A cautionary tale

Here's a cautionary tale for bloggers about BBC bias...

I was all set to 'gotcha' Darragh MacIntyre - the Panorama journalist behind this week's BBC One investigation into allegations of official British collusion with loyalist terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. 

After all, Darragh was the guy behind that attempted hatchet job on Nigel Farage last year. 

As I wrote at the time:

Such a trawl [through the Panorama archive] reveals that most of Darragh MacIntyre's Panorama reports have been about 'tax dodging', though there's also one in his portfolio called Hungry Britain? (about "the dramatic rise in the number of food banks in Britain") and an exposé of the BNP entitled BNP: The Fraud Exposed.

He also did an (at the time) incendiary-seeming hatchet-job on the DUP in Northern Ireland - BBC Spotlight: The Iris Robinson Investigation.

His targets appear to prove him, therefore, to be very selective in his interests - right-wing politicians, Ulster unionists, the British state, tax dodgers - and mark him as having a clear left-wing bias.

However Google carefully and you'll see that he was also behind another BBC exposed, Storyville: The Disappeared, which investigated the IRA's murderous past and pointed the finger at Gerry Adams himself, deeply discomforting him at the time.

So the charge of 'bias' isn't quite as clear cut as it first appeared.