Thompson Admits Bias on Immigration

[Teddy Bear]

Eventually the BBC will own up to all of its bias, but the fact that it continues to deny it until then, and the damage it does with its biased output can't be undone, and makes it reprehensible.

BBC director-general admits:
We DID fail to address 'taboo' subjects like immigration

Sensitive or ‘taboo’ subjects such as immigration were avoided by the BBC for fear of being too right-wing, the corporation’s director-general admitted yesterday.

Mark Thompson conceded that the broadcaster had been ‘anxious’ in the past about playing into what it may have perceived to be a Right-wing political agenda.

But he claimed it had now changed its position and was responsible for raising the topic of immigration during last year’s general election.

Mr Thompson added that the BBC had a duty to address ‘sensitive and difficult’ issues a ‘significant proportion’ of the public wanted to hear about.

In an article for the New Statesman magazine, he admitted: ‘There have been occasions, I believe, in the past, when the BBC has had limitations.

‘For example, I think there were some years when the BBC, like the rest of the UK media, was very reticent about talking about immigration.

‘There was an anxiety whether or not you might be playing into a political agenda if you did items about immigration.’

Mr Thompson went on to insist that he did not like the idea that certain subjects were ‘taboo’.

He said: ‘In the 2010 election campaign, none of the parties was talking about immigration.

‘We believed we should deal with it, because the public – not everyone, but a significant proportion – was saying to us that it was a real issue.

‘We’ve got a duty, even if issues are sensitive and difficult to get right, to confront what the public want. I don’t like the idea of topics that are taboo.’

Last year, Mr Thompson accepted that the BBC had been guilty of ‘massive’ Left-wing bias.
The BBC was criticised last month for sending 407 people to the Glastonbury festival at a cost of £1.5million

And in 2007, a BBC Trust report criticised the corporation for coming late to several important stories, including Euroscepticism and immigration, which it described as ‘off limits’ in terms of a liberal-minded comfort zone.

Mr Thompson also defended the large numbers of journalists the BBC sends to events such as Glastonbury and the Olympics.

And he insisted that staff were low paid compared with other broadcasting organisations.

The BBC was criticised last month for sending 407 people to the Glastonbury festival – at a cost of £1.5million.

But the director-general said: ‘In the British press, the BBC sending a few hundred people to the Beijing Olympics was a national scandal. We sent about a tenth of the number sent by NBC, the U.S. broadcaster.

‘We’re known internationally for the small numbers of people we send, but in a newspaper 100 sounds like a lot, in the way £7million for taxis does. It depends on the context.

'We should make sure we’re doing these things with as few people as we can and I think we do.'

[Teddy Bear]

An article in todays' Telegraph with the beginning of the realisation of how much the BBC has damaged the country as a result of their agenda on immigration. The author however is rather naive as my comment posted here and there indicates.

How the BBC's silence on immigration damaged the country
Mark Thompson's confession that the BBC shied away from subjects like immigration shows how an insidious culture of the unsayable took hold under Labour, says Jenny McCartney.

By Jenny McCartney7:00PM BST 09 Jul 2011
It was interesting to hear Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, admit last week that in the past, the corporation “has had limitations. For example, I think there were some years when the BBC, like the rest of the UK media, was very reticent about talking about immigration. There was an anxiety whether you might be playing into a political agenda if you did items on immigration.” In other words, it was quietly believed that even raising the topic meant that the BBC was producing propaganda for British National Party.

What Mr Thompson has admitted – and at least he is honest about it – is that before 2010, our national broadcaster became a hostage to the insidious culture of the unsayable, which established itself across so much of British life during the Labour years, and left a legacy of widespread damage.

I can understand that immigration was a sensitive subject: I have complicated feelings about it myself. On one hand, the steady flow of newcomers has shaped Britain’s character and success for thousands of years. My in-laws are first-generation immigrants from India, who came to Britain in the early 1960s, and in terms of industry and achievement, they and their peers have been a tremendous boon to this country. Frequently, immigrants represent the boldest and best from their homelands, the ones with the courage and drive to struggle towards a better life somewhere else, and carry on grafting when they get there.

But it also seems reasonable that if there is going to be a very sharp rise in immigration in a very short time – as there was under Labour, when just over three million legal immigrants arrived in 13 years – there should at least be an open discussion about how many can be welcomed without flooding the job market and putting an unsustainable strain on health and education systems.

Immigrants don’t tend to compete for the jobs of BBC executives. The professional middle classes might well be delighted that they suddenly have a glut of cheap, efficient Polish workmen to choose from. A painter-decorator with a family to support might not.
The topic of immigration today is no longer primarily bound up with racism, but with resources and economics: the views of the children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation are just as varied on the subject as anyone else’s. All of this should have led to a vigorous discussion, on the BBC and elsewhere, which would have helped considerably to detoxify the debate.

Yet for far too long, the corporation simply bottled it, preferring to leave any mention of the i-word to the BNP. As a result, the notion of the “unsayable” was perpetuated, an official omertà that let government policy proceed unchallenged – in a chaotic style that even Labour now admits was a mistake – while popular concern mounted.

There were other “unsayables”, too, although in fairness, the BBC tackled at least some. Under Blair, GCSE and A-level results rose annually – bumper exam crops of Stalinist proportions. To question the worth of this, ministers repeatedly suggested, was to malign the hard work of pupils and teachers alike.

But what’s this? David Frost, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said recently that businesses are employing immigrants because they require young people who can “read, write, communicate and have a strong work ethic” and in British-born youths, “too often that’s not the case”. Sir Terry Leahy, the former boss of Tesco, has said that “standards in too many schools are simply not good enough” to prepare children for the world of work. The routine ignoring of another “unsayable” – that paper qualifications are not translating into skills or employability – has let down a generation of children.

Not so long ago, to voice the opinion that there should be a re-examination of immigration policy, that qualifications were ebbing in value, or even that the ideal of the European Union was expensive and unworkable, would be to outrage several bien-pensant orthodoxies at once. Today, they all sound like simple common sense. As the BBC has now realised, difficult topics do not evaporate because one ignores them: the unsayable has a way of becoming the unavoidable.

My comment:
What Mr Thompson has admitted – and at least he is honest about it – is that before 2010, our national broadcaster became a hostage to the insidious culture of the unsayable,
Admitted??? There was no doubt to anybody with more than half their own mind that this was part of the BBC agenda, and anybody who questioned their bias would be labelled xenophobic or worse. 'Finally owned up to...' would be a better way of putting it. So he's far from 'honest', just eventually caught in the act.

Further dishonesty is the claim that the BBC was 'hostage to the insidious culture of the unsayable', as they were the ones largely responsible for creating it.

There is no question that the BBC is doing damage to the country, and in a lot more ways than just immigration. The fact that the public is forced to pay for them to do it is the sickest joke one can imagine. A true S & M scenario.