David Keighley of News-watch has written about how the BBC's pro-immigration bias has long shown itself through "paying disproportionate attention to asylum seeker problems", and especially by "focusing on the bleeding heart cases of those who were trying to obtain asylum".
As 2015 got underway we detailed an extraordinary burst of pro-immigration BBC reporting in the closing weeks of 2014. From Today to The World Tonight, from Broadcasting House to the BBC News website, there was something of a tidal waves of immigration reports and specials. Each and every one of them included a heavy focus on the sad stories (or 'sob stories', as some might call them) of desperate immigrants seeking to reach our shores.
As we reach the end of January 2015, on it goes...
The latest BBC News website article on the subject [featured very prominently on the BBC's homepage] bears the loaded headline The huddled masses besieging Fortress Calais.
In it, BBC producer Darius Bazargan gives us the heart-tugging stories of several "desperate" illegal immigrants - all of which he recounts as fact (without attempting to verify their stories?). In his account, they all have good reasons to be on our doorstep (which, of course, they very well might).
And they are all people with skills [implication: the kind of skills we in the UK could benefit from]. There's a "gentle, well-educated" Sudanese engineer called Osman; a statistician from Syria called Mustafa; a video editor from Kabul called Ahmad; and an English teacher from Iran called Hussein. Quality people. No riff-raff.
They are having a terrible time of it in Calais, after all the terrible times they'd experienced before. Locals shout unfriendly things at them. "Far-right nationalists" are campaigning against them. It's enough to make your heart bleed.
"So what should we do with all of these skilled, desperate people on our own doorstep?", seems to be the unspoken question behind the article. The 'unspoken answer' being implied by Darius Bazargan's piece seems obvious: "We should let them in".
His half-hour documentary about Osman & Co. will be on the BBC News Channel at 9.30 pm tonight.
