Do we want independent news?
Over the past week, there has been an increase in criticism of the BBC’s political coverage. The escalation this week occurred in parallel to the focus on the Green Party in Norwich North’s by-election. While I haven’t been following all media outlet’s coverage, luckily others have, and Daniel Hannan has quite simply pointed out the dramatic political bias they have shown. From his column it is clear that the BBC are indeed Anti-UKIP and Pro-Green:
Newsnight, Look East and Radio 4 all chose to disregard UKIP and treat the Greens as the main story. Three days before the poll, the BBC’s Eastern region TV held a hustings meeting for four candidates: Conservative, Labour, LibDem and Green.
What was the result in the event? UKIP won 11.8 per cent of the vote - comfortably ahead of the Greens and remarkably close to the LibDems (or “worryingly close” as I just heard a Radio 5 Live presenter put it).
With our paid news coverage, we inevitably go for an outlet that will provide the political bias that we are so aligned to, and yet with the BBC they hold themselves to a higher, self-righteous, moral standard. The BBC we must remember are that they are paid for by the taxpayer. To use the biased a degrading choice of words that the 5 Live presenter used yesterday, the BBC ‘worryingly’ declared itself ‘left-of-centre thinking’ as if this was the silver lining we’d been waiting for. There should be no left or right with the BBC, it is funded by everyone, and indeed they should cover all parties with the same encouragements and skeptisms as one another. UKIP’s blatant exclusion from coverage is an outrage, UKIP voters are taxpayers like everyone else, and personally I find it’s coverage of the Green Party ‘worryingly’ excessive. Charles Moore might just have the right idea in his boycott of the licencse fee (originally outlined in The Spectator, and revisisted by The Telegraph).
Don’t get me wrong, I read The Telegraph, and (by preference) watch Sky News for a reason, but for those of us living in a slightly outdated age where BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 is all we have on our televisions, the main news provider needs to be unbiased; and its an outrage that they still play politics on such a dramatic scale.
