC's pro-metropolitan, liberal attitude is well documented. Some of the most significant work on the topic was compiled by ex-BBC producer Antony Jay for the Centre for Policy Studies. In his pamphlet entitled, "Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer", he describes the tribal-like mentality of BBC employees. Jay claims that BBC staff worked and socialised with people who have the same experiences and believe in the same principles, naturally reinforcing their pre-existing prejudices. Jay confessed:""We so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that we took our group-think as the views of all right-thinking people."" More recently, Andrew Marr famously described the BBC as not "impartial or neutral", arguing that it had a "cultural liberal bias" due to the type of people who were attracted to work there. The European elections in June represent a particularly difficult challenge for the BBC: licence fee payers expect the BBC not only to give a fair hearing for the major political parties, but to report impartially on the debate between European integrationists and Eurosceptics. So far, it has been a challenge too far. An internal report for the BBC in 2005 found that its news suffered from an "institutional mindset" that led to a""reluctance to question pro-EU assumptions"." It said that the BBC journalists are ignorant of how the EU works and have failed to show how much of British policy originates in Brussels, and it criticised managers who""appear insufficiently self-critical about standards of impartiality"." The report concluded that""the BBC is getting it wrong, and our main conclusion is that urgent action is required to put this right"." Unfortunately, urgent action has not been forthcoming. Another internal investigation in 2007 accused the BBC of trendy left-wing bias and stated that it was guilty of omitting opinions that were""off limits in terms of a liberal-minded comfort zone"." The report noted that the BBC had come late to several important issues, including Euroscepticism and immigration. The BBC's liberal obsession with multiculturalism means that it has become completely out of touch with large swathes of the country. The corporation has effectively censured the topics that people care about, because of its culture of uber-political correctness. That is also why the BBC gives a fairer hearing to trendy left-wing organisations such as Amnesty International and Liberty yet treats spokespeople for the Countryside Alliance and Migrationwatch UK as eccentric bores.