from Coalition for Marriage
Last Saturday, former BBC journalist Robin Aitken told us how the BBC closes the book on moral issues. In part two of our interview, he explains how that shuts out the case for real marriage. And he reveals that the BBC has invited him “on several occasions to give evidence confidentially to internal BBC inquiries into their impartiality”. Yet “I have never been publicly interviewed about these issues on the BBC or by the BBC”, he says. Meanwhile the bill keeps rising. On 30 October, new figures suggested the licence fee will pass £200 a year within five years. You can watch our discussion here.
Put Robin live on the Today programme, he says, and “what I would have to say would be almost irrefutable from the BBC’s point of view”. A courageous organisation would say, “here’s a critic, one of our own, if you like, homegrown. Let’s have him on and talk about these things.” “Do they ever?” he asks. “Of course they don’t.”
The BBC “would far sooner that these things were not discussed”, he says, because our case is “a central challenge to the whole liberal edifice which dominates this society”.
So the BBC hears its own critic in confidence, but has never publicly interviewed him, he says. That isn’t impartiality. It’s the BBC deciding what the people who pay for it may hear.