How neutral is BBC News?

[mickthinks]

An interesting spat between the Labour Party and the BBC:

Labour Party Formally Complains To BBC Over Stephen Doughty's Live On-Air Resignation In Jeremy Corbyn's Reshuffle; BBC Rejects 'Orchestrated' Charge

I find the BBC's official denials disingenuous. The minister may have already decided to resign, but such a decision is not the same thing as a declaration. The BBC were not merely getting a scoop on the decision, they were staging the actual resignation and controlling the timing, enabling Cameron to use it to try to score points against Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions immediately after the programme ...

PMQs 6 Jan 2016 Corbyn v Cameron bit - YouTube

It seems entirely possible that, thanks to BBC News, the Conservative leader could have known about the resignation before the Labour Leader, to whom the resignation was supposed to be tendered, did. I think that is stepping quite clearly and quite deliberately over the line between neutral reporting and political interference.

[mickthinks]

Some useful background on the political leanings of the people who run BBC news, including the man in charge of Daily Politics, the programme which staged the resignation, here:

The BBC is full of political bias - but that doesn't affect its output | The Guardian

From the link

Then there’s Robbie Gibb, the current excellent editor of all BBC TV’s political programmes In a former life he was a vice-chairman of the extreme rightwing Federation of Conservative Students and went on to become chief of staff to the senior Tory MP Francis Maude before joining the BBC.

[Vivisectus]

I always thought of the BBC as I think of absolute monarchies. Sometimes it is great that it is ruled by little czars, if you get a really GOOD little czar. But it can also be pretty terrible and there is not enough control over the quality of the leadership. For the state broadcasting service of a democratic country, it seems a curiously undemocratic institution.

[ceptimus]

I think of the BBC as a self-perpetuating clique. It's the current middle class, privately educated incumbents who get to interview new applicants and decide whether or not to hire them. Unsurprisingly, they tend to hire other people from the same social group - sometimes, no doubt, their own friends and relatives.

They worry about having a representative sample of ethnic minority presenters, but they don't seem concerned about having a similarly representative sample from a working class background.

The BBC management have always been conservative with a small c, and probably a large C too - though I think in the past they tried harder to appear unbiased. Right now they are running scared of a Tory government that is determined to cut them back, so their anti-left bias is showing through more clearly.

I'm particularly disgusted by their coverage of any matters to do with Israel; also by their heavily biased pro-EEC coverage.

I think that the forthcoming referendum on us remaining in or leaving the European club requires some agency to impartially report the facts so that the voters can make an informed choice: it would be nice to think that the BBC could fill such a role, but I think their inherent bias and their own self-interests in Europe mean that they will stealthily campaign on the side of the 'remain' group.