Complaints from two sides

Bias

As Sue noted the other day, it seems as if the world and his wife appears to be noticing BBC bias at the moment - particularly over the past couple of years, and the last year especially (post-Brexit, post-Trump). 

The BBC appears to be facing a populist uprising (as they themselves might put it).

The interesting thing, however (for me), is that it isn't just from 'our side'. The 'other side' seems to be just as riled about the BBC - though, it has to be said, given their ideological propensities, they appear much less willing to call for the BBC's scrapping, or privatisation, or the abolition of the licence fee!

That 'other side' is, of course, the Left or far-Left - whatever you want to call it. And it likes the soggy-left, 'left-liberal', Blairite, "Tory" BBC about as much as 'we' do.

It particularly dislikes Laura Kuenssberg. 

And that 'other side' is now doing what 'we' were doing and saying about the BBC a few years back and often in much the same language, albeit from the opposite ideological direction - often uncannily so (including disparaging talk of the 'MSM').

The left-wing Huffington Post reports that the BBC has yet again had to remind its staff that they ought to be impartial on Twitter.

Previously, that's come about because of left-wing tweets from BBC types.

Not this time though, as a freelance Question Time audience producer (i.e. someone who assembles QT audiences) recently appeared to share posts by Britain First on Facebook and promote messages supportive of Vote Leave (two things which the Huff Post blithely appears to link together).

This all came originally via the far-left Canary website. I checked out the QT producer's tweets at the time and found them wholly innocuous but the Huff Post insists that her Facebook feed was much as the Canary site suggests. 

That said, the Huff Post article suggests to me that the sharing of Britain First's call for people to wear the poppy of remembrance was indeed shared innocently (out of reverence for the poppy) by the QT audience producer - but maybe that's just me being 'right-wing' and giving her 'the benefit of the doubt' because of my own bias.

The article also notes that QT has been accused of favouring MPs critical of Jeremy Corbyn "after it was revealed no member of his shadow cabinet had appeared for five weeks". Checking the QT lists, that run ran from 3/11 to 1/12 and featured non-Corbynite Labour MPs Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper, Chris Bryant, Chris Leslie and Alan Johnson. 

Looking at QT since its summer return, however, I'd count the pro-Corbyn/anti-Corbyn ratio (Labour-backing-politician-wise) as 7 for Mr Corbyn and 8 not for Mr Corbyn (if you include Yanis Varoufakis as being a 'Labour-backing-politician'.) Check it for yourselves here.

Complaints from two sides.

Not 'both sides', very importantly to note, but 'two sides' - against the central centre/centre-left/left-liberal BBC standpoint.