BBC impartiality and the problem of bias - Dr. Richard Norrie August 2023

The original working idea of the BBC was to tell the country about itself, as well as bring the ‘best which has been thought and said’ into the lives of ordinary people, plus a bit of fun thrown into the mix. [...] It defines the BBC’s mission as: ‘The Mission of the BBC is 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.’ The charter defines the BBC’s ‘public purposes’ to include providing ‘impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them. [...] Off the back of Prebble’s review, the Trust declared the BBC ‘delivered a good range of opinion and that it was impartial’.16 The content analysis, which was based on monitoring of BBC output on three topics (immigration, the European Union, and religion), concluded among other things, ‘Although political voices dominate, and the ruling party has a larger share of voice, the Conservative dominance. [...] Also, that ‘truthful and informative reporting was drowned out in the political tit-for-tat between the two campaigns.’ This resulted in the ‘palpably misleading claims’, for example the infamous claim from the Leave Campaign that £350 million per week was being sent to the EU each week, assigned the same status as the ‘consensus view from most economists that withdrawal from the EU was likely to. [...] The better word is a ‘mindset.’ At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left… ‘Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good – it is heresy to question any of its activities.