Complaints from another side

Katy Searle

Something highly unusual and rather disconcerting happened on Radio 4's Feedback this week. Questions about BBC bias were put and a senior BBC editor repeated admitted that the BBC had got things wrong. 

I can't recall ever hearing such an interview before on Feedback - except over climate change, where various BBC editors have publicly confessed to the sin of not being hard enough on unbelievers like Nigel Lawson and Quentin Letts. 

Still, this interview was even more striking than those because the BBC editor in question - BBC Political News Editor Katy Searle - admitted error on the BBC's part not once, not twice but three times in the course of a single interview. 

That must be unprecedented.

The issue at hand was: Is the BBC biased against Jeremy Corbyn? 

Roger Bolton took the question very seriously indeed. 

The first Corbynista complaint was that TrainGate was a "non story" and that the BBC shouldn't have spent much time on it. Katy Searle rejected that particular complaint saying that TrainGate certainly was a significant story. (That's the one bit where she behaved like a typical BBC editor on Feedback).

The second Corbynista complaint was that an edition of The Week in Westminster had featured two Labour figures - Chris Mullen and Caroline Flint - discussing Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom said that Jeremy couldn't win an election. 'Why wasn't there a Corbyn supporter present?' was the question asked. Katy accepted that complaint and said, yes, on that occasion, more could have been done to find a Corbyn supporter. 

The third  Corbynista complaint was that the BBC has run "factually incorrect" stories about thuggish behaviour by Corbyn supporters, citing the BBC's reports about protests surrounding Stella Creasey that got where the protests happened wrong. Katy accepted that one too, saying, yes, a mistake was made there. "We" got it wrong, she said, adding. "In live broadcasting mistakes are made and I only think it's right we put our hands up to that".

A genuine new book

The fourth Corbynista complaint was that the BBC hasn't been reporting what Jeremy Corbyn has been saying at packed meeting up and down the country. Katy  rejected the idea that the BBC hasn't reported those meetings. However, she agreed that the BBC should talk more about the issues and said, "I would accept actually that we have done perhaps a little bit too much on the party leadership." 

Katy Searle was remarkably contrite and appealed, more than once, to Radio 4 listeners to believe that the BBC takes complaints about bias "very, very seriously": 

Any accusation or perception of bias is taken very seriously and I, on a day to day basis, look at what we're doing on output and make sure we correct that".

Isn't that something? 

Given all the years people like us have complained about BBC bias on issues of concern to us and got pretty much nowhere in terms of official concessions about, say, BBC pro-EU bias, or BBC pro-immigration bias, or BBC anti-Israel bias, etc, etc,...

...and given how often we've been told that single editions of ongoing programmes can't be taken as proof of bias but must be judged, bias-wise, over time and many episodes, and how often our side is excluded from discussion after discussion (or utterly overwhelmed numerically on programme after programme) without the slightest chance of an admission of bias from the BBC...

...and given how long and arduous the process of complaining about BBC bias usually is....

...isn't it then utterly remarkable how easily Katy Searle conceded those points to Roger Bolton and his Corbynista listeners, and just how apologetic she sounded?

We've had pretty much all such complaints dismissively waived away on programmes like Feedback and Newswatch for donkeys' years only now to find that the merest whiff of grapeshot from a few Momentum types has the BBC bowing and scraping.

As I say, a truly remarkable interview. 

Red Ken

Curiously, as Politics Home reports, the day before this edition of Feedback saw an intervention from far-left film director Ken Loach urging Jeremy Corbyn supporters to flood the BBC with complaints about bias. 

Speaking to a Corbynista gathering, Mr Loach twice read out the number of the BBC Complaints line and coached his audience on the dos and don'ts of complaining to the BBC. (He didn't mention Feedback though.)

“The BBC is an arm of the state. The BBC is not some objective chronicler of our time – it is an arm of the state,” he told them. “They have this pretence of objectivity where in fact it is propaganda on behalf of the broad interests of the state.".

Given the referential treatment he's usually accorded by the BBC (see Today here and The World Tonight here) "the state" seems happy about the BBC giving Ken Loach a platform. And yet he's not remotely grateful, is he?