As evidence of serious bias continues to pile up, the corporation’s leadership is burying its head in the sand
Daily Telegraph 19/10/26
The BBC has continued to deny that it has a serious problem with impartiality. But evidence continues to emerge that tells a very different story.
Following an investigation by The Telegraph, the BBC was last weekend forced to pause a scheme in which civil servants on secondment were contributing to news reporting and being asked to fact-check contentious political issues.
It also emerged last week that the BBC’s Bitesize service had been using quizzes to encourage schoolchildren to take political positions on controversial subjects. In one example, the BBC created an online game which rewarded children for choosing the answer “open borders” and granting an amnesty to illegal migrants.
Meanwhile. the BBC is fighting a legal battle with Donald Trump after a Panorama documentary was misleadingly edited to make it look like the US president had said something he did not.
You might think that this catalogue of serious failings would be enough on their own for the BBC’s leadership to ask difficult questions about what is happening to the corporation’s standards. Just in the last week, it is not difficult to join the dots and see a major problem that is impacting the BBC’s journalism, its output for children and its recruitment practices.
But there is of course plenty more evidence of fundamental problems. They continue to emerge whilst the BBC’s leadership buries its head in the sand.
Former director of BBC News, Fran Unsworth, has described a culture of “progressive madness” that became a form of bullying on transgender issues and more. “It wasn’t just the trans issue,” said Ms Unsworth. “There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view: they’d ‘no platform’ them: all that safe-spaces s---.”
You do not have to look hard to find more examples, whether it be the BBC documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas official, the live broadcast without interruption from Glastonbury of a performer chanting “death to the IDF” or elements of the continuing output of BBC Arabic that poisons the BBC’s reputation with anti-Semitism and overt bias.
When this number of examples stacks up they cannot simply be dismissed as a series of unfortunate coincidences. What is more, all of these examples are evidence of bias in one particular direction: a progressive group-think that fundamentally fails to recognise the BBC’s duty to impartiality and balance.
I have two questions to ask the BBC, one for its journalists and one for its senior leadership.
To BBC journalists I ask this: if you were not working for the corporation at this time and were presented with this amount of evidence, this ongoing drumbeat of examples of impartiality failures would you just dismiss it? Or might you think there is a problem here that needs investigating, however uncomfortable that might be?
To the BBC’s leadership, there is a critical question of responsibility: what will be the consequences of continuing to ignore repeated failures of impartiality, of pretending there is not a problem when there so patently is one?
Rather than gripping the problem with strength and transparency, BBC leaders have been looking the other way, hoping that a repeated pattern of impartiality failures will magically end.
But it won’t. Not without action, openness and courage. Without this, the BBC’s reputation will continue to diminish. A national asset, 100 years in the making, will be squandered. Thousands of BBC staff members committed to impartiality will have been failed by their leaders and millions of licence-fee payers will pay the price too.
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