I'm not sure what you mean when you talk about that thread. No one refuted my arguments.
You don't really show much evidence or respond to mine.
It should be noted that the Cameronian Tory party is not necessarily right-wing. As Peter Hitchens has pointed out, much to the appreciation of those like the BBC, Cameron has moved the Tory party to the left. Cameron is the self-proclaimed Heir to Blair, and his government is essentially Blairite. So, having Tory MPs on the BBC is not necessarily evidence of a lack of bias. Indeed, Gordon Brown was generally unpopular with even the likes of the Guardian, as Peter Hitchens shows in his
The Cameron Delusion, because of his anti-Blairite position, and also because he was dour and considered antiquated. Cameron was welcomed as young, Blairite, and someone who would steer the Tory party towards a more left-ward position. I am a traditional conservative and yet in some ways I preferred Gordon Brown to the current PM, Mr. Slippery, so that should show you the issues aren't clear cut. Certainly, to talk of the BBC attitude to the current Tories says nothing about its general ideological bent. It doesn't show it isn't still heavily Europhile, pro-mass immigration, socially liberal, pro-multiculturalism, and so on. If what you were suggesting was correct, then surely the BBC wouldn't have shown the absurd amount of anti-UKIP bias it did.
Besides, it has been the case, still, that the BBC tends to interrupt politicians from different parties at different rates in its interviews and to treat them differently. Tories are second only to UKIP, still, in being interrupted and contradicted. Greens get especially good treatment.
Ironically, Owen Jones regularly appears on the BBC's
Dateline show, where there is regularly a panel of three or four centre-leftists and leftists, and one week in three or four there is a single conservative. His article is not persuasive. For example, he starts by calling Chris Patten, someone from the left of the Tory party, a right-winger. If someone had any knowledge of British politics, this would be absurd. It is usual BBC defense tactics though - get on left-of-centre Tories and claim you are being balanced. Jones must take it for granted that only leftist are going to read this article. Andrew Neil is the sole proper conservative in the BBC reporter or senior administration ranks, and he is kept from important positions. Peter Hitchens recounts how he has been told he will never get to host his own show in a prominent position because of his views. He was trying to produce a show on grammar schools and was discretely told the BBC would never back such a project. Most of the BBC reporters are leftists, as shown by their twitter accounts and other instances. Webb and Bacon spring to mind as obvious examples. When Lord Tebbitt is made director of the BBC, get back to me.
Jones also doesn't appear to know that the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail, though sister papers, are not the same paper. Peter Hitchens, whom he mentions, does not work for the Daily Mail.
That is all the evidence Jones musters. It hardly compares to what I mention. The BBC admitted it didn't allow Eurosceptics on the for eleven years in the 1990s and 2000s, because they were considered fringe. And yet Euroscepticism has always been the dominant feeling amongst the British people.
Here is what some Beeboids have said themselves:
http://biasedbbc.org/quotes-of-shame/
The BBC is “a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large”.
All this, he said, “creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC”.
-Andrew Marr
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
– Peter Sissons, Former BBC News and Current Affairs presenter
“It’s a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society. As they discuss great issues of the day, they discuss them from the point of view that the earth is flat.
“If someone says, ‘No, no, no, the earth is round!’, they think this person is an extremist. That’s what it’s like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC.”
– Jeff Randall, former BBC business editor
“We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.”
– Ben Stephenson, BBC controller of drama commissioning
The Peter Sissons quote is almost all the evidence needed. He was a senior news anchor. If the Guardian is by far and away the most popular and quoted paper at the BBC - and the figures show they order 10,000 more copies of that paper and tend to advertise for employees in it - then this is almost cast iron evidence of pervasive left-liberal bias. The Guardian is notoriously badly edited and written. Journalistically it is no better than the other broadsheets. They are buying it because they agree with its views.
