All in the past?

There seems to be a pattern emerging. 

Several senior BBC figures - from Mark Thompson to Helen Boaden - have made various mea culpas about BBC bias in recent years. This is all for the good, and shows that those who criticised them for it at the time were right all along. 

These senior BBC figures, however, always seem to go on to say that such bias, however regrettable, is 'historic', 'a thing of the past', and that the corporation is now getting it about right.

This weekend the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson has backed up Helen Boaden's admission of 'liberal' bias over immigration, telling The Sunday Times's Oliver Thring that the BBC made a "terrible mistake" in the late 1990s and early 2000s in its approach to the issue. However, following the pattern, he goes on to say that things are hunky-dory now:

“In public life, in politics and, I accept, historically at the BBC [we] didn’t have a warts-and-all ... debate about immigration.” Some people at the BBC “thought it would unleash some terrible side of the British public”. But the corporation is “now getting it right”, he says, and his programme should only encourage this.

Well, yes, I think things are a bit better now than they were in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, but then the BBC's behaviour at the time was truly terrible and it's a low base for comparison. You many recall the remarkable evidence of last year's Prebble Report about the behaviour of BBC employees during Radio 4's Any Answers:

According to a former producer of Any Answers? who worked on the programme ten years ago, people ringing in to the telephonists who act as a first filter for the programme would probably have found that, if they said they wanted to come on air and say immigration was too high or was harming the country, they would not make it through to the next filter and on to air.

Plus, I certainly don't agree that the BBC is getting it right now, however much some parts of the organisation may be trying. There are still plenty of signs that the squeamishness of the late 1990s and early 2000s is still manifesting itself across the BBC's output.  

It's 'three steps forward, two steps back' all the time, isn't it, with the BBC and their admissions of bias? 


Update 6/1: It's almost as if the Daily Mail reads this blog. Their editorial today seems strangely familiar!:

First came ex-director general Mark Thompson's admission that the BBC had a 'massive' Left-wing bias and, for years, had been 'very reticent' discussing immigration. 

Then, last year, it was the turn of outgoing head of news Helen Boaden to confess that the Corporation had a 'deep liberal bias' that prevented it from taking 'seriously' the views of campaign groups such as MigrationWatch.

Now BBC political editor Nick Robinson says his employer made a 'terrible mistake' in censoring the public's legitimate fears about the strain being put on British society by an unprecedented number of new arrivals. 

'We worried too much about airing views that might offend some viewers and listeners and not enough by the offence caused to people who did not hear their own concerns reflected on air,' he said yesterday. 

Unusually, Mr Robinson made his remarks while still in the prime of his BBC career. 

Normally executives are scurrying out of the door (with a large pay-off from the taxpayer) before they admit just how outrageously slanted their coverage of immigration and the EU had been. 

But what Mr Robinson has in common with his ex-colleagues is the utter delusion that such bias is all a thing of the past and the BBC 'has now changed'. 

Consider, for instance, how the Corporation gave excited blanket coverage two months ago to a heavily spun report by University College London, claiming that migrants have made a 'substantial' contribution to Britain's public finances.

Yet, when the UCL's own Emeritus Professor of Statistics warned last week that the research was 'fatally flawed', a BBC still dominated by liberal bien-pensant opinion did not report a word of it.

As with the Labour Party, we suspect the BBC's only real regret over immigration is that its shameful attempt to silence all public debate on the subject did not succeed.