Criticism of the BBC
Encyclopedia
The British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) has been criticized for various reasons, by the British government of the day, as well as from other political groups and various media outlets.
, although this finding was much disputed by the British press, who branded it as a government
whitewash
.
The BBC's chairman and director general both resigned following the inquiry, and its vice-chairman Lord Ryder made a public apology to the government – which the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker
MP described as "of such capitulation that I wanted to throw up when I heard it".
. The Centre for Policy Studies
has stated that, "Since at least the mid-1980s, the Corporation has often been criticised for a perceived bias against those on the centre-right of politics." Similar allegations have been made by past and present employees such as Antony Jay
,, North American editor Justin Webb
, former editor of the Today Programme
Rod Liddle
, former correspondent Robin Aitken
and Peter Sissons
, a veteran news anchor. Former political editor Andrew Marr
argues that the liberal bias of the BBC is the product of the types of people the Corporation employs, and is thus cultural not political.. In 2011 Mark Thompson
, the current BBC Director General, wrote, "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left." In 2011, Peter Oborne
wrote, "Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it [the BBC] ]has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite".
Accusations of a left-wing bias were often made against the Corporation by members of Margaret Thatcher
's 1980s Conservative government. Norman Tebbit
called the BBC the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation" because of what he regarded as its unpatriotic and neutral coverage of the Falklands War
, and Conservative MP Peter Bruinvels
called it the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation". Steve Barnett noted in The Observer
that "back in 1980, George Howard, the hunting, shooting and fishing aristocratic pal of Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, was appointed [BBC chairman] because Margaret Thatcher couldn't abide the thought of distinguished Liberal Mark Bonham-Carter being promoted from vice-chairman. "Then there was Stuart Young, accountant and brother of one of Thatcher's staunchest cabinet allies, who succeeded Howard in 1983. He was followed in 1986 by Marmaduke Hussey, brother-in-law of another Cabinet Minister who was plucked from the obscurity of a directorship at Rupert Murdoch's Times Newspapers. According to Norman Tebbit, then Tory party chairman, Hussey was appointed 'to get in there and sort the place out, and in days not months.'" But controversies continued with the likes of the Nationwide
general election special with Thatcher in 1983, a Panorama
documentary called Maggie's Militant Tendency, the Real Lives interview with Martin McGuinness
, the BBC's coverage of the United States' 1986 Bombing of Libya and the Zircon affair
. In 1987 Director-General of the BBC Alasdair Milne
was forced to resign. Thatcher later said: "I have fought three elections against the BBC and don't want to fight another against it." In 2006 Tebbit said: "The BBC was always against Lady Thatcher."
Speaking to journalists at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in 2009, Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Cabinet
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
, claimed that BBC News needed more Conservatives: "I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the Corporation tend to be from the centre-left. That's why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr
called an innate liberal bias."
In contrast, writer and journalist John Pilger
has frequently accused the BBC of a right-wing bias, a view shared by the left-wing Media Lens website. The editors' of Media Lens claim that the BBC acts to narrow the range of thought and like most commercial broadcasters it inherently portrays the opinions of the powerful. Former Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke
, has criticised the BBC as part of a "Westminster conspiracy" to maintain the British political system. The former Respect MP George Galloway
has referred to it as the "Bush and Blair Corporation".
, explained the thinking behind the seminar in an article in The Guardian
newspaper. He also announced in the same article a live stream of the seminar would be available on the BBC Governors' website. The stream was only available live and was not publicised on the main BBC or BBC News websites, causing some media reports, including in The Mail on Sunday
, to mistakenly claim that it was "secret". The full transcript of the seminar was released in June 2007.
In the seminar there was a hypothetical discussion including senior BBC executives about what they would allow controversial Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen
to throw into a dustbin on the satirical television show Room 101
. It was imagined that Baron Cohen would wish to throw into Room 101 kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury
, the Qur'an
, and the Bible. Most at the summit agreed that all would be permissible - except for the Qu'ran. There was also a hypothetical discussion about whether a Muslim BBC newsreader should be allowed to wear a headscarf.
In the seminar former BBC business editor Jeff Randall
claimed he was told by a senior news executive in the organisation that "The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism
: it believes in it and it promotes it." The Daily Mail
claimed in 2006 that Andrew Marr stated, "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay
people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias". These comments were reported in the UK national press a couple of weeks later. At the seminar Helen Boaden
(Director of BBC News) said that the BBC must be impartial on the issue of multiculturalism. Boaden responded to press criticism of the seminar in a post on the BBC's Editors' Blog. Mark Thompson responded to press criticism in an article in the Daily Mail, as did Mark Byford
in an interview in The Sunday Telegraph.
in 2008, Lenny Henry
said that ethnic minorities were "pitifully underserved" in television comedy and that little had changed at senior levels in terms of ethnic representation during his 32 years in television. Jimmy McGovern
in a 2007 interview called the BBC "one of the most racist institutions in England".
The BBC is striving for 12.5% of its staff to be from a black and minority ethnic background (12% at 31 January 2009). This is over 4% higher than the current percentage of ethnic minorities in the UK as a whole, though the BBC is largely based in urban areas with a more diverse demographic. However, it has been argued that much of its ethnic minority staff are cleaners and security guards and not presenters and programme makers.
that promoted the Make Poverty History
campaign. The bias was explained as the result of the BBC's liberal culture. A transcript of the impartiality seminar is included as a separately published appendix to the report available via the BBC Trust.
After press reports emerged that BBC employees had edited the Wikipedia
article's coverage of the report, the BBC issued new guidelines banning BBC staff from "sanitising" Wikipedia articles about the BBC.
, referred to as the Balen Report and completed in 2004. The BBC's refusal to release the report under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
resulted in a long-running and ongoing legal case. This led to speculation that the report was damning, as well as to accusations of hypocrisy, as the BBC frequently made use itself of Freedom of Information Act requests when researching news stories.
After the Balen report, the BBC appointed a committee chosen by the Governors and referred to by the BBC as an "independent panel report" to write a report for publication which was completed in 2006. The committee said that "apart from individual lapses, there was little to suggest deliberate or systematic bias" in the BBC's reporting of the middle east. However, their coverage had been "inconsistent," "not always providing a complete picture" and "misleading". Reflecting concerns from all sides of the conflict, the committee highlighted certain identifiable shortcomings and made four recommendations.
According to an article in The Independent
, the report suggested that BBC coverage in fact favoured the Israeli side. Martin Walker
, then the editor of United Press International
, agreed that the report implied favoritism towards Israel, but said this suggestion "produced mocking guffaws in my newsroom" and went on to list a number of episodes of (in his view) clear pro-Palestinian bias on the part of the BBC.
Former BBC middle east correspondent Tim Llewellyn wrote in 2004 that the BBC's coverage allowed an Israeli view of the conflict to dominate, as demonstrated by research conducted by the Glasgow Media Group
.
In the course of their "Documentary Campaign 2000-2004," Trevor Asserson, Cassie Williams and Lee Kern of BBCWatch published a series of reports The BBC And The Middle East stating in their opinion that "the BBC consistently fails to adhere to its legal obligations to produce impartial and accurate reporting."
Douglas Davis, the London
correspondent of The Jerusalem Post
, has accused the BBC of being anti-Israel
. He wrote that the BBC's coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is "a relentless, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as a demonic, criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors [which] bears all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign of vilification that, wittingly or not, has the effect of de-legitimising the Jewish state and pumping oxygen into a dark old European hatred that dared not speak its name for the past half-century."
"Anglicans for Israel
", the pro-Israel pressure group, have berated the BBC for apparent anti-Israel bias.
Writing in the Financial Times
, Philip Stephens, one of the panellists, later accused Mark Thompson of misrepresenting the panel's conclusions. He also stated, "My sense is that BBC news reporting has also lost a once iron-clad commitment to objectivity and a necessary respect for the democratic process. If I am right, the BBC, too, is lost." Thompson published a rebuttal in the Financial Times the following day.
The Daily Telegraph
has criticised the BBC for its coverage of the Middle East. In 2007, the newspaper wrote, "In its international and domestic news reporting, the corporation has consistently come across as naïve and partial, rather than sensitive and unbiased. Its reporting of Israel and Palestine, in particular, tends to underplay the hate-filled Islamist ideology that inspires Hamas and other factions, while never giving Israel the benefit of the doubt."
In 2008 the BBC was accused by the pro-Israel watchdog group CAMERA
of falsifying reports related to the aftermath of the Mercaz HaRav massacre
. The BBC later apologised for incorrectly showing footage that they had said showed one of the perpetrator's houses being demolished.
The BBC received particularly intense criticism in January 2009 for its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies on behalf of the people of Gaza during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict
, on the grounds that it could compromise the BBC's journalistic impartiality. A number of protesters asserted that this showed pro-Israeli bias, while some analysts suggested that the BBC's decision in this matter derived from its concern to avoid anti-Israeli bias as analysed in the Balen report. Many parties criticised the decision, including Church of England
archbishops, British government ministers and even some BBC employees. More than 11,000 complaints were filed in a three-day span. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
, protested the BBC's decision by cancelling interviews scheduled with the company; ElBaradei claimed the refusal to air the aid appeal "violates the rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is right or wrong."
i diplomatic officials boycotted BBC news programmes, refused interviews, and excluded BBC reporters from briefings because Israeli officials believed the BBC's reporting was biased, stating "the reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah instead of doing fair journalism." Francesca Unsworth, head of BBC News gathering, defended the coverage in an article for Jewish News.com.
, a senior editorial adviser.
Critics of the BBC claimed that the Balen Report includes evidence of bias against Israel in news programming. For examples, on 10 October 2006, The Daily Telegraph claimed that "The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage. The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism. The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming."
It has been alleged that the corporation paid £200,000 for this legal action. The Daily Mail called the BBC's blocking a Freedom of Information Act request "shameful hypocrisy", in light of the corporation's previous extensive use of Freedom of Information Act requests in its journalism.
On 27 April 2007 the High Court rejected Mr Steven Sugar's challenge to the Information Commissioner's decision. However, on 11 February 2009 the House of Lords (the UK's highest court) reinstated the Information Tribunal's decision to allow Sugar's appeal against the Information Commissioner's decision.
The BBC's press release following the High Court judgment included the following statement:
Sugar was reported after his success in the House of Lords as saying:
published a report on three complaints brought against two news items involving Jeremy Bowen
, the Middle East Editor for BBC News
. The complaints included 24 allegations of inaccuracy or impartiality of which three were fully or partially upheld. Parts of a news article were found to breach BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. Also, one statement in a radio broadcast was found to breach BBC guidelines on accuracy. The original website article was amended and Bowen did not face any disciplinary measures.
The Jerusalem Post
reported the story using the headline "Complaints of BBC bias partially upheld". However, the report did not accuse Bowen of bias. According to The Guardian, the problem was only that "Bowen should have used clearer language and been more precise in some aspects of the piece". Also, for the disputed claim in the radio broadcast, the committee accepted that Bowen had an authoritative source.
and Sikh
leaders in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of pandering to Britain's Muslim community by making a disproportionate number of programmes on Islam at the expense of covering other Asian religions.
In a letter sent in July to the Network of Sikh Organizations (NSO), the head of the BBC's Religion and Ethics, Michael Wakelin, denied any biases on their part. A spokesman for the BBC said the broadcaster was committed to representing all of Britain's faiths and communities.
However, a number of MPs, including Rob Marris
and Keith Vaz
, called on the BBC to do more to represent Britain's minority faiths. "I am disappointed," said Mr Vaz. "It is only right that as licence fee payers all faiths are represented in a way that mirrors their make-up in society. I hope that the BBC addresses the problem in its next year of programming."
. Rediff reporter Arindam Banerji has chronicled what he argues are numerous cases of Indophobic bias from the BBC regarding reportage, selection bias, misrepresentation, and fabrications. Hindu
groups in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of anti-Hindu
bigotry and whitewashing Islamist hate groups that demonise the British Indian
minority
In protest against the use of the word "gunmen" by the BBC, journalist Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar
refused to take part in an interview following the Mumbai terror attacks. British parliamentarian Stephen Pound has supported these claims, referring to the BBC's whitewashing of the terror attacks as "the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone."
Writing for The Hindu
Business Line, reporter Premen Addy criticises the BBC's reportage on South Asia as consistently anti-India and pro-Islamist, and that they underreport India's economic and social achievements, as well as political and diplomatic efforts, and disproportionately highlight and exaggerate problems in the country. In addition, Addy alludes to discrimination
against Indian anchors and reporters in favor of Pakistan
i and Bangladesh
i ones who are hostile to India.
Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyzes the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war
, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist
stance.
correspondent Justin Webb
said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford
had secretly agreed to help him to "correct" it in his reports, and that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it "no moral weight".
In April 2007, Webb presented a three part series for BBC Radio 4 called Death To America: Anti Americanism Examined in which he challenged a common perception of the United States as an international bully and a modern day imperial power.
American news commentator Bill O'Reilly
has repeatedly sought to draw attention to what he calls the BBCs "inherent liberal culture."
MP John Redwood
's policy group's deregulation
proposals. Prominent political blogger Iain Dale
criticised the organisation for leading news reports with the Labour Party
's response to the proposals, rather than the proposals themselves, and claimed the BBC was "doing Labour's dirty work". The BBC denied the charge.
British newspaper The Sun
also alleged the BBC reports showed bias, criticising the organisation for including embarrassing footage of John Redwood badly singing the Welsh national anthem from the early 1990s. The paper argued that the coverage "was a mockery of impartial journalism" and "could have been scripted by Labour ministers". The BBC later apologised, but denied showing bias.
British National Party
where undercover reporter Jason Gwynne
infiltrated the BNP by posing as a football hooligan. The programme resulted in Mark Collett
and Nick Griffin
, the leader of the party, being charged for inciting racial hatred
in April 2005, for statements which included Griffin describing Islam
as a "wicked, vicious faith," Collett describing asylum seekers as "a little bit like cockroaches" and saying "let's show these ethnics the door in 2004." Griffin and Collett were found not guilty on some charges at the first trial in January 2006, but the jury failed to reach a verdict on the others, so a retrial was ordered. At the retrial held in November 2006 all of the defendants were found not guilty on the basis that the law at the time did not consider those who follow Islam or Christianity to be a protected group with respect to racial defamation laws. Shortly after this case, British law was amended to outlaw incitement to hatred against a religious group (see Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
).
The BNP believe this was an attempt to "Discredit the British National Party as a party of opposition to the Labour government."
After the second trial, Nick Griffin described the BBC as a "Politically correct, politically biased organisation which has wasted licence-fee payers' money to bring two people in a legal, democratic, peaceful party to court over speaking nothing more than the truth."
broadcast on 30 October 2004, Plett described herself crying when she saw a frail Yasser Arafat
being evacuated to France for medical treatment. This led to "hundreds of complaints" to the BBC, and suggestions that the BBC was biased. BBC News
defended Plett in a statement saying that her reporting had met the high standards of "fairness, accuracy and balance" expected of a BBC correspondent. Initially, a complaint of bias against Plett was rejected by the BBC's head of editorial complaints. However, almost a year later, on November 25, 2005, the programme complaints committee of the BBC governors partially upheld the complaints, ruling that Plett’s comments “breached the requirements of due impartiality”. Despite initially issuing a statement in support of Plett, the BBC director of news Helen Boaden
later apologised for what she described as "an editorial misjudgment". The governors praised Boaden's speedy response and reviewed the BBC's stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
.
, ultimately resulting in around 55,000 complaints to the BBC from those upset at the opera's alleged blasphemies against the Christian religion. In advance of the broadcast, which the BBC had warned "contains language and content which won't be to some tastes" mediawatch-uk
's director John Beyer wrote to the Director General urging the BBC to drop the programme, saying "Licence fee payers do not expect the BBC to be pushing back boundaries of taste and decency in this way." The BBC issued a statement saying: "As a public service broadcaster, it is the BBC's role to broadcast a range of programmes that will appeal to all audiences - with very differing tastes and interests - present in the UK today." Before the broadcast, some 150 people bearing placards protested outside the BBC Television Centre
in Shepherd's Bush
. On the Monday following the broadcast, which was watched by some two million viewers, The Times
announced that BBC executives had received death threats after their addresses and telephone numbers were posted on the Christian Voice
website. The Corporation had received some 35,000 complaints before the broadcast, but reported only 350 calls following the broadcast, which were split between those praising the production and those complaining about it.
One Christian group attempted to bring private criminal prosecutions for blasphemy
against the BBC, and another demanded a judicial review of the decision.
In March 2005, the BBC's Board of Governors
convened and considered the complaints, which they rejected by a majority of 4 to 1. The subsequent refusal of the BBC to reproduce the actual Muhammad cartoons in its coverage of the controversy concerning them convinced many that the BBC follows an unstated policy of freely broadcasting defamation of Christianity which it would not allow in the case of any other religion.
, in view of the amount of coverage it gives to the topic of climate change. Newsnight
presenter Jeremy Paxman
argues that the Corporation's correspondents "travel the globe to tell the audience of the dangers of climate change while leaving a vapour trail which will make the problem even worse". Paxman further argues that the 'BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago'.
At the 2007 Edinburgh International Television Festival
, Peter Horrocks
(Head of TV News) and Peter Barron
(Editor, Newsnight
), said that the BBC should not campaign on the issue of climate change. They criticised proposed plans for a BBC Comic Relief style day of programmes around climate change. Horrocks was quoted as saying: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it."
Peter Barron was quoted as adding: "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. I think there are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped."
Peter Horrocks later outlined the BBC's position on the BBC Editors Blog ("No Line").
The plans for a day of programmes about environmental issues were abandoned in September 2007. A BBC spokesperson said this was "absolutely not" because of concerns about impartiality.
In January 2011, broadcast journalist Peter Sissons
told the Daily Mail
that "the BBC became a propaganda
machine for climate change zealots...and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent".
was formed in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse
to "clean up" the BBC, claiming that it "was responsible for the moral collapse in the country".
A 2010 House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report criticised the number of staff that the BBC had sent to sporting events such as the Beijing Olympics and the Euro 2008 football championships. In June 2011 the Corporation sent 263 staff to cover the Glastonbury Festival
. The next month they sent 250 staff members to cover an event marking one year until the start of the London 2012 Olympics, ten times the numbers used by other broadcasters. On 19 October 2011 the Liberal Democrats
' culture spokesman Don Foster
criticised the large number of BBC staff members who attended the eviction of travellers and their supporters from the illegal section of the Dale Farm
site. Foster stated that it was 'ludicrous over staffing and hardly good way to get public sympathy for the 20 per cent budget cuts facing the BBC'. The BBC responded that they only had 20 staff members on site.
fees is criticised by its competitors and others on a number of grounds.
would be dropped, leaving only medium and short wave broadcasts in Russia. Financial organisation Finam, which owns the FM radio service now dropping the BBC Russia broadcasts, through its spokesman Igor Ermachenkov, said that "Any media which is government-financed is propaganda
- it's a fact, it's not negative". A spokesman, for the BBC responded: "Although the BBC is funded by the UK government... a fundamental principle of its constitution and its regulatory regime is that it is editorially independent of the UK government." Reports put the development in the context of criticism of the Russian government for curbing media freedom and strained UK-Russian relations. Reporters Without Borders
condemned the move as censorship.
, the Plaid Cymru
MP
, highlighted what he perceived as a lack of a Welsh focus on BBC news broadcasts
. Price threatened to withhold future television licence
fees in response to a lack of thorough news coverage of Wales, echoing a BBC Audience Council for Wales July report citing public frustration over how the Welsh Assembly is characterised in national media. Plaid AM Bethan Jenkins
agreed with Price and called for responsibility for broadcasting to be devolved to the Welsh Assembly, voicing similar calls from Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond
. Criticism of the BBC's news coverage for Wales and Scotland since devolution prompted debate of possibly providing evening news broadcasts with specific focus for both countries.
have been made by many observers:
The privately owned BBC began in 1922. Its employee general manager was John Reith
(knighted 1926, created 1st Baron Reith 1940), who stated that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a General Strike and the Conservative Government feared the outbreak of revolution, as had happened in Russia so very recently. Labour Party politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald
and Philip Snowden criticized the BBC for being pro-Government and anti-Unions; however, throughout the strike, Reith insisted that the news bulletins report all sides of the dispute without comment. Reith's attempts to broadcast statements by the Labour Party and TUC leaders were blocked by the Government; in partial response, he personally vetoed a statement
that Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, wished to make, in the belief that allowing such a statement would give Winston Churchill
both motive and opportunity to take over the BBC- something for which Churchill had continually antagonized since the beginning of the Strike. Despite admitting to his staff that he would have preferred to allow the Labour and TUC leaders to broadcast directly, Reith's stance was vindicated by a post-Strike analysis carried out by the BBC's Programme Correspondence Department: of those polled, 3,696 commended the BBC's coverage, whilst 176 where critical.
Since 1927, arguments over actual impartiality at the BBC have been ongoing. Prior to World War II, Sir John Reith, in breach of his public duties and obligations, excluded Winston Churchill from the BBC airwaves. In 1927, under a Royal Charter, the BBC became a public entity for the first time - with requirements including the need for impartiality and for staff not to be expressing opinions on controversial subject matters.
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
(BBC) has been criticized for various reasons, by the British government of the day, as well as from other political groups and various media outlets.
Iraq and the Hutton Inquiry
The BBC was criticised for its coverage of the events before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The controversy over what it described as the "sexing up" of the case for war in Iraq by the government, led to the BBC being heavily criticised by the Hutton InquiryHutton Inquiry
The Hutton Inquiry was a 2003 judicial inquiry in the UK chaired by Lord Hutton, who was appointed by the Labour government to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, a biological warfare expert and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq.On 18 July 2003, Kelly, an employee...
, although this finding was much disputed by the British press, who branded it as a government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
whitewash
Whitewash (censorship)
To whitewash is a metaphor meaning to gloss over or cover up vices, crimes or scandals or to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data. It is especially used in the context of corporations, governments or other organizations.- Etymology :Its first...
.
The BBC's chairman and director general both resigned following the inquiry, and its vice-chairman Lord Ryder made a public apology to the government – which the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker
Norman Baker
Norman John Baker is a British Liberal Democrat politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Lewes in East Sussex since 1997. Since May 2010 he has been Parliamentary Under Secretary for the Department for Transport....
MP described as "of such capitulation that I wanted to throw up when I heard it".
Political bias
BBC News forms a major department of the Corporation, and regularly receives complaints of bias, mostly of being overly left-wing, while some on the left criticise the BBC for being part of the establishmentThe Establishment
The Establishment is a term used to refer to a visible dominant group or elite that holds power or authority in a nation. The term suggests a closed social group which selects its own members...
. The Centre for Policy Studies
Centre for Policy Studies
The Centre for Policy Studies is a British right wing policy think tank whose goal is to promote coherent and practical public policy, to roll back the state, reform public services, support communities, and challenge threats to Britain’s independence...
has stated that, "Since at least the mid-1980s, the Corporation has often been criticised for a perceived bias against those on the centre-right of politics." Similar allegations have been made by past and present employees such as Antony Jay
Antony Jay
Sir Antony Rupert Jay, CVO, is an English writer, broadcaster, director, and actor famous for the co-authorship, with Jonathan Lynn, of the successful British political comedies Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister...
,, North American editor Justin Webb
Justin Webb
Justin Oliver Webb is a British journalist who has worked for the BBC since 1984. Since August 2009, he has presented on the Today programme.-Early life:...
, former editor of the Today Programme
Today programme
Today is BBC Radio 4's long-running early morning news and current affairs programme, now broadcast from 6.00 am to 9.00 am Monday to Friday, and 7.00 am to 9.00 am on Saturdays. It is also the most popular programme on Radio 4 and one of the BBC's most popular programmes across its radio networks...
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle
Roderick E. L. Liddle is an English print, radio, and television journalist.He is an associate editor of The Spectator, and former editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he is the author of Too Beautiful for You , Love Will Destroy Everything , and co-author of The Best of Liddle Britain...
, former correspondent Robin Aitken
Robin Aitken
Robin Aitken is a British journalist who for many years worked for the BBC. He wrote a book alleging liberal and left-wing bias at the BBC. He has held a seminar on this subject at the Thomas More Institute.-External links:...
and Peter Sissons
Peter Sissons
Peter George Sissons is a broadcast journalist in the United Kingdom. He was the presenter of the BBC Nine O'Clock News and the BBC News at Ten between 1993 and 2003, as earlier a newscaster for ITN, providing bulletins on ITV and Channel 4. He is also a former presenter of the BBC's Question Time...
, a veteran news anchor. Former political editor Andrew Marr
Andrew Marr
Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a Scottish journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years until May 1998, and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 until 2005....
argues that the liberal bias of the BBC is the product of the types of people the Corporation employs, and is thus cultural not political.. In 2011 Mark Thompson
Mark Thompson
Mark John Thompson is Director-General of the BBC, a post he has held since 2004, and a former chief executive of Channel 4...
, the current BBC Director General, wrote, "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left." In 2011, Peter Oborne
Peter Oborne
Peter Oborne is a British journalist and political commentator. He was educated at Sherborne School and The University of Cambridge. He is a Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph columnist, author of The Rise of Political Lying and The Triumph of the Political Class, and, with Frances Weaver, the...
wrote, "Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it [the BBC] ]has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite".
Accusations of a left-wing bias were often made against the Corporation by members of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
's 1980s Conservative government. Norman Tebbit
Norman Tebbit
Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit, CH, PC , is a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he served in the Cabinet from 1981 to 1987 as Secretary of State for Employment...
called the BBC the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation" because of what he regarded as its unpatriotic and neutral coverage of the Falklands War
Falklands War
The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...
, and Conservative MP Peter Bruinvels
Peter Bruinvels
Peter Nigel Edward Bruinvels is a British Conservative Party politician.Surrey-born, he was educated at St. John's School, Leatherhead, an independent school...
called it the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation". Steve Barnett noted in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
that "back in 1980, George Howard, the hunting, shooting and fishing aristocratic pal of Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, was appointed [BBC chairman] because Margaret Thatcher couldn't abide the thought of distinguished Liberal Mark Bonham-Carter being promoted from vice-chairman. "Then there was Stuart Young, accountant and brother of one of Thatcher's staunchest cabinet allies, who succeeded Howard in 1983. He was followed in 1986 by Marmaduke Hussey, brother-in-law of another Cabinet Minister who was plucked from the obscurity of a directorship at Rupert Murdoch's Times Newspapers. According to Norman Tebbit, then Tory party chairman, Hussey was appointed 'to get in there and sort the place out, and in days not months.'" But controversies continued with the likes of the Nationwide
Nationwide (TV series)
Nationwide was a BBC News and Current affairs television programme broadcast on BBC One each weekday following the early evening news. It followed a magazine format, combining political analysis and discussion with consumer affairs, light entertainment and sports reporting...
general election special with Thatcher in 1983, a Panorama
Panorama (TV series)
Panorama is a BBC Television current affairs documentary programme, which was first broadcast in 1953, and is the longest-running public affairs television programme in the world. Panorama has been presented by many well known BBC presenters, including Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day, David Dimbleby...
documentary called Maggie's Militant Tendency, the Real Lives interview with Martin McGuinness
Martin McGuinness
James Martin Pacelli McGuinness is an Irish Sinn Féin politician and the current deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. McGuinness was also the Sinn Féin candidate for the Irish presidential election, 2011. He was born in Derry, Northern Ireland....
, the BBC's coverage of the United States' 1986 Bombing of Libya and the Zircon affair
Zircon affair
The Zircon affair was an incident in 1986 that raised many important issues in the British constitution.During the winter of 1985–1986, journalist Duncan Campbell was commissioned by the BBC to make six half-hour television documentaries under the title Secret Society...
. In 1987 Director-General of the BBC Alasdair Milne
Alasdair Milne
Alasdair David Gordon Milne is a former BBC producer who became Controller of BBC Scotland, the BBC's Director of Programmes and then Director-General of the BBC in July 1982. His resignation was forced by the BBC Governors in January 1987, following pressure from the Thatcher government...
was forced to resign. Thatcher later said: "I have fought three elections against the BBC and don't want to fight another against it." In 2006 Tebbit said: "The BBC was always against Lady Thatcher."
Speaking to journalists at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in 2009, Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Cabinet
Shadow Cabinet
The Shadow Cabinet is a senior group of opposition spokespeople in the Westminster system of government who together under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition form an alternative cabinet to the government's, whose members shadow or mark each individual member of the government...
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport is a United Kingdom cabinet position with responsibility for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The role was created in 1992 by John Major as Secretary of State for National Heritage...
, claimed that BBC News needed more Conservatives: "I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the Corporation tend to be from the centre-left. That's why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr
Andrew Marr
Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a Scottish journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years until May 1998, and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 until 2005....
called an innate liberal bias."
In contrast, writer and journalist John Pilger
John Pilger
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US....
has frequently accused the BBC of a right-wing bias, a view shared by the left-wing Media Lens website. The editors' of Media Lens claim that the BBC acts to narrow the range of thought and like most commercial broadcasters it inherently portrays the opinions of the powerful. Former Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke
Greg Dyke
Gregory "Greg" Dyke is a British media executive, journalist and broadcaster. Since the 1960s, Dyke has a long career in the UK in print and then broadcast journalism. He is credited with introducing 'tabloid' television to British broadcasting, and reviving the ratings of TV-am...
, has criticised the BBC as part of a "Westminster conspiracy" to maintain the British political system. The former Respect MP George Galloway
George Galloway
George Galloway is a British politician, author, journalist and broadcaster who was a Member of Parliament from 1987 to 2010. He was formerly an MP for the Labour Party, first for Glasgow Hillhead and later for Glasgow Kelvin, before his expulsion from the party in October 2003, the same year...
has referred to it as the "Bush and Blair Corporation".
Political correctness
On Friday 22 September 2006 the BBC's Board of Governors held an impartiality seminar which was streamed live on the internet. The previous day the then Chairman of the Governors, Michael GradeMichael Grade
Michael Ian Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth CBE is a British broadcast executive and businessman. He was BBC chairman from 2004 to 2006 and executive chairman of ITV plc from 2007 to 2009.-Early life:...
, explained the thinking behind the seminar in an article in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper. He also announced in the same article a live stream of the seminar would be available on the BBC Governors' website. The stream was only available live and was not publicised on the main BBC or BBC News websites, causing some media reports, including in The Mail on Sunday
The Mail on Sunday
The Mail on Sunday is a British conservative newspaper, currently published in a tabloid format. First published in 1982 by Lord Rothermere, it became Britain's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper following the closing of The News of the World in July 2011...
, to mistakenly claim that it was "secret". The full transcript of the seminar was released in June 2007.
In the seminar there was a hypothetical discussion including senior BBC executives about what they would allow controversial Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Noam Baron Cohen is an English stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and voice artist. He is most widely known for his portrayal of three unorthodox fictional characters: Ali G, Borat, and Brüno...
to throw into a dustbin on the satirical television show Room 101
Room 101 (TV series)
Room 101 is a BBC comedy television series based on the radio series of the same name, in which celebrities were invited to discuss their pet hates and persuade the host to consign them to a fate worse than death in Room 101, named after the torture room in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is...
. It was imagined that Baron Cohen would wish to throw into Room 101 kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...
, the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
, and the Bible. Most at the summit agreed that all would be permissible - except for the Qu'ran. There was also a hypothetical discussion about whether a Muslim BBC newsreader should be allowed to wear a headscarf.
In the seminar former BBC business editor Jeff Randall
Jeff Randall
Jeff Randall is a fictional character played by Mike Pratt in the original private detective series, Randall and Hopkirk from 1969 to 1971 and by Bob Mortimer in the BBC remake...
claimed he was told by a senior news executive in the organisation that "The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
: it believes in it and it promotes it." The Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
claimed in 2006 that Andrew Marr stated, "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias". These comments were reported in the UK national press a couple of weeks later. At the seminar Helen Boaden
Helen Boaden
Helen Boaden is the director of BBC News, part of the world’s biggest broadcast news operation . Boaden controls much of the BBC's domestic news output along with current affairs, including programmes such as Newsnight and Panorama.-Education:Boaden attended Colchester County High School for Girls...
(Director of BBC News) said that the BBC must be impartial on the issue of multiculturalism. Boaden responded to press criticism of the seminar in a post on the BBC's Editors' Blog. Mark Thompson responded to press criticism in an article in the Daily Mail, as did Mark Byford
Mark Byford
Mark Byford was Deputy Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation and head of BBC Journalism from 2004-2011. He chaired the BBC Journalism Board and had overall responsibility for the world’s largest and most trusted news organisation, and all its radio, television and interactive...
in an interview in The Sunday Telegraph.
Racism
The BBC has also been accused of racism. In a speech to the Royal Television SocietyRoyal Television Society
The Royal Television Society is a British-based educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present and future. It is the oldest television society in the world...
in 2008, Lenny Henry
Lenny Henry
Lenworth George "Lenny" Henry, is a British actor, writer, comedian and occasional television presenter.- Early life :...
said that ethnic minorities were "pitifully underserved" in television comedy and that little had changed at senior levels in terms of ethnic representation during his 32 years in television. Jimmy McGovern
Jimmy McGovern
Jimmy McGovern is a BAFTA award-winning English television scriptwriter from Liverpool.-Early career:McGovern started his career working on Channel 4's soap opera Brookside in 1982, tackling many social issues such as unemployment.-Successes:...
in a 2007 interview called the BBC "one of the most racist institutions in England".
The BBC is striving for 12.5% of its staff to be from a black and minority ethnic background (12% at 31 January 2009). This is over 4% higher than the current percentage of ethnic minorities in the UK as a whole, though the BBC is largely based in urban areas with a more diverse demographic. However, it has been argued that much of its ethnic minority staff are cleaners and security guards and not presenters and programme makers.
"Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century"
A report commissioned by the BBC Trust, Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century, published in June 2007, stressed that the BBC needed to take more care in being impartial. It said the BBC broke its own guidelines by screening an episode of The Vicar of DibleyThe Vicar of Dibley
The Vicar of Dibley is a British sitcom created by Richard Curtis and written for its lead actress, Dawn French, by Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, with contributions from Kit Hesketh-Harvey. It aired from 1994 to 2007...
that promoted the Make Poverty History
Make Poverty History
Make Poverty History is the name of a campaign that exists in a number of countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark , Finland, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain and Ireland...
campaign. The bias was explained as the result of the BBC's liberal culture. A transcript of the impartiality seminar is included as a separately published appendix to the report available via the BBC Trust.
After press reports emerged that BBC employees had edited the Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
article's coverage of the report, the BBC issued new guidelines banning BBC staff from "sanitising" Wikipedia articles about the BBC.
Israel / Palestine conflict
Criticism of the BBC's Middle East coverage from supporters of both Israel and Palestine led the BBC to commission an investigation and report from a senior broadcast journalist Malcolm BalenMalcolm Balen
Malcolm Balen is the BBC's senior editorial adviser and author of the controversial Balen Report. He has previously edited the 9 o'Clock News, Channel 4 News and been Head of News at LNN....
, referred to as the Balen Report and completed in 2004. The BBC's refusal to release the report under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
Freedom of Information Act 2000
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 is an Act of Parliament of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that creates a public "right of access" to information held by public authorities. It is the implementation of freedom of information legislation in the United Kingdom on a national level...
resulted in a long-running and ongoing legal case. This led to speculation that the report was damning, as well as to accusations of hypocrisy, as the BBC frequently made use itself of Freedom of Information Act requests when researching news stories.
After the Balen report, the BBC appointed a committee chosen by the Governors and referred to by the BBC as an "independent panel report" to write a report for publication which was completed in 2006. The committee said that "apart from individual lapses, there was little to suggest deliberate or systematic bias" in the BBC's reporting of the middle east. However, their coverage had been "inconsistent," "not always providing a complete picture" and "misleading". Reflecting concerns from all sides of the conflict, the committee highlighted certain identifiable shortcomings and made four recommendations.
According to an article in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, the report suggested that BBC coverage in fact favoured the Israeli side. Martin Walker
Martin Walker (reporter)
Martin Walker is the Senior Director of the Global Business Policy Council . He has been a part of the GBPC since 1997 and was appointed as the Senior Director on January 25, 2007-Life:...
, then the editor of United Press International
United Press International
United Press International is a once-major international news agency, whose newswires, photo, news film and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations for most of the twentieth century...
, agreed that the report implied favoritism towards Israel, but said this suggestion "produced mocking guffaws in my newsroom" and went on to list a number of episodes of (in his view) clear pro-Palestinian bias on the part of the BBC.
Former BBC middle east correspondent Tim Llewellyn wrote in 2004 that the BBC's coverage allowed an Israeli view of the conflict to dominate, as demonstrated by research conducted by the Glasgow Media Group
Glasgow Media Group
The Glasgow Media Group, also known as Glasgow University Media Group, is a leading group of media researchers based in Glasgow, Scotland, who pioneered the analysis of television news in a series of studies starting in 1976 with Bad News...
.
In the course of their "Documentary Campaign 2000-2004," Trevor Asserson, Cassie Williams and Lee Kern of BBCWatch published a series of reports The BBC And The Middle East stating in their opinion that "the BBC consistently fails to adhere to its legal obligations to produce impartial and accurate reporting."
Douglas Davis, the London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
correspondent of The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post is an Israeli daily English-language broadsheet newspaper, founded on December 1, 1932 by Gershon Agron as The Palestine Post. The daily readership numbers do not approach those of the major Hebrew newspapers....
, has accused the BBC of being anti-Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. He wrote that the BBC's coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is "a relentless, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as a demonic, criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors [which] bears all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign of vilification that, wittingly or not, has the effect of de-legitimising the Jewish state and pumping oxygen into a dark old European hatred that dared not speak its name for the past half-century."
"Anglicans for Israel
Anglicans for Israel
Anglican Friends of Israel is a pressure group that aims to move the Church of England and other Christian groups into a position that is friendly towards Israel. The director is a London solicitor, Simon McIlwaine, and the campaign director is the Conservative activist Huw Shooter. Technologist...
", the pro-Israel pressure group, have berated the BBC for apparent anti-Israel bias.
Writing in the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
, Philip Stephens, one of the panellists, later accused Mark Thompson of misrepresenting the panel's conclusions. He also stated, "My sense is that BBC news reporting has also lost a once iron-clad commitment to objectivity and a necessary respect for the democratic process. If I am right, the BBC, too, is lost." Thompson published a rebuttal in the Financial Times the following day.
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
has criticised the BBC for its coverage of the Middle East. In 2007, the newspaper wrote, "In its international and domestic news reporting, the corporation has consistently come across as naïve and partial, rather than sensitive and unbiased. Its reporting of Israel and Palestine, in particular, tends to underplay the hate-filled Islamist ideology that inspires Hamas and other factions, while never giving Israel the benefit of the doubt."
In 2008 the BBC was accused by the pro-Israel watchdog group CAMERA
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...
of falsifying reports related to the aftermath of the Mercaz HaRav massacre
Mercaz HaRav massacre
The Mercaz HaRav massacre, also called the Mercaz HaRav shooting, was an attack that occurred on 6 March 2008, in which a lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, after which the gunman himself was shot dead. Eight students...
. The BBC later apologised for incorrectly showing footage that they had said showed one of the perpetrator's houses being demolished.
The BBC received particularly intense criticism in January 2009 for its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies on behalf of the people of Gaza during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict
2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict
The Gaza War, known as Operation Cast Lead in Israel and as the Gaza Massacre in the Arab world, was a three-week bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel, and hundreds of rocket attacks on south of Israel which...
, on the grounds that it could compromise the BBC's journalistic impartiality. A number of protesters asserted that this showed pro-Israeli bias, while some analysts suggested that the BBC's decision in this matter derived from its concern to avoid anti-Israeli bias as analysed in the Balen report. Many parties criticised the decision, including Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
archbishops, British government ministers and even some BBC employees. More than 11,000 complaints were filed in a three-day span. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
International Atomic Energy Agency
The International Atomic Energy Agency is an international organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to inhibit its use for any military purpose, including nuclear weapons. The IAEA was established as an autonomous organization on 29 July 1957...
, protested the BBC's decision by cancelling interviews scheduled with the company; ElBaradei claimed the refusal to air the aid appeal "violates the rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is right or wrong."
2006 Lebanon War
During the 2006 Lebanon War, IsraelIsrael
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i diplomatic officials boycotted BBC news programmes, refused interviews, and excluded BBC reporters from briefings because Israeli officials believed the BBC's reporting was biased, stating "the reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah instead of doing fair journalism." Francesca Unsworth, head of BBC News gathering, defended the coverage in an article for Jewish News.com.
The Balen Report
The BBC is seeking to overturn a ruling by the Information Tribunal rejecting the BBC's refusal to release the Balen report to a member of the public under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that it was held for the purposes of journalism. The report examines BBC radio and television broadcasts covering the Arab-Israeli conflict and was compiled in 2004 by Malcolm BalenMalcolm Balen
Malcolm Balen is the BBC's senior editorial adviser and author of the controversial Balen Report. He has previously edited the 9 o'Clock News, Channel 4 News and been Head of News at LNN....
, a senior editorial adviser.
Critics of the BBC claimed that the Balen Report includes evidence of bias against Israel in news programming. For examples, on 10 October 2006, The Daily Telegraph claimed that "The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage. The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism. The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming."
It has been alleged that the corporation paid £200,000 for this legal action. The Daily Mail called the BBC's blocking a Freedom of Information Act request "shameful hypocrisy", in light of the corporation's previous extensive use of Freedom of Information Act requests in its journalism.
On 27 April 2007 the High Court rejected Mr Steven Sugar's challenge to the Information Commissioner's decision. However, on 11 February 2009 the House of Lords (the UK's highest court) reinstated the Information Tribunal's decision to allow Sugar's appeal against the Information Commissioner's decision.
The BBC's press release following the High Court judgment included the following statement:
"The BBC's action in this case had nothing to do with the fact that the Balen report was about the Middle East - the same approach would have been taken whatever area of news output was covered."
Sugar was reported after his success in the House of Lords as saying:
"It is sad that the BBC felt it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money fighting for three years to try to load the system against those requesting information from it. I am very pleased that the House of Lords has ruled that such obvious unfairness is not the result of the Act."
Jeremy Bowen
In April 2009, the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC TrustBBC Trust
The BBC Trust is the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is operationally independent of BBC management and external bodies, and aims to act in the best interests of licence fee payers....
published a report on three complaints brought against two news items involving Jeremy Bowen
Jeremy Bowen
Jeremy Francis John Bowen is a Welsh journalist and television presenter. He was the BBC's Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem between 1995 and 2000, and has been its Middle East Editor since 2005.-Background:...
, the Middle East Editor for BBC News
BBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
. The complaints included 24 allegations of inaccuracy or impartiality of which three were fully or partially upheld. Parts of a news article were found to breach BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. Also, one statement in a radio broadcast was found to breach BBC guidelines on accuracy. The original website article was amended and Bowen did not face any disciplinary measures.
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post is an Israeli daily English-language broadsheet newspaper, founded on December 1, 1932 by Gershon Agron as The Palestine Post. The daily readership numbers do not approach those of the major Hebrew newspapers....
reported the story using the headline "Complaints of BBC bias partially upheld". However, the report did not accuse Bowen of bias. According to The Guardian, the problem was only that "Bowen should have used clearer language and been more precise in some aspects of the piece". Also, for the disputed claim in the radio broadcast, the committee accepted that Bowen had an authoritative source.
Pro-Muslim bias
HinduHindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
and Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
leaders in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of pandering to Britain's Muslim community by making a disproportionate number of programmes on Islam at the expense of covering other Asian religions.
In a letter sent in July to the Network of Sikh Organizations (NSO), the head of the BBC's Religion and Ethics, Michael Wakelin, denied any biases on their part. A spokesman for the BBC said the broadcaster was committed to representing all of Britain's faiths and communities.
However, a number of MPs, including Rob Marris
Rob Marris
Robert Howard Marris is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West from 2001 to 2010....
and Keith Vaz
Keith Vaz
Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz, known as Keith Vaz, was born 26 November 1956 in Aden, Yemen.Keith Vaz is a British Labour Party politician and a Member of Parliament for Leicester East, He is the longest serving Asian MP and has been the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee since July...
, called on the BBC to do more to represent Britain's minority faiths. "I am disappointed," said Mr Vaz. "It is only right that as licence fee payers all faiths are represented in a way that mirrors their make-up in society. I hope that the BBC addresses the problem in its next year of programming."
Indophobia
In 2008, the BBC was criticised by some for referring to the men who carried out the November 2008 Mumbai attacks as "gunmen" rather than "terrorists". This follows a steady stream of complaints from India that the BBC has an Indophobic bias that stems from a culturally ingrained racism against Indians arising from the British RajBritish Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
. Rediff reporter Arindam Banerji has chronicled what he argues are numerous cases of Indophobic bias from the BBC regarding reportage, selection bias, misrepresentation, and fabrications. Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
groups in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of anti-Hindu
Anti-Hindu
Anti-Hindu prejudice is a negative perception or religious intolerance against the practice and practitioners of Hinduism. Anti-Hindu sentiments have been expressed by Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh, leading to significant persecution of Hindus in those regions, such as the 1971 Bangladesh...
bigotry and whitewashing Islamist hate groups that demonise the British Indian
British Indian
The term British Indian refers to citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestral roots lie in India. This includes people born in the UK who are of Indian descent, and Indian-born people who have migrated to the UK...
minority
In protest against the use of the word "gunmen" by the BBC, journalist Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar
M. J. Akbar
Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He has recently taken charge as Editorial Director of India Today, India's leading weekly English news magazine published by the Living Media group...
refused to take part in an interview following the Mumbai terror attacks. British parliamentarian Stephen Pound has supported these claims, referring to the BBC's whitewashing of the terror attacks as "the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone."
Writing for The Hindu
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
Business Line, reporter Premen Addy criticises the BBC's reportage on South Asia as consistently anti-India and pro-Islamist, and that they underreport India's economic and social achievements, as well as political and diplomatic efforts, and disproportionately highlight and exaggerate problems in the country. In addition, Addy alludes to discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...
against Indian anchors and reporters in favor of Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
i and Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
i ones who are hostile to India.
Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyzes the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control...
stance.
Anti-American bias
In October 2006, Chief Radio Correspondent for BBC News since 2001 and WashingtonWashington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
correspondent Justin Webb
Justin Webb
Justin Oliver Webb is a British journalist who has worked for the BBC since 1984. Since August 2009, he has presented on the Today programme.-Early life:...
said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford
Mark Byford
Mark Byford was Deputy Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation and head of BBC Journalism from 2004-2011. He chaired the BBC Journalism Board and had overall responsibility for the world’s largest and most trusted news organisation, and all its radio, television and interactive...
had secretly agreed to help him to "correct" it in his reports, and that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it "no moral weight".
In April 2007, Webb presented a three part series for BBC Radio 4 called Death To America: Anti Americanism Examined in which he challenged a common perception of the United States as an international bully and a modern day imperial power.
American news commentator Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly (commentator)
William James "Bill" O'Reilly, Jr. is an American television host, author, syndicated columnist and political commentator. He is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, which is the most watched cable news television program on American television...
has repeatedly sought to draw attention to what he calls the BBCs "inherent liberal culture."
John Redwood's deregulation proposals
The BBC has been criticised for the way it covered ConservativeConservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
MP John Redwood
John Redwood
John Alan Redwood is a British Conservative Party politician and Member of Parliament for Wokingham. He was formerly Secretary of State for Wales in Prime Minister John Major's Cabinet and was an unsuccessful challenger for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1995...
's policy group's deregulation
Deregulation
Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or...
proposals. Prominent political blogger Iain Dale
Iain Dale
Iain Campbell Dale is best known for his conservative-minded British political blog Iain Dale's Diary and for his frequent appearances on UK news channels as a political commentator. He is also a publisher, broadcaster and former Conservative Party politician...
criticised the organisation for leading news reports with the Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
's response to the proposals, rather than the proposals themselves, and claimed the BBC was "doing Labour's dirty work". The BBC denied the charge.
British newspaper The Sun
The Sun (newspaper)
The Sun is a daily national tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and owned by News Corporation. Sister editions are published in Glasgow and Dublin...
also alleged the BBC reports showed bias, criticising the organisation for including embarrassing footage of John Redwood badly singing the Welsh national anthem from the early 1990s. The paper argued that the coverage "was a mockery of impartial journalism" and "could have been scripted by Labour ministers". The BBC later apologised, but denied showing bias.
The Secret Agent Documentary
On Thursday 15 July 2004 the BBC broadcast a documentary on the far rightFar right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
British National Party
British National Party
The British National Party is a British far-right political party formed as a splinter group from the National Front by John Tyndall in 1982...
where undercover reporter Jason Gwynne
Jason Gwynne
Jason Gwynne is a journalist, most widely known for his 2004 documentary on the British National Party . The documentary was based on undercover footage gathered by Gwynne who posed as a football hooligan looking to get involved in far-right politics.-External links:*...
infiltrated the BNP by posing as a football hooligan. The programme resulted in Mark Collett
Mark Collett
Mark Adrian Collett is a British political activist. He is a former chairman of the Young BNP, the youth division of the British National Party , and was Director of Publicity for the Party before being suspended from the party in early April 2010...
and Nick Griffin
Nick Griffin
Nicholas John "Nick" Griffin is a British politician, chairman of the British National Party and Member of the European Parliament for North West England....
, the leader of the party, being charged for inciting racial hatred
Inciting racial hatred
Incitement to racial or ethnic hatred is a crime under the laws of a number of countries.-United Kingdom:Under the Law of the United Kingdom, "incitement to racial hatred" was established as an offence by the provisions of §§ 17-29 of the Public Order Act 1986. It was first established as a...
in April 2005, for statements which included Griffin describing Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
as a "wicked, vicious faith," Collett describing asylum seekers as "a little bit like cockroaches" and saying "let's show these ethnics the door in 2004." Griffin and Collett were found not guilty on some charges at the first trial in January 2006, but the jury failed to reach a verdict on the others, so a retrial was ordered. At the retrial held in November 2006 all of the defendants were found not guilty on the basis that the law at the time did not consider those who follow Islam or Christianity to be a protected group with respect to racial defamation laws. Shortly after this case, British law was amended to outlaw incitement to hatred against a religious group (see Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which creates an offence in England and Wales of inciting hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion...
).
The BNP believe this was an attempt to "Discredit the British National Party as a party of opposition to the Labour government."
After the second trial, Nick Griffin described the BBC as a "Politically correct, politically biased organisation which has wasted licence-fee payers' money to bring two people in a legal, democratic, peaceful party to court over speaking nothing more than the truth."
Barbara Plett's tears for Yasser Arafat
During the BBC programme From Our Own CorrespondentFrom our own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent is a BBC radio programme in which BBC correspondents broadcast monologues on topical current events from countries outside the UK...
broadcast on 30 October 2004, Plett described herself crying when she saw a frail Yasser Arafat
Yasser Arafat
Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini , popularly known as Yasser Arafat or by his kunya Abu Ammar , was a Palestinian leader and a Laureate of the Nobel Prize. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization , President of the Palestinian National Authority...
being evacuated to France for medical treatment. This led to "hundreds of complaints" to the BBC, and suggestions that the BBC was biased. BBC News
BBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
defended Plett in a statement saying that her reporting had met the high standards of "fairness, accuracy and balance" expected of a BBC correspondent. Initially, a complaint of bias against Plett was rejected by the BBC's head of editorial complaints. However, almost a year later, on November 25, 2005, the programme complaints committee of the BBC governors partially upheld the complaints, ruling that Plett’s comments “breached the requirements of due impartiality”. Despite initially issuing a statement in support of Plett, the BBC director of news Helen Boaden
Helen Boaden
Helen Boaden is the director of BBC News, part of the world’s biggest broadcast news operation . Boaden controls much of the BBC's domestic news output along with current affairs, including programmes such as Newsnight and Panorama.-Education:Boaden attended Colchester County High School for Girls...
later apologised for what she described as "an editorial misjudgment". The governors praised Boaden's speedy response and reviewed the BBC's stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...
.
Jerry Springer: The Opera
In January 2005, the BBC aired Jerry Springer: The OperaJerry Springer: The Opera
Jerry Springer: The Opera is a British musical written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, based on the television show The Jerry Springer Show. The musical is notable for its profanity, its irreverent treatment of Judeo-Christian themes, and surreal images such as a troupe of tap-dancing Ku Klux...
, ultimately resulting in around 55,000 complaints to the BBC from those upset at the opera's alleged blasphemies against the Christian religion. In advance of the broadcast, which the BBC had warned "contains language and content which won't be to some tastes" mediawatch-uk
Mediawatch-uk
Mediawatch-uk, formerly known as the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, is a pressure group in the United Kingdom, which campaigns against the publication and broadcast of media content that it views as harmful and offensive, such as violence, profanity, sex, homosexuality and...
's director John Beyer wrote to the Director General urging the BBC to drop the programme, saying "Licence fee payers do not expect the BBC to be pushing back boundaries of taste and decency in this way." The BBC issued a statement saying: "As a public service broadcaster, it is the BBC's role to broadcast a range of programmes that will appeal to all audiences - with very differing tastes and interests - present in the UK today." Before the broadcast, some 150 people bearing placards protested outside the BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre at White City in West London is the headquarters of BBC Television. Officially opened on 29 June 1960, it remains one of the largest to this day; having featured over the years as backdrop to many BBC programmes, it is one of the most readily recognisable such facilities...
in Shepherd's Bush
Shepherd's Bush
-Commerce:Commercial activity in Shepherd's Bush is now focused on the Westfield shopping centre next to Shepherd's Bush Central line station and on the many small shops which run along the northern side of the Green....
. On the Monday following the broadcast, which was watched by some two million viewers, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
announced that BBC executives had received death threats after their addresses and telephone numbers were posted on the Christian Voice
Christian Voice (UK)
Christian Voice is a Christian pressure group based in the United Kingdom. Its stated objective is "to uphold Christianity as the Faith of the United Kingdom, to be a voice for Biblical values in law and public policy, and to defend and support traditional family life." It is independent of...
website. The Corporation had received some 35,000 complaints before the broadcast, but reported only 350 calls following the broadcast, which were split between those praising the production and those complaining about it.
One Christian group attempted to bring private criminal prosecutions for blasphemy
Blasphemy law in the United Kingdom
This article describes the blasphemy law in the United Kingdom.-England and Wales:The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. See the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006....
against the BBC, and another demanded a judicial review of the decision.
In March 2005, the BBC's Board of Governors
Board of Governors of the BBC
The Board of Governors of the BBC was the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It consisted of twelve people who together regulated the BBC and represented the interests of the public. It existed from 1927 until it was replaced by the BBC Trust on 1 January 2007.The governors...
convened and considered the complaints, which they rejected by a majority of 4 to 1. The subsequent refusal of the BBC to reproduce the actual Muhammad cartoons in its coverage of the controversy concerning them convinced many that the BBC follows an unstated policy of freely broadcasting defamation of Christianity which it would not allow in the case of any other religion.
Climate change
The BBC has been criticised for hypocrisy over its high carbon footprintCarbon footprint
A carbon footprint has historically been defined as "the total set of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person.". However, calculating a carbon footprint which conforms to this definition is often impracticable due to the large amount of data required, which is...
, in view of the amount of coverage it gives to the topic of climate change. Newsnight
Newsnight
Newsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for over two decades....
presenter Jeremy Paxman
Jeremy Paxman
Jeremy Dickson Paxman is a British journalist, author and television presenter. He has worked for the BBC since 1977. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style, particularly when interrogating politicians...
argues that the Corporation's correspondents "travel the globe to tell the audience of the dangers of climate change while leaving a vapour trail which will make the problem even worse". Paxman further argues that the 'BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago'.
At the 2007 Edinburgh International Television Festival
Edinburgh International Television Festival
The Edinburgh International Television Festival, founded in 1976, is held annually over the British August bank holiday weekend at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre....
, Peter Horrocks
Peter Horrocks
Peter John Gibson Horrocks is Director of BBC World Service. He was educated at the independent King's College School in Wimbledon and at Christ's College, Cambridge....
(Head of TV News) and Peter Barron
Peter Barron
Peter Barron is Google's head of public relations for Britain, Ireland and the Benelux countries.Immediately prior to his appointment in 2008 the Belfast-born journalist had for four years been editor of the BBC programme Newsnight.-References:...
(Editor, Newsnight
Newsnight
Newsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for over two decades....
), said that the BBC should not campaign on the issue of climate change. They criticised proposed plans for a BBC Comic Relief style day of programmes around climate change. Horrocks was quoted as saying: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it."
Peter Barron was quoted as adding: "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. I think there are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped."
Peter Horrocks later outlined the BBC's position on the BBC Editors Blog ("No Line").
The plans for a day of programmes about environmental issues were abandoned in September 2007. A BBC spokesperson said this was "absolutely not" because of concerns about impartiality.
In January 2011, broadcast journalist Peter Sissons
Peter Sissons
Peter George Sissons is a broadcast journalist in the United Kingdom. He was the presenter of the BBC Nine O'Clock News and the BBC News at Ten between 1993 and 2003, as earlier a newscaster for ITN, providing bulletins on ITV and Channel 4. He is also a former presenter of the BBC's Question Time...
told the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
that "the BBC became a propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
machine for climate change zealots...and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent".
National Viewer's and Listeners' Association
The National Viewers' and Listeners' AssociationMediawatch-uk
Mediawatch-uk, formerly known as the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, is a pressure group in the United Kingdom, which campaigns against the publication and broadcast of media content that it views as harmful and offensive, such as violence, profanity, sex, homosexuality and...
was formed in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse, CBE was a British campaigner against the permissive society particularly as the media portrayed and reflected it...
to "clean up" the BBC, claiming that it "was responsible for the moral collapse in the country".
'London-centrism'
On 1 November 2007 it was reported that Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, criticised the BBC as too London-centric, paying less attention to news stories outside of the capital.'Overstaffing'
The BBC has been criticised for 'overstaffing' news, sporting, and cultural events and in doing so both wasting licence fee money, and using their dominant position to control the coverage of events.A 2010 House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report criticised the number of staff that the BBC had sent to sporting events such as the Beijing Olympics and the Euro 2008 football championships. In June 2011 the Corporation sent 263 staff to cover the Glastonbury Festival
Glastonbury Festival
The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, commonly abbreviated to Glastonbury or even Glasto, is a performing arts festival that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England, best known for its contemporary music, but also for dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and other arts.The...
. The next month they sent 250 staff members to cover an event marking one year until the start of the London 2012 Olympics, ten times the numbers used by other broadcasters. On 19 October 2011 the Liberal Democrats
Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrats are a social liberal political party in the United Kingdom which supports constitutional and electoral reform, progressive taxation, wealth taxation, human rights laws, cultural liberalism, banking reform and civil liberties .The party was formed in 1988 by a merger of the...
' culture spokesman Don Foster
Don Foster
Donald Michael Ellison Foster is a British Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, representing Bath in southwest England.-Early life:...
criticised the large number of BBC staff members who attended the eviction of travellers and their supporters from the illegal section of the Dale Farm
Dale Farm
Dale Farm is a plot of land on Oak Lane in Crays Hill, Essex, United Kingdom.Until October 2011, it was an Irish Traveller halting site which had been established without planning permission...
site. Foster stated that it was 'ludicrous over staffing and hardly good way to get public sympathy for the 20 per cent budget cuts facing the BBC'. The BBC responded that they only had 20 staff members on site.
Funding
The fact that the BBC's domestic services are funded by television licenceTelevision licence
A television licence is an official licence required in many countries for the reception of television broadcasts...
fees is criticised by its competitors and others on a number of grounds.
BBC Russia
On 17 August 2007 it was reported that FM broadcast of the BBC's Russian language service in RussiaRussia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
would be dropped, leaving only medium and short wave broadcasts in Russia. Financial organisation Finam, which owns the FM radio service now dropping the BBC Russia broadcasts, through its spokesman Igor Ermachenkov, said that "Any media which is government-financed is propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
- it's a fact, it's not negative". A spokesman, for the BBC responded: "Although the BBC is funded by the UK government... a fundamental principle of its constitution and its regulatory regime is that it is editorially independent of the UK government." Reports put the development in the context of criticism of the Russian government for curbing media freedom and strained UK-Russian relations. Reporters Without Borders
Reporters Without Borders
Reporters Without Borders is a France-based international non-governmental organization that advocates freedom of the press. It was founded in 1985, by Robert Ménard, Rony Brauman and the journalist Jean-Claude Guillebaud. Jean-François Julliard has served as Secretary General since 2008...
condemned the move as censorship.
Wales and Scotland coverage controversy
In August 2007, Adam PriceAdam Price
Adam Price is a politician in Wales, and former Plaid Cymru Member of Parliament for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. He was elected to Parliament in the 2001 general election and re-elected in 2005 but stood down at the 2010 election...
, the Plaid Cymru
Plaid Cymru
' is a political party in Wales. It advocates the establishment of an independent Welsh state within the European Union. was formed in 1925 and won its first seat in 1966...
MP
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
, highlighted what he perceived as a lack of a Welsh focus on BBC news broadcasts
News broadcasting
News broadcasting is the broadcasting of various news events and other information via television, radio or internet in the field of broadcast journalism. The content is usually either produced locally in a radio studio or television studio newsroom, or by a broadcast network...
. Price threatened to withhold future television licence
Television licence
A television licence is an official licence required in many countries for the reception of television broadcasts...
fees in response to a lack of thorough news coverage of Wales, echoing a BBC Audience Council for Wales July report citing public frustration over how the Welsh Assembly is characterised in national media. Plaid AM Bethan Jenkins
Bethan Jenkins
Bethan Jenkins AM , is a Welsh politician, born in Aberdare, Wales, who has represented the South Wales West Region for Plaid Cymru as a Member of the National Assembly for Wales since 2007.-Background:...
agreed with Price and called for responsibility for broadcasting to be devolved to the Welsh Assembly, voicing similar calls from Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond
Alex Salmond
Alexander Elliot Anderson "Alex" Salmond MSP is a Scottish politician and current First Minister of Scotland. He became Scotland's fourth First Minister in May 2007. He is the Leader of the Scottish National Party , having served as Member of the Scottish Parliament for Gordon...
. Criticism of the BBC's news coverage for Wales and Scotland since devolution prompted debate of possibly providing evening news broadcasts with specific focus for both countries.
Historic
Criticism of lack of impartiality and objectivityObjectivity (journalism)
Parent article: Journalism ethics and standardsObjectivity is a significant principle of journalistic professionalism. Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities.- Definitions :In the context...
have been made by many observers:
The privately owned BBC began in 1922. Its employee general manager was John Reith
John Reith, 1st Baron Reith
John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, KT, GCVO, GBE, CB, TD, PC was a Scottish broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom...
(knighted 1926, created 1st Baron Reith 1940), who stated that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a General Strike and the Conservative Government feared the outbreak of revolution, as had happened in Russia so very recently. Labour Party politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald, PC, FRS was a British politician who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority government for two terms....
and Philip Snowden criticized the BBC for being pro-Government and anti-Unions; however, throughout the strike, Reith insisted that the news bulletins report all sides of the dispute without comment. Reith's attempts to broadcast statements by the Labour Party and TUC leaders were blocked by the Government; in partial response, he personally vetoed a statement
that Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, wished to make, in the belief that allowing such a statement would give Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
both motive and opportunity to take over the BBC- something for which Churchill had continually antagonized since the beginning of the Strike. Despite admitting to his staff that he would have preferred to allow the Labour and TUC leaders to broadcast directly, Reith's stance was vindicated by a post-Strike analysis carried out by the BBC's Programme Correspondence Department: of those polled, 3,696 commended the BBC's coverage, whilst 176 where critical.
Since 1927, arguments over actual impartiality at the BBC have been ongoing. Prior to World War II, Sir John Reith, in breach of his public duties and obligations, excluded Winston Churchill from the BBC airwaves. In 1927, under a Royal Charter, the BBC became a public entity for the first time - with requirements including the need for impartiality and for staff not to be expressing opinions on controversial subject matters.