This story should be utterly astonishing to people. It should have people shocked by the sheer brazen cheek of what happened. But it won’t because it is what now passes for normality at the BBC, aka the Biased Broadcast Corporation.
The Biased BBC blog has the details, but in summary, Radio 4 Today programme presenter, Evan Davis, this morning interviewed Ian Mulheirn – a director of the Social Market Foundation, a ‘think tank’ which is highly critical of the Department of Work and Pension’s Work Programme to get the long-term unemployed back into employment, before going on to challenge Employment Minister, Chris Grayling about Mulheirn’s assertions.
But Davis was not questioning Mulheirn and probing Grayling as an impartial, truth seeking journalist. Evan Davis is himself on the Board of Directors of the Social Market Foundation and Mulheirn is one of his colleagues!
How could the Today editor possibly think that allowing Evan Davis to conduct the interviews was appropriate given he was so thoroughly compromised by a staggering conflict of interest?
With each passing day it becomes ever more clear that the BBC no longer even pretends to embody probity and impartiality because it feels immune from any consequences or sanction, so its employees do whatever they want. In years past this kind of unethical behaviour would have resulted in resignations and fullsome public apologies. What odds we get anything remotely like that in respect of this latest instance of shameless contempt?
It seems to me that a license fee strike is long overdue.
They *do* try to hide their bias; because they don’t mention their conflict of interest.
They’re just supremely confident, now they have a virtual monopoly of broadcast media and have cowed the competition, that only a vanishingly small percentage of the population will ever find out.
Dark times indeed.
Jon – quite right. I’ve thought for some time now that the BBC are clearly confident that their bias will go unpunished . All the coalition has done is to install Patten as DG and frozen the licence fee for a while. Effectively, they have got off scot-free.So, they can pretty much do just what they want with impunity. No fear of the Government curtailing them.
Reef knot: Actually, Patten is the BBC Chairman and heads the BBC Trust, with a role of ensuring the impartiality of the DG (Thompson) and his staff. Patten, with his continuum of EU connections, should have refused the job on the basis of conflicts of interest. So, in the words of the AGW crowd; it’s worse than we thought.
AM – this evening, there is a post coming up by my Scottish contributor, entitled “BBC – value for money”. I’ve warned him he’s going to cop it for that. I have this:
http://archive-other-nour-obscur.blogspot.com/2011/08/bbc-political-bias.html
and if you don’t mind, I’ll also put the url for this post.
Thanks James. Fill your boots.
Suggested title for a series of articles:
“BBC’s Brazen Balls”.
That should get a response.
;)