Humphreys Accused of Right Wing Bias by BBC

[Teddy Bear]

We are so used to the usual BBC agenda, and the way they perpetrate it with complete disregard for their charter, it's become their usual way of programming. So what happens when a presenter actually strays from the desired BBC perspective and presents a subject with honesty and common sense?

The answer is the BBC pulls the programme and accuses the presenter, in this case John Humphrys, of being biased and unbalanced.

Proof positive that the BBC is biased

Viewers who watched John Humphrys’s thoughtful BBC2 documentary, The Future of the Welfare State, may well have been struck that this was an unusual programme for the corporation to broadcast.

For instead of the BBC’s habitual shroud-waving over spending cuts, the veteran presenter dared to ask whether the ‘age of entitlement’ to benefits might have had unintended consequences, some of them bad.

He even gave a hearing to ordinary people’s views about the morale-sapping effects of welfarism, while drawing on his experience of the erosion of the work ethic since his Welsh working-class childhood, when idleness was seen as wrong.

Yesterday, the corporation’s governing trust ruled that this balanced analysis was indeed an aberration, with no place on the BBC.

In a judgment that confirms everything this paper has argued about the corporation’s bias, the trust’s Left-dominated Editorial Standards Committee rebuked Mr Humphrys for failing to toe the BBC line that all benefits are good, and all cuts are evil.

Upholding a complaint from the Child Poverty Action Group, which denies the existence of a dependency culture, the committee found Mr Humphrys was wrong to imply a link between dependence on jobless benefits and a crisis in the welfare state.

To deny there are worrying numbers of families hooked on benefits that sap self-reliance is the politics of the ostrich.

Mr Humphrys, in his typically even-handed way, was right to expose this.

Indeed, the parody-defying ruling from the trust puts beyond question that it is institutionally unfit for its role of guarding against bias.

Far from ensuring balance, the committee is effectively saying that opposition to welfare cuts should be compulsory for all BBC presenters.

What is so chilling is that the monolithic corporation is the chief source of news for the overwhelming majority of Britons, reaching 86 per cent of current affairs consumers through TV, radio and the internet.

This cannot be healthy for British democracy. And as the printed Press faces demands for draconian statutory controls, the truth is that the giant BBC has no regulatory controls – the politically correct, supine trust apart.

Yesterday, Culture Secretary Maria Miller suggested the BBC could be included in future moves to limit the share of the market that any one media organisation may command.

The trust’s crass ruling against Mr Humphrys – one of the corporation’s most distinguished and fair-minded presenters – makes her case unanswerable.

[Teddy Bear]

Just to show how twisted is the BBC about what constitutes bias, here's an article from the Guido Fawkes blog about the type of stories the BBC wants to report, and the lengths they will go to find them.

BBC Outsource “Bedroom Tax” Bashing to Private Sector Firm

Newsnight have been caught red-handed using a private firm to try stir up outrage toward’s the government’s, legal, tweaking of Housing Benefit changes. The bizarre email below was sent by Support Solutions, who boast that they have “carved a niche as a provider of revenue optimisation, strategic positioning and learning & development services.” The font sizes alone are baffling:



After a day of mourning on the airwaves after the legal challenge against the spare room subsidy cut was quashed, it would appear from this that the Beeb are struggling to find enough “victims”. So they’ve called in the private sector…

[Teddy Bear]

Cristina Odone makes a valid observation about the BBC and the outcome of this squashed documentary.

Rude words, not honest opinions, are welcome at the BBC
The BBC Trust's censure of John Humphrys over his welfare documentary reveals much about the corporation

Cristina Odone

It is more than 20 years since I noticed the small woman in Dame Edna spectacles and stiff hairstyle marching through the bowels of the old BBC building in White City, where I was being interviewed. I was new to British media, and asked who she was. “Ah,” the producer escorting me to a studio winked, “that is our biggest enemy.”

He giggled. Mary Whitehouse, tireless campaigner against the permissive society, had become a figure of fun, the killjoy every liberal loved to hate. Her letters and tirades of complaint about everyone from Alf Garnett to Dennis Potter caused titters rather than chest-beatings.

But Mary Whitehouse RIP has had the last laugh. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the BBC is now modelling itself on its old foe. The corporation sees blasphemy everywhere, and wants it censored.

Not “blasphemy” as Mrs Whitehouse would know it, admittedly. In her heyday, TV’s clean-up crusader sought to censor entertainments like Monty Python’s Life of Brian, with jokes such as “Crucifixion’s a doddle”.

Today, the BBC couldn’t give two hoots about Bible-bashing (though it would draw the line at Koran-kicking). It has no problems broadcasting programmes with language that would have Mrs Whitehouse reaching for her smelling salts. But it does want to censor a different kind of blasphemy: any opinion that opposes the liberal consensus.

This week, on the day that the BBC Trust decided that it was acceptable to allow an offensive (to many) vulgarity to be aired before the watershed, its panjandrums criticised a BBC Two documentary about welfare. The trust censured John Humphrys, who wrote and presented The Future of Welfare, for making a programme that highlighted how welfare has become a lifestyle choice for some so that thousands now feel entitled to benefits.
But even the right-on arbiters of BBC taste and decency could not accuse Humphrys’s script of bias or party-politicking. Instead, they scolded the veteran broadcaster for failing to back up with statistics an assertion that Britain has “a healthy supply of jobs”.

How dare he? The BBC moved quickly to protect its audience. Imagine if a child had heard Humphrys’s scandalous contention that welfare instils indolence. Think how shocking for an unsuspecting OAP to come across such insidious moralising aired aloud. What damage exposure to such an outrage could inflict on young minds and fragile old ones!

Thank goodness we can rely on Auntie to shield us from illiberal positions. In her capable hands, audiences can rest assured that they will be spared similar profanities about the NHS, equality legislation, environmental lobbies, gender politics, abortion – all those sacred pillars of the liberal establishment. The BBC will not permit four-letter thoughts on these subjects.

While drama series such as Holby City can feature words such as “s-------” before the 9pm watershed, it pledges never – no, not even past the watershed – to give a platform to foul prophets of traditional marriage, fracking or the pro-life cause. The BBC will give air time only to those who subscribe to correct thinking and adopt a suitably reverential manner in dealing with the hallowed issues.
The irony of a deferential BBC is only really appreciated by those who remember, or have studied, the 1960s. While Whitehouse took up her campaign, students, pop stars and film-makers were taking on the conservative consensus. The dissenters, wearing wispy beards and tie-dye T-shirts, built the momentum for a counter-culture based on free speech and free love. They changed the establishment and demoted all kinds of authority figures, from police to civil servants, parents to politicians.

More than 50 years on, the taboo-breakers have left the barricades and occupy the heart of the new establishment. They fill Westminster, staff the NHS, sit on the BBC Trust. Not surprisingly, their stature has deflated their old love of liberty. Free sex is still fine, but as for free speech…

The consensus has changed, but its safeguarding is as important today as it was back then. The BBC, as the nation’s messenger, can and does choose to megaphone some news and opinions, while ignoring or quashing others.

John Humphrys has been there long enough to know this. He knows he was venturing into an area that his employers have declared out of bounds. The same fate would await him were he to make an objective, factual programme about the multitude of problems in the NHS, or how fracking will free us from dependence on Russia and the Middle East for energy.

But were he to swear on air, or ape Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross with their off-colour jokes and innuendo, his bosses would turn a blind eye. Their defence, published this week, is that viewers now regard casual vulgarity as “acceptable”.

The trustees can claim that swearing has become routine, and listening to strangers on the bus, on the street, even (heavens above) at Waitrose, I have to agree. But the BBC cannot present itself as a mirror of our culture unless it is prepared to reflect the views as well as the words that ordinary people routinely exchange.
If the corporation can accept the language of the people, no matter how rude, it has no option but to accept their opinions, too.

I want a BBC that broadcasts programmes in which Lord Lawson decries climate change policy; Nadine Dorries MP argues to lower the limit on abortion; and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey makes his case against gay marriage. And in which no one utters a four-letter word.

[Teddy Bear]

Another related piece in the subject, this time from Graeme Archer in the Telegraph. I like his tongue in cheek impersonation of a BBC presenter at the beginning of the article.

Of course people at the BBC are biased: why not make a virtue of it?
We need the BBC to be more like the newspapers - open about the unavoidably political beliefs of its staff

By Graeme Archer

(This week’s column is brought to you courtesy of the BBC Trust)
Welcome to Saturday in The Daily Telegraph. My name is Graeme, and today I’ll be interviewing two parts of myself about welfare reform. What do you think about it, Graeme?

Well, it’s my opinion that the Coalition’s reforms are among the most important since the post-war settlement.

Let me just interrupt you there, and put that point to myself. Do you agree?

No, of course I don’t. These malicious reforms are designed to help the Tories’ banker friends. No public spending need ever be cut again if Osborne’s millionaire mates pay their tax.

Thank you both. Now over to our political correspondent, Graeme, for a commentary on Graeme’s interview with himselves. That was an interesting exchange, Graeme, wasn’t it?

Oh absolutely, Graeme. What we heard there is that, on the one hand, some people might argue that these reforms are necessary. Increasingly, however, opposition to the Government describes the policy as “abhorrent” and “uncivilised”.

Thank you Graeme, I’ll need to stop that, er, balanced review there; we’ve run out of time, I’m afraid! Coming up after the news: we’ll be interviewing the Prime Minister, by shouting at him halfway through each of his sentences. He won’t get a word in edgeways! Can’t wait.

Because I tired of exchanges like this – only a slight exaggeration – I gave up listening to Radio 4’s Today programme years ago. It treats politics as football: who’s winning the league? Who won PMQs? Will a new manager make a difference? (Clue: no.) You learn a lot about which slogans are current, but not much else.

It leaves me cold – no, that’s inaccurate. It infuriates me, not least for that studied pretence of political neutrality, contradicted by every nuanced phrase, tone of voice or, indeed, official BBC investigation. (The BBC didn’t realise immigration was a political issue until some time around 2010, for example.)

Which makes it all the more amusing (admittedly, amusing in the way that leaves you feeling slightly ashamed) that it’s the Today programme’s lead presenter, John Humphrys, who’s been criticised this week by the BBC Trust, for a television programme he made two years ago about welfare. The Child Poverty Action Group complained about some statistic or other that he should have included (according to them), and the Trust upheld that complaint.

Lobby groups love statistics – “evidence” – and always deploy them when it’s their turn to be interviewed on Today. (“Coming up after the news, we’ll be interviewing the head of Fight Against Something Ghastly. We won’t interrupt them at all, or ask them to prioritise the spending they want against every other competing claim for your money you’ll hear throughout the programme.”) Evidence is always useful, but it’s not a substitute for ideology, for your political outlook on life, through which such evidence is (always) refracted.
Which makes it ridiculous for the BBC to pretend that its front-persons remove their own world views the moment they sit in front of a microphone. It’s absurd, because it is impossible, and were it possible, it would be uninformative. I could write these columns as though I weren’t a Tory (see above). I’m sure you’d pick up on it soon enough, and wonder why you’d paid to read someone pretending to be something they weren’t: that is, neutral. That is: a lie.

Such neutrality doesn’t fail only when it is used as an attempted mask for party affiliation. Any policy issue is identically afflicted. Do BBC staff really have no opinions about, say, fracking? Is it conceivable that those views don’t leak through into their broadcasts?

As with so much other establishment practice, this is one best tackled by transparency. Were the BBC to give up on its neutrality dogma – not least because it’s untrue – presenters would be free to say what they actually think. And we would be free to view their arguments through the prism of their beliefs.

Just as you can with this newspaper, or any of the other brands of newspaper that are available, from the less fashionable outlets.
But there’s the difference: you chose to buy this newspaper. You don’t choose to buy the BBC; which fact, increasingly, is unsustainable politically and is why, I suspect, the BBC Trust clings to the arcane lore upon which the Corporation was established. “If we admit we’re no more neutral than any other human being, they’ll wonder why we need to be funded by a poll tax.”

Surely the reverse would be true: diversity (so we’re endlessly told) is good for organisations. The BBC has many wonderful broadcasters: I’d pay to hear what they think, more happily than I pay to hear them mime, unconvincingly, a lack of bias.

We don’t need newspapers to become more like the BBC (thank you, Lord Justice Leveson): we need the BBC to be more like the newspapers. That is, open about the unavoidably political beliefs of its staff, and shaken from its tax-funded pulpit, from which it broadcasts its imperious “neutrality”. You, not the Child Poverty Action Group, should decide whether John Humphrys is worth listening to or not.