Saturday morning reading

This morning's interesting BBC-related reading includes: 

Spectator: Ed West - Why do most children’s books have a liberal bias?

...and now only children's books. Ed now believes he's not losing the plot when he detects a liberal bias in today's children's TV. He's found that he's not alone. Contrasting the conservative values enshrined in Thomas the Tank Engine with the liberal messages enshrined in today's Mike the Knight on CBeebies, he suggests that today's children are being instilled with liberal values from a very early age - and that the BBC's in on it.

Spectator (£): Henry Jeffreys - Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies

This is how Ed knows he's not alone:

I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s programming since I was little. These young recyclers are from a show [on CBeebies] called Green Balloon Club, which is ostensibly a wildlife programme, but the song had more in common with one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea. It wasn’t education, it was propaganda.

Biased BBC: Alan - You’re either in front of Guido, or you’re behind…

A persuasive piece arguing that the BBC has allowed Labour's claims about the 'standards of living crisis' to go largely unchallenged thus allowing the party to dominate the agenda while relentless dissecting all the government's claims. 

Derek Bateman Broadcaster 1: Derek Bateman -  BBC Bias Update 

Former BBC Radio Scotland presenter (now pro-independence blogger) Derek updates his readers on how their complaints to the BBC about the report evidently showing a marked anti-independence bias at the BBC have been received by the man in charge of the BBC's editorial policy in Scotland. They are telling him that they've received "an automated response", which Derek calls "the BBC corporate equivalent of saying F**k Off."

BBC Watch: Hadar - Bowen on Sharon: what did BBC audiences learn?
Hadar outlines Jeremy Bowen's characteristically skewed reports about the late Ariel Sharon with her customary attention to detail. Is Jeremy Bowen biased? Do bears perform a bowel movement in the woods?