Today on OpinionJournal, a former BBC employee opens the curtains just a little on "the Beeb."
As usual, ya gotta read the whole thing.I know this from experience: Toward the end of my 25 years as a BBC reporter I began writing a series of internal memos, first to senior news executives and finally to the BBC's Board of Governors, detailing an entrenched liberal-left bias that seriously undermined the BBC's claim to be an impartial news provider. Referring to well-documented incidents, I posed several questions: Why did we keep hiring established left-wing pundits, but never any journalists with right-wing credentials? Why did we use "right wing" as a yah-boo term to mean "anything we don't like"? Why did we never give U.S. actions the benefit of the doubt--in contrast to our strenuous efforts to be "fair" to Britain's avowed enemies?
The reaction was a studied indifference from everyone up the command chain. In a way, the BBC's attitude makes sense. The most important asset for any news organization is credibility. It is the mortal fear of "brand contamination" which in the past persuaded BBC executives to keep a lid on any discussion of the organization's failure to live up to its obligations to fairness and impartiality.
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