With perfect timing, former BBC editorial director Roger Mosey has written a book on his experiences with the corporation, entitled, “Getting out alive.”
This week, it’s been serialised in The Times, making interesting reading for new culture secretary John Whittingdale, currently tasked with deciding the future of the licence fee.
Mr Mosey’s main point is that the BBC adopts a "liberal defensive" position in general and fails to reflect the concerns of its audience. In one anecdote, he claims that the BBC "sanitised" a report about an area with high immigration by leaving critical - and therefore ‘racist’ - interviews with certain members of the white community on the cutting room floor. The resulting news item was therefore not truly representative.
In another, Mr Mosey describes a BBC Today morning meeting in 1995, where the editorial team jeered at eurosceptics, including Bill Cash, for their determination to keep Britain out of the euro. Rod Liddle, an editor for the programme between 1997-2003, confirms this.
“As a very senior BBC executive said to me a few years later, about the Eurosceptics: ‘You do realise, Rod, that these people are mad?,” he writes.
Certainly, BBC coverage of the so-called Arab Spring and the current mass migration crisis in the Mediterranean appears biased. The Arab Spring, joyfully welcomed by the BBC, has notably failed to bring democracy to the Middle East, while 70 per cent of the refugees arriving in Italy and Greece have been found to be economic migrants fleeing from poverty rather than war.
Also, as Rod Liddle writes, “Its attacks on Ukip during the election campaign — no other party warranted such treatment, remember — were an utter disgrace and, I would suggest, in breach of its charter. There was not even a genuflection towards even-handedness. The line was simple: these bastards are racists, and we’re going to nail them.”
Like Rod Liddle, I worked for the BBC for many years and admire a lot of what it, most notably locally. But, for the huge numbers who turn to it for news, delivering a smug, liberal consensus, which does not reflect the true state of affairs, betrays the vast majority of people who rely upon it and ultimately, pay for it.