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Andrew Lownie in the Sunday Times yesterday
‘In common with every other big developed world news organisation I know, generational change brought a younger, more dirigiste kind of progressivism onto the team. The language of ‘lived experience’, ‘don’t be a bystander’, and formulas such as ‘silence is violence’, entered the editorial conversation. ‘Thus I was in a meeting where one producer with strong views on trans issues tried to veto an interview bid for JK Rowling, saying she was “very problematic” (she didn’t want to come on anyway). On different occasion another of our journalists told Rod Liddle, who did make it on to the show, to his face that they were dead against inviting him on, triggering a (justified) complaint from the columnist.’
Former BBC reporter Mark Urban on BBC bias.
"It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living." Bertrand Russell
I was cancelled by the BBC for telling the truth about immigration
ReplyDeleteI was warned I’d never work there again if I spoke about the issue. They were right. I never did
Harriet Sergeant
The two homeless teenagers begging on a street in Manchester cheered up over a hot chocolate and doughnuts. They were only 17. His leg was in plaster after a fight. She had mental health issues. Both had been in care, but they assured me that they watched out for each other. Certainly there was no one else looking after them.
Why not stay in a hostel for the homeless, I asked. I was interviewing them for a BBC Radio Four documentary on the rise of homelessness. They had tried, they said, but the migrants got there first. It was always full up by the time they arrived.
This was news to me. It was 2016 and we had just come from speaking to Andy Burnham, then a Labour MP and shadow home secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. Like everyone else the BBC researcher had lined up, he blamed the surge in the homeless on austerity and Tory cuts.
Unlike some of the others we interviewed, the teenage couple were genuinely homeless and were the only ones to mention immigration had contributed to their situation.
When I looked into their claim, I found migrants made up around half of rough sleepers in London and one in three elsewhere The rise in the homeless and their overwhelmed facilities was a direct result of the rise in immigration. It was also an example of how migration has hit the poorest in society hardest. This seemed a crucial point to make in a programme on homelessness.
The BBC producer who checked my script thought otherwise. I only wanted a sentence or two as background. But she warned that any criticism of immigration would harm my future relationship with the BBC. I was astonished. Not even when I researched my first book on apartheid in South Africa or my second, in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, had anyone tried to censor me before. Yet here was the BBC, the BBC of all institutions, insisting I ignore a key fact.
I did consider keeping quiet. Up until then, the BBC producer and I had been bonding over some very good cakes from Ottolenghi. But the teenage couple had touched me. The point of being a journalist is to give voice to the overlooked. And there were few more helpless and poignant than those two young people.
In the end the programme focused on my night in a squat with a commune of vegans. They were poor but also mostly middle class and anti-capitalist and wore their Caucasian hair in dreadlocks. The BBC clearly felt more at home with them than my care leavers.
When A Waste of Space was broadcast, it was reviewed by Gillian Reynolds then radio critic of the Telegraph and “the radio equivalent of the Oscars”, according to my lovely editor. Gillian congratulated him and declared me, “a new Radio star”.
On the strength of this, my editor pitched a series to Radio Four entitled “Sergeant in the System”, which would be my take on the welfare state which I had spent ten years investigating for a series of Think Tank reports.
This would include people I had interviewed and, in many cases, befriended, like members of a south London gang, drug dealers, prostitutes, single mothers, care leavers, illiterate pupils and disillusioned NHS staff and patients.
Just as with the homeless couple, these people had a unique insight into the failures of the welfare state. But the BBC’s sympathies lie with those who work for the welfare state, less so with its uppity customers. Once more I was proving a liability. Radio Four rejected our pitch and told my editor I was too Right wing.
The BBC producer had warned me, “You will never work at the BBC again if you question immigration”. She was right. I never did.