If the BBC is so woke, how come it grovels before Farage?

The radical right is also the enemy of journalism

Impartial journalism ought to be a skilled but easy trade. You leave your political beliefs at the newsroom door. You follow leads and verify stories. You put accusations to the accused and broadcast their replies.

Or maybe not.

As the crisis engulfing the BBC shows, good news journalists are hard to find. Not impossible. Before I go any further, I must emphasise that the overwhelming majority of BBC output is scrupulously fair,

But a leaked memo by Michael Prescott, who was an external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines committee, showed that, when it occurred, BBC bias was just awful – clumsy, wheedling and patronising deceits that fell apart at the first moment of scrutiny.

When I knew him, Prescott worked at Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and leftish readers will find it easy to dismiss his findings.

And it is true that Prescott, the supposed enemy of bias, has biases of his own. Nowhere does he discuss the power of right-wing figures in the BBC hierarchy or hold the broadcasters to account for their demeaning relationship with Nigel Farage.

I would advise strongly against wholly dismissing Prescott, however. A minority of biased journalists at the BBC – and I emphasise again that they are in the minority – have caused disproportionate damage.

On Saturday they allowed Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump’s press secretary, to stop lying for once in her wasted life.

She cried that

“This purposefully dishonest, selectively edited clip by the BBC is further evidence that they are total, 100 per cent fake news that should no longer be worth the time on the television screens of the great people of the United Kingdom.”

The BBC had played into Trump’s hands. Panorama, the BBC’s documentary slot, had run a programme just before the 2024 US presidential election. Inquiries by Michael Prescott and his colleagues found that the BBC had spliced together two remarks by Trump to make it sound as if he was ordering his supporters to attack Congress.

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell,” went the BBC version.

In fact, Trump had said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

The “fight like hell” comment came 50 minutes later in the speech. But Trump was not talking about fighting security guards at the Capitol but corrupt elections. Honest observers could argue that Trump was still inciting violence. Democrats said just that after the attack

But the BBC was not being honest. It cut out Trump’s remark to his supporters that he wanted them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Why for goodness’ sake?

It’s not as if there aren’t 1001 fact-checked reasons to condemn Trump.

Anyone who has been caught up in ideological frenzies and wished for lies to be true and the truth to be lies will recognise the symptoms. You so loathe Trump you will break all the rules journalists are taught from their first day in the newsroom to harm him.

As it has turned out, and as might have bene predicted, the BBC did not harm Trump in the slightest. It gave him a propaganda victory, instead

Prescott found the same pattern on other fronts in the culture war. There was an “investigation” that claimed that racist insurers were overcharging black customers. The report was “so thoroughly wrong” it had to be taken down. To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention he found multiple faults in the BBC Arabic service’s coverage of the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, the trans issue is causing as much damage to the BBC as it is to the Guardian, publishing and the health service. Prescott reports that BBC journalists told him that LGBTQ+ colleagues could tone down and veto stories. The behaviour of the BBC’s regulators suggests that the whistleblowers are right.

Only this week, the BBC censured its own newsreader, Martine Croxall for correcting a script that referred to “pregnant people” and explaining that it meant “women”.

I now need to explain to the uninitiated that, in the currently fashionable ideology, you must say that trans men are actual men even though they are biological women. Therefore, you cannot say that only women can become pregnant. You must affect to believe that trans men are not women but men, even though they can still become pregnant.

Journalists were once taught to avoid jargon and embrace clarity. Now the BBC reprimands its journalists for speaking plainly.

My former colleague, Mark Urban, writes that when he was the BBC’s defence editor, a producer tried to veto an interview bid for J.K. Rowling, saying she was “very problematic”. The news value of interviewing the most famous author in the world counted for nothing when set against a progressive ideology that can’t handle problems.

I could go on. But you get the point. The BBC has journalists who should be looking for other work.

Yet before you commit to the right-wing side in the culture war consider that there is a BBC Michael Prescott and his former colleagues in the Tory press do not criticise.

There is the BBC that, in a clear breach of its rules, is making a deliberate attempt to warp its news values to woo Farage supporters.

Minutes of a meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter “story selection” and “other types of output, such as drama” in order to win the trust of Reform voters.

There is the BBC that the Liberal Democrats accuse, with justice, of “following Farage around like a lost puppy” and of “fanning the flames of a dangerous populism parroted by Farage and borrowed from Donald Trump.”

There is the BBC that treats Labour governments far more harshly than Conservative governments.

There is the BBC that hounded Tony Blair after he gave the British public a false justification for taking Britain into George W. Bush’s war with Iraq in 2003, and yet never even attempted to hold Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage to account for giving the British public a false justification for leaving the EU.

There is the BBC that, in contravention of every journalistic principle, allowed Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to give a say its editorial process to Robbie Gibb, who describes himself as a ““proper Thatcherite conservative”

How can these two BBCs coexist?

The short answer is that left-wing bias – though disgraceful – is rare.

The longer answer is that the right so terrifies the BBC it seeks to appease it, even though appeasement succeeds only in egging on the bullies.

The constant attacks from Prescott’s former colleagues in the Tory press, and the repeated threats to the licence fee from Farage and his allies, show that the unappeasable right is now determined to abolish the BBC and turn us into a cheap version of Trump’s America.

Not the smallest of reasons to deplore biased leftish journalists at the BBC is that they are aiding and abetting the radical right project to destroy public service broadcasting in the UK and hand it over to Murdoch and his successors.

Below are two long reads. The first is on the right’s attack on the BBC. The second is on why the trans movement has caused mayhem on the left.

The pieces are for the paying subscribers, who allow me to carry on working, so I need to say that you can read on with an annual subscription which works out at £1.15 a ($1.45) a week.

That’s a pretty good deal.