BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness resigned last month in the wake of serious allegations of bias at the publicly funded broadcaster. An internal memo by Michael Prescott to BBC board members revealed shocking editorial malfeasance, from Panorama's doctoring of a speech by Donald Trump to BBC Arabic's hiring of anti-Semites to the corporation-wide submission to trans-activist insanity. Yet despite all this, the BBC still insists it is objective and unbiased, asking us to deny the evidence of our eyes.
Drawing on his decades of experience inside the corporation, Robin Aitken joined Brendan O'Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O'Neill Show, to discuss how these controversies fit into a longstanding pattern of BBC bias. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full thing here.
Brendan O'Neill: Older readers will remember a time when the BBC was a more conservative, even slightly 'stuffy' organisation. When did things begin to change?
Robin Aitken: That's a very interesting question. If you read the early history of the BBC, you'll see that from the beginning, Asa Briggs, the official BBC historian, documented suspicions on the right about the corporation potentially being a collectivist, socialist project. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were even speeches in the House of Commons criticising the BBC for its perceived bias. But the BBC emerged from the Second World War with its status enhanced because of the noble role it played during the conflict. I find it very moving to read accounts of people in the French Resistance tuning in with their little crystal or shortwave radios to receive news that they trusted, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda. The BBC had its golden period during those years, while still being a socially conservative organisation.