'Blairite @PCollinsTimes gets to defend the #BBC in a paper owned by #Murdoch' #thatllconfuseTwitter pic.twitter.com/8A4MOAmPZg— Ben Fuller (@politicsastar) 13 May 2016
To call the BBC biased is dangerously wrong
“Now that bias is the assumed vice of all media, I feel bound to confess how angry I used to be with Nick Robinson. Back in 2005, when I was in the Blair bunker, we were convinced that the BBC’s political editor was embedded with the Brown team. Day after day we were certain that BBC output was dictated verbatim by our sworn enemies. They may as well have let Ed Balls present the Ten O’Clock News. So when, during the 2015 election, the Scottish National party carried banners emblazoned with “The British Biased Corporation” and accused the estimable Robinson.....
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If you haven’t got a hard copy or a subscription to the Times you’ll have to take it from me that Philip Collins thinks the BBC is doing just fine. As you can see from the above free passage, he starts off by establishing his credentials. Having ‘been there, done that, seen it all before’ he feels he’s in a unique position to judge whether the BBC is biased. He sees things with a clarity that only a ‘born again’ can see. I once was blind but now can see.
Anyway, now we know. It is dangerously wrong to call the BBC biased. It’s too hot today to figure out what the actual danger is. Maybe it’s just a threat, like “There will be consequences”. Anyway, I’ll risk it.
I’ll call the BBC biased, but then I’m only an doing so on an obscure website, a bit like the one that was “established by people who support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.” Of course the comparison between our websites is only in terms of obscurity; nothing to do with calling for Laura Kuenssberg to be sacked. I think she’s perfectly entitled to be biased against Jeremy Corbyn as all normal people should jolly well be.
The thing is, I’m not unduly bothered by individual examples of political bias. The days when the BBC consistently turned a blind eye to Gordon Brown’s inadequacies are over. Things have improved.
Anyone who looks at Twitter can plainly see that most BBC staff are openly left-wing, but even so, Jeremy Corbyn and the Trots and antisemites have toxified the cause, to use one of the BBC’s less than impartial adjectives, usually reserved for Nigel Farage.
I think the public can see through that kind of bias. You can tell this through having ordinary conversations with ordinary people.
The bias that Philip Collins and others seem unaware of, and will remain unaware of if they never look at ‘obscure websites’, is of course the bias against Israel and Jews and to a lesser extent just recently, (post Rotherham) the BBC’s “blind eye” policy with regard to Islam and the unreconstructed mindset of many Pakistani Muslim immigrants, which should be a great embarrassment to them.
These biases are largely a matter of bias by omission. And what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
