Stephen Glover wrote a great piece in yesterday's Daily Mail about the increasingly opinionated output of BBC bloggers:
"The point about these blogs is that they are not simply opinionated. The opinions they offer are often Leftist or bien pensant. In recent years BBC reporters have been giving us the news on screen or on the radio, and then regularly providing their own 'take'. When they come to writing their own blogs, which generally are subjected to the most cursory editing, if any at all, they become freer still in disclosing what they believe."
I know this to be true. One BBC corresponent with a blog told me that blogging was now their favourite part of their journalism. "I get the best of both worlds," they told me, "I get the huge BBC audience and the pleasure of being a newspaper-style columnist."
It's true that these blogs are not used for party political biases - treatment of Tory-Labour coverage is too closely monitored. But the other more ingrained BBC biases are likely to pop up:
- Favouritism towards multilateral bodies like the UN and EU rather than the nation state.
- Anti-Americanism and hostility towards Israel.
- Disdain for traditional Christianity as part of a multiculturalist worldview.
- Support for popular views on climate change.
- An instinct to favour state intervention over laissez-faire solutions.
- A constant tendency to see issues through urban rather than rural eyes.
PS I really shouldn't be bashing the BBC today. The Public Affairs team at the Corporation sent me (and, I suspect, many, many others) a DVD set of Little Dorrit just before Christmas. It was terrific.
