Quote of the day 5th June 2020
"Emily Maitlis, he writes, laid out questions which the programme would address but “It was unambiguously clear what Maitlis’s own position was, and she stirred in words such as ‘fury, contempt and anguish’ to describe the national mood when a significant minority doesn’t share that view.”
“The programme had already made its mind up about the answers.”
The bigger problem Mosey addresses is BBC bias in general. It aspires
“to be a broadcaster for the whole of the UK.”
But it is struggling to do that
“because it is a rather liberal organisation which recruits many of its staff from metropolitan areas; and they are typically graduates with a worldview which is different from a car worker in Sunderland or a hill farmer in Brecon. This means the BBC has been ill-equipped to cope with the forces of Brexit or the rise of Boris Johnson … It is hard to think of any BBC presenter who could be accused of a pro-Johnson bias. The traffic is all speeding in the opposite direction.”
Quotes from an article in the New Statesman, called "The BBC is failing its journalists with lack of clear direction" by the master of Selwn College, Cambridge and former BBC news executive Roger Mosey, referenced in a piece on "The Article" by David Herman about whether the corporation has a bias problem.
I thought carefully about whether to refer to these as it is an almost universal constant that the great majority of people with a strong political position tends to feel the media are biased against that position.
But I do think that these pieces, in which Mosey who is broadly a defender of the BBC admits they have a problem, and Herman argues that they have a worse one, make a strong enough case to be worth reading.
A national broadcaster funded by what amounts to a tax - you can quibble about this but since the license fee is payable even by TV users who don't watch the BBC, in my view it is effectively a tax on all TV viewers to support one broadcaster - has to be particularly careful not to insult the views of any significant fraction of the people who are forced to pay for it, and frankly, the BBC's traditional approach that if they are getting flak from both sides of the political spectrum they must be getting it right is simply not good enough.
There are some people on both sides of the political spectrum who will give the BBC grief whatever they do, but I am concerned that there have been instances where both sides of politics have had legitimate issues. And since Boris Johnson became PM there seems has clearly been a particular problem as even defenders of the BBC such as Roger Mosey admit.
“The programme had already made its mind up about the answers.”
The bigger problem Mosey addresses is BBC bias in general. It aspires
“to be a broadcaster for the whole of the UK.”
But it is struggling to do that
“because it is a rather liberal organisation which recruits many of its staff from metropolitan areas; and they are typically graduates with a worldview which is different from a car worker in Sunderland or a hill farmer in Brecon. This means the BBC has been ill-equipped to cope with the forces of Brexit or the rise of Boris Johnson … It is hard to think of any BBC presenter who could be accused of a pro-Johnson bias. The traffic is all speeding in the opposite direction.”
Quotes from an article in the New Statesman, called "The BBC is failing its journalists with lack of clear direction" by the master of Selwn College, Cambridge and former BBC news executive Roger Mosey, referenced in a piece on "The Article" by David Herman about whether the corporation has a bias problem.
I thought carefully about whether to refer to these as it is an almost universal constant that the great majority of people with a strong political position tends to feel the media are biased against that position.
But I do think that these pieces, in which Mosey who is broadly a defender of the BBC admits they have a problem, and Herman argues that they have a worse one, make a strong enough case to be worth reading.
A national broadcaster funded by what amounts to a tax - you can quibble about this but since the license fee is payable even by TV users who don't watch the BBC, in my view it is effectively a tax on all TV viewers to support one broadcaster - has to be particularly careful not to insult the views of any significant fraction of the people who are forced to pay for it, and frankly, the BBC's traditional approach that if they are getting flak from both sides of the political spectrum they must be getting it right is simply not good enough.
There are some people on both sides of the political spectrum who will give the BBC grief whatever they do, but I am concerned that there have been instances where both sides of politics have had legitimate issues. And since Boris Johnson became PM there seems has clearly been a particular problem as even defenders of the BBC such as Roger Mosey admit.
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