How the BBC enforces the woke agenda

We’ve seen from our previous post on the BBC and its woke agenda the extent to which it will go to ensure that its output is consistently left wing, with opposing viewpoints either misrepresented or not represented at all.

Woke in, woke out

But there are other ways in which the BBC’s inbuilt left wing bias manifests itself. Before programmes can be broadcast they have to be planned and organised, producers and presenters found, and interviewees or panelists and, where appropriate, audience members, invited.

And it is here, as much as in the content of its programmes, that the BBC ensures that it has a built in bias in favour of all things woke. A glimpse of this was given us early this year, when an internal BBC recruitment policy document came to light. This instructed all managers and recruiters not to hire candidates who are “unsuited to the organisation”, or are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics”.

Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and author has referred to these guidelines as showing “just how embedded Diversity, Equality and Inclusion ideology is in the BBC”.

The BBC says that this document had been replaced in January 2023 by a new framework – one that assesses each candidate against “BBC values and behaviours“. Which means, in effect, that nothing has changed when it comes to selecting each new wave of BBC apparatchiks.

BBC staff help convicted Somali sex offenders fight deportation

A specific example of the nature of a typical BBC employee was revealed in February 2024, when The Mail on Sunday reported on Mary Harper, Africa Editor for the BBC World Service. She was paid to give expert evidence on behalf of a convicted Somali gang rapist in his five-year legal battle fo remain in the UK.

Not only that, but she gave (or sold) similar evidence to help a number of other Somali sex offenders, drug dealers, and career criminals in their deportation appeals. In one case she testified that a Somali man who had committed a horrific sexual assault on a profoundly deaf 17-year old girl would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.

There is more to this one example of highly placed and paid BBC staff being extreme left wing activists, but we shall move on.

Tim Davie facing both ways at once

Being “progressive” (i.e. left wing) is institutionalised at the BBC. From Tim Davie, the Director-General, downwards through the ranks, the stench of left wing ideology assaults the nostrils at every juncture.

In February 2024 Tim Davie told his staff that they should be “proud” to be progressive. But wait a minute. Isn’t this the same Tim Davie who identifies himself as one who is opposed to “the tyranny of a wholly polarised society”? The man who oversaw the hiring of outside “experts” to monitor the BBC’s output for bias?

Is it not true that there are people who identify as “progressive” and other people (almost certainly far more numerous) who identify as being decidedly not progressive?

So how can this man justify his position here? He is saying two different, conflicting, things. He can’t have it both ways. He either has to ensure he has political balance in the BBC’s output, so that left wing views and bias are eliminated, or he should stop trying to fool the rest of us through his ridiculous claims of impartiality.

Again, Robin Aitken sums it up perfectly. “For Tim Davie to say the BBC is proud to be progressive,” he says, “is to take a firm, and controversial, political position. It suggests he has a very poor understanding of what true impartiality looks like.” Mr Aitken also points out, correctly, that such a statement “directly contradicts the BBC’s core mission, which is to accurately reflect all shades of opinion, not merely those of progressives”.

BBC’s lofty ideals versus the reality

By “core mission”, Mr Aitken is referring to the BBC’s object, as set out in clause 4 of the “Incorporation and Objects” section of its Royal Charter (downloadable from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80c6d740f0b6230269570c/57964_CM_9365_Charter_Accessible.pdf). Here you will find just what the BBC’s object is supposed to be. It’s “the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes.”

The BBC’s Mission is set out in clause 5 as “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”

Clause 6 defines the Public Purposes of the BBC, the first of which is to “provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”

As everyone who has followed Anglo-Celtic’s battle to get justice from the BBC and, later, from Ofcom will know, the BBC ignores its obligations under the Royal Charter whenever it likes, just as it ignores complaints from viewers and listeners. It is high time for the whole putrid, “progressive” organisation to be given the fate that it is long overdue to receive – the order of abolition.

The BBC and its woke agenda

Back in October 2021 the then new Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he was all for “banishing fear from public debate”. He identified himself as one who “believes in the free and open exchange of ideas to push back against the tyranny of a wholly polarised society and make the UK a beacon for free, enlightened, robust and respectful debate”.

Around the same time it was announced, to a fanfare of media publicity, that outside “experts” had been hired to monitor the BBC’s output for bias. They were to review programmes of all types to “ensure impartiality guidelines are being met”.

Did this mean that a new age was about to dawn for the BBC and its viewers and listeners? An age where the BBC would return to being the honoured and respected institution established over many years by its first boss, John Reith? Would it really do what it was supposed to do – allow freedom of expression to all, rather than just the left?

"We don't really care if they complain." - Hugh Greene, Director-General BBC 1960-69.

A relentless output of biased content

We’ve seen from earlier posts in this series that the BBC has, since that time, lamentably failed to promote any kind of genuine “free and open exchange of ideas” that aren’t themselves thoroughly woke and left wing. See our posts about the re-writing of history and the Covid pandemic. It has also failed to stem the relentless output of biased and distorted news items, educational and entertainment programmes. But there’s more.

In particular, any debates over race and gender are heavily biased, with interviewees, panellists and even audiences carefully vetted beforehand to ensure that the opinions they express will be suitably left wing. The evidence for this can be only be circumstantial, but is plentiful all the same. The BBC website is typical of media sites in that it is designed to shock ordinary people into thinking that extreme left wing wokery is the norm. For example, at the present time it has at least one new article a week focusing on the slave trade.

It’s not that we in the British Nationalist camp dislike talking about the slave trade. It’s just that we like to have the whole subject covered fairly, to include the countless examples of non-whites enslaving whites, as well as the other way round. A mention of Britain’s role in the abolition of the slave trade would be a good way of promoting the “free, enlightened, robust and respectful debate” as well.

A one-sided woke agenda

It’s not just news and current events programmes that are woke. The seemingly now defunct “Campaign for Common Sense” published a report in 2023 which studied the output of the BBC in 2022 across 70 episodes of dramatic output, and involved watching over 60 hours of BBC programming. Its conclusion was that many of the programmes surveyed “had a distinct left-wing bias”, but that “there were no dramas reflecting a conservative, pro-Brexit or right-wing bent”.

In fairness, the BBC did, in 2021-22, initiate a new whistle-blowing scheme whereby members of staff are able to report instances of what they believe to be malpractice in the output of news and entertainment.

It seems the rate at which allegations of bias are upheld is on the rise. In 2021-22 just 16 per cent of cases were upheld, rising to 62.5 per cent for the period April to October 2023. One of them, for example, was where a news item gave us the impression that the President of Harvard University, in the US, had resigned because she was a “casualty of campus culture wars”, when in fact she was forced to leave over her response to “anti-semitism” on campus and when it was found that she had, er, plagiarised some of her academic work.

One woke organisation supervising another woke organisation

In early 2024, in a bid to improve “audience confidence” in the BBC (as opposed to elimating bias and returning to a path of honest and straightforward broadcasting), the then Conservative government announced major reforms involving the extension of Ofcom’s remit over the BBC to include its BBC News website.

The BBC’s social media guidelines will also come under such supervision from 2025. This follows a large number of complaints about the left-wing football pundit, Gary Lineker, and his posturings on Twitter/X. Ofcom will have the power to fine the BBC (and other broadcasters) if the rules are breached, and have, apparently, told the BBC to increase independent scrutiny of the way it handles complaints, so as to ensure fairness.

This fails to instill any confidence at all in us at Anglo-Celtic, who have suffered blatant unfairness in the way our complaints have been handled by both the BBC and, later, on appeal to Ofcom. The idea that Ofcom would rein in the woke output of the BBC and take any serious steps to ensure impartiality is laughable. Many of the managers and personnel at Ofcom are former BBC staff.

How the BBC enforces the woke agenda

There are other ways in which the BBC’s inbuilt left wing bias manifests itself. Before programmes can be broadcast they have to be planned and organised, producers and presenters found, and interviewees or panelists and, where appropriate, audience members, invited.

And it is here, as much as in the content of its programmes, that the BBC ensures that it has a built in bias in favour of all things woke. A glimpse of this was given us early this year, when an internal BBC recruitment policy document came to light. This instructed all managers and recruiters not to hire candidates who are “unsuited to the organisation”, or are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics”.

Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and author has referred to these guidelines as showing “just how embedded Diversity, Equality and Inclusion ideology is in the BBC”.

The BBC says that this document had been replaced in January 2023 by a new framework – one that assesses each candidate against “BBC values and behaviours“. Which means, in effect, that nothing has changed when it comes to selecting each new wave of BBC apparatchiks.

A specific example of the nature of a typical BBC employee was revealed in February 2024, when The Mail on Sunday reported on Mary Harper, Africa Editor for the BBC World Service. She was paid to give expert evidence on behalf of a convicted Somali gang rapist in his five-year legal battle fo remain in the UK.

Not only that, but she gave (or sold) similar evidence to help a number of other Somali sex offenders, drug dealers, and career criminals in their deportation appeals. In one case she testified that a Somali man who had committed a horrific sexual assault on a profoundly deaf 17-year old girl would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.

There is more to this one example of highly placed and paid BBC staff being extreme left wing activists, but we shall move on.

Tim Davie facing both ways at once

Being “progressive” (i.e. left wing) is institutionalised at the BBC. From Tim Davie, the Director-General, downwards through the ranks, the stench of left wing ideology assaults the nostrils at every juncture.

In February 2024 Tim Davie told his staff that they should be “proud” to be progressive. But wait a minute. Isn’t this the same Tim Davie who identifies himself as one who is opposed to “the tyranny of a wholly polarised society”? The man who oversaw the hiring of outside “experts” to monitor the BBC’s output for bias?

Is it not true that there are people who identify as “progressive” and other people (almost certainly far more numerous) who identify as being decidedly not progressive?

So how can this man justify his position here? He is saying two different, conflicting, things. He can’t have it both ways. He either has to ensure he has political balance in the BBC’s output, so that left wing views and bias are eliminated, or he should stop trying to fool the rest of us through his ridiculous claims of impartiality.

Again, Robin Aitken sums it up perfectly. “For Tim Davie to say the BBC is proud to be progressive,” he says, “is to take a firm, and controversial, political position. It suggests he has a very poor understanding of what true impartiality looks like.” Mr Aitken also points out, correctly, that such a statement “directly contradicts the BBC’s core mission, which is to accurately reflect all shades of opinion, not merely those of progressives”.

BBC’s lofty ideals versus the reality

By “core mission”, Mr Aitken is referring to the BBC’s object, as set out in clause 4 of the “Incorporation and Objects” section of its Royal Charter (downloadable from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80c6d740f0b6230269570c/57964_CM_9365_Charter_Accessible.pdf). Here you will find just what the BBC’s object is supposed to be. It’s “the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes.”

The BBC’s Mission is set out in clause 5 as “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”

Clause 6 defines the Public Purposes of the BBC, the first of which is to “provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”

As everyone who has followed Anglo-Celtic’s battle to get justice from the BBC and, later, from Ofcom will know, the BBC ignores its obligations under the Royal Charter whenever it likes, just as it ignores complaints from viewers and listeners. It is high time for the whole putrid, “progressive” organisation to be given the fate that it is long overdue to receive – the order of abolition.

In our next post in this series, we’ll examine how the BBC enforces its woke agenda.

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