by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage (Image: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
We pay for the BBC through the licence fee, and its Charter binds it to be impartial. Yet it closes the book on marriage, and on the plain fact that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. It wants to shape our children’s minds as well. By last Sunday, it had taken material on migration and Net Zero off Bitesize, its schools website, after the Mail on Sunday exposed it as one-sided. A week before, it paused its own scheme putting Government civil servants in its newsroom.
Robin Aitken joined the BBC in the 1970s and spent 25 years there as a journalist, from local radio to the Today programme. Watch our discussion here.
The Telegraph revealed on 17 October that 39 civil servants had worked in the BBC newsroom since 2018, “bylined and credited as members of ‘BBC News’ and ‘BBC Verify’”. Despite the BBC saying they “never make editorial decisions”, one civil servant wrote: “My lines were then quickly pulled into a full article on the main site”. Lines that go straight into BBC News are editorial, whatever the BBC says.
A newsroom bound to be impartial, Robin says, is no place for “civil servants whose job it is, after all, to follow the dictates of the government of the day”. “I would say that the BBC really is a state broadcaster”, he says, and one that “instinctively aligns itself with progressive thought”.