BBC Hires (another) Guardian Journalist

[Teddy Bear]

The previous BBC director general Mark Thompson admitted there has been a 'massive' left wing bias at the BBC that he'd witnessed over 30 years ago, but indicated nothing, nor could he, that anything had been done about it since then.

We here, as well as many other sites, record the continued left wing bias exhibited by the BBC on a daily basis, in direct contravention of their charter. In my opinion it is this bias, continually pushing poorly thought out policies that has created much of the problems that we endure in the country. We are within a structure where the most incompetent and vision-less personnel are in the hierarchy, and are kept there by sticking to and promoting this mindset.

We have seen a glaring example recently with the vile Oxford Muslim gang that preyed on young girls. This is not the first gang of its kind but one of several that have come to light in various parts of Britain. The fact that they could continue their actions for so long was because police and social services did not want to 'offend' the Muslim community by bringing it to light. Is the fact that in every article concerning the abusers from the BBC, not one refers to them as Muslims unless an outside party, like a judge, made reference to it, create the PC world that our public servants don't want to step outside?

Not only have they completely failed the victims, and enabled their abusers, but they don't even see why they should now resign.

Instead of considering that their approach to this and many other issues might not be the correct one, and try to get other views, the BBC is so arrogant and full of their own self-importance, and so used to the fact that nobody will do anything about it, they don't even bother with the pretence of being balanced and impartial, as the following article highlights.

Just what is needed, another left wing Guardian journalist to promote the BBC world view and agenda.

The BBC hires (another) Guardian journalist

By Janet Daley

The BBC has announced the appointment of a new editor for Newsnight, its troubled flagship current affairs programme. Contrary to expectation, the job has not gone to a BBC veteran but to Ian Katz, the Deputy Editor of the Guardian. Fancy that. Is this appointment designed to provide balance for the programme's political editor Allegra Stratton who was also (guess what?) – a Guardian journalist?

Now don't get me wrong. I am not intending to cast any suspicion on the integrity of Mr Katz, or to suggest that he may be incapable of separating his previous political orientation from his responsibility to treat issues and politicians impartially under the aegis of the BBC. No, indeed. I am simply flabbergasted by the insensitivity and political crassness of the BBC management.

Do they have no idea how this looks? Can they not see that, so far as their critics are concerned, there is something deeply sinister about the apparently cosy relationship between the country's most blatantly Left-wing newspaper and the BBC's political coverage? What in the name of God are they thinking?

[steevo]

They don't care. A conscience about crime and even death? A self-absorbed ideological agenda for controlling those within the political hierarchy involves delusion and destruction of liberty for the masses. They don't care about arrogance and its appearance when most in positions of authority throughout the tax-paying citizenry won't hold them accountable. Even if the road has bumps the insatiable vision grinds on.

[Teddy Bear]

You got that right.
They're also making sure that their ultimate end will be violent. The shit will hit the fan, and they will be held accountable by the public they were supposed to serve, but instead used to serve themselves.

What goes around....

[Teddy Bear]

Stephen Glover in the Spectator asks this question. My response is after the article.

Why does the BBC so love lefty journalists?
It is no surprise that the latest high-profile BBC recruit is from the Guardian
Stephen Glover

My response to the appointment of Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian, to the editorship of BBC2’s Newsnight has been one of disbelief and amusement. Of course there’s nothing new in the Beeb hiring a paid-up Guardian-ista. It’s what we have come to expect. But one might have expected its new director-general, Tony Hall, to tread a little more carefully. Newsnight has a long history of Tory-bashing, and it disgraced itself last November with an orgy of false accusations against Alistair McAlpine, claiming without any evidence that he was a paedophile. Can one doubt that the programme threw caution to the wind at least in part because Lord McAlpine was once a friend and champion of Margaret Thatcher, and a hated Tory?

Lord Hall’s hiring of Mr Katz follows his recruitment of the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell as the BBC’s ‘director of strategy and digital’ on a salary of £295,000 a year. Both are doubtless able men, and their appointments would be unobjectionable were there a level playing field. But there isn’t. We only have to ask ourselves whether we could imagine a former Tory cabinet minister becoming a very senior BBC executive, or a deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph becoming editor of Newsnight. Of course we couldn’t. The chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten, may once have served in a Conservative cabinet, but he is hardly a traditional Tory.

Mr Katz seems a pleasant chap, though some colleagues accuse him of arrogance. Until quite recently he was thought the most likely successor to the long-serving, and seemingly immovable, Alan Rusbridger as editor of the Guardian, but two female candidates have pulled ahead of him — hence his willingness to accept the lesser, though not contemptible, crown of editor of Newsnight. He will find some sympathetic souls there. Allegra Stratton, who once worked with him at the Guardian, is now the programme’s political editor. Some furlongs further to the left is its economics editor, Paul Mason, by many accounts an absolutely charming fellow. In May 2011 he took part in Leveller’s Day march in Burford in Oxfordshire under the slogan ‘Jobs! The Future of Employment’, which was sponsored by the trade union Unite and CND among others. If he does not already know her, Mr Katz should get on well with the presenter Kirsty Wark, who with her husband invited the then Labour First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell, and his family to her villa in Spain in 2002.

I can’t see many closet Tories on Newsnight. In fact, none. Mr Katz will doubtless strive, at least at first, to appear even-handed for the sake of appearances, but the point stands. Why is it considered acceptable for the corporation’s leading current affairs television programme (though it has been haemorrhaging viewers lately, and is practically unwatchable unless Jeremy Paxman is presenting and on form) to recruit its personnel from the centre-left? The same question could be asked of the entire BBC news and current affairs operation. Mark Thompson, director-general from 2004 until last year, conceded in a magazine interview in 2010 that the corporation had been guilty of ‘massive’ left-wing bias in the past, though without defining when the past ended. A few months later he admitted that the BBC had been ‘historically rather weak and rather nervous’ in its coverage of immigration and Europe.

And yet, despite this apparent breast-beating, along comes Lord Hall, a senior BBC apparatchik during the 1990s, when he failed to be appointed director-general, carrying on as though nothing has changed. He has cast his net in waters where only Guardian-istas and other assorted lefties are likely to be found. At first glance his appointment of the former Times editor James Harding as head of news and current affairs might seem to challenge my thesis until one reflects that Mr Harding was celebrated by many hacks on his paper for not being right-wing, which was why Rupert Murdoch decided to get rid of him. He is no Tory.

Let me repeat that I have no objection to either Mr Purnell or Mr Katz. Nor would I deny that many of the best reporters are left-wing. My point is about balance and equity — or the lack of them. Mark Thompson’s analysis was obviously correct, and Andrew Marr, another man of the soft left who has thrived at the corporation, was also right when he said the BBC has ‘an innate liberal bias’. The most senior executives don’t -dictate this. It’s the way most BBC -journalists and executives are. Andrew Neil of this parish is the exception who proves the rule.

By the way, I remember Lord Hall slightly from Oxford of 40 years ago. One of his mates was Peter Stothard, later editor of the Times. Their respective girlfriends, later their wives, were even greater pals. Whereas Sir Peter made a journey of sorts towards Thatcherism, later veering towards Blairism, Lord Hall appears to have stayed safely on the social democratic left. The new director-general evidently subscribes to ‘Young’s Law’ as adumbrated by the late Hugo Young, for many years the Guardian’s chief columnist and sage.

When the Blairite cheerleader Andrew Marr was made political editor of the BBC in 2000, one or two pundits, including myself, questioned whether with the best will in the world he could ever be wholly even-handed. (He wasn’t.) Mr Young ventured down the slopes of Mount Olympus to deliver his dictum. He explained that while it was possible, indeed relatively easy, for a lefty columnist such as Mr Marr to be objective, a columnist of the right could never be. Right-wing journalists were, by training and disposition, incapable of balance. ‘The right,’ he wrote, ‘still speaks from the bunker of the dispossessed’ and, unlike the left, ‘is a long way from attempting to tease out the truth in what is actually happening.’

Ah! This must explain why the BBC is hiring James Purnell and Ian Katz, and will continue to avoid recruiting Tories. We must never forget that lefties are uniquely interested in telling the truth.

Stephen Glover is a columnist for the Daily Mail.

Why does the BBC so love lefty journalists?

After all that is known already about this insidious left wing propaganda machine, is this really the question that still needs to be asked?

Why is a supposed right wing government still forcing the public to pay for it so it can continue to masquerade as operating as fair and balanced under its charter?
When the rest of the media make the government accountable for maintaining this travesty is when they might just DO something about it.

What a stupid society that thinks of itself as free with this ridiculous state of those who control information being allowed to reign as if they were impartial.
Goebbels would be in admiration.
Future civilisations that might evolve will see just how backward and ignorant we truly were,

[thehighlandrebel]

I don't think it will be long until the Gruinard closes down due to the massive losses it's making.

With the price of toilet paper dropping people no longer need to buy it and cut it into squares.

[steevo]

After all that is known already about this insidious left wing propaganda machine, is this really the question that still needs to be asked?

That's the question that should be asked here. Why is there still the appearance of ignorance or more likely, unwillingness to call a spade a spade? There should be no surprise. No expectation to the contrary.

Why is a supposed right wing government still forcing the public to pay for it so it can continue to masquerade as operating as fair and balanced under its charter?
When the rest of the media make the government accountable for maintaining this travesty is when they might just DO something about it.

Yup. Conservative media cannot be intimidated by the BCC and/or public perception as being out of line or biased themselves when making this injustice an ongoing emphasis putting the feet of the political establishment to the fire.

[Teddy Bear]

Even as toilet paper, the Guardian would still manage to smear.
So long as the BBC props them up by continuing to advertise there for staff, at least those that are not cronies, I guess they will continue if only for that.

Since Glover writes for the Daily Mail I would expect him to be more aggressive than he has done with this piece. Perhaps he's afraid of getting lampooned by the left as has happened to Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, and a few others who speak their mind a lot more directly. Perhaps we should shame more those that try to appease the BBC with this kind of mediocre quasi attack.