The Guardian makes some interesting points about BBC bias today. Picking up on Jeremy Hunt’s observation that Corporation staff lean largely Leftward, it quotes Andrew Marr’s obervation that the one-sidedness is “cultural and not party political”. Precisely. BBC presenters and editors rarely set out to promote one party over another. Their partiality, rather, is unconscious, reflexive, instinctive. Indeed, I remember a classic example from Marr himself. When Chris Patten averred that, on the issue of leaving the EPP, David Cameron should “listen to Angela Merkel and not to people like Daniel Hannan”, Marr, the interviewer, replied, “Yes, absolutely”. I don’t think he was trying to be snotty: he simply couldn’t see that he was asserting an opinion rather than a fact. (Beeb types often make this error when discussing the EU: see here and here for examples). It’s the same tendency that leads presenters to introduce conservatives as Right-wing polemicists, but to introduce Lefties as disinterested experts (see here).

The Guardian finishes with an amusing demonstration of its own unconscious bias: “There is, however, at least one self-confessed Conservative executive at the BBC. The BBC4 controller, Richard Klein, confessed his political leaning in August at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival”. Note the choice of verb. My dictionary defines “confess” as “to disclose something damaging or inconvenient to oneself; to make known one’s sins to a priest”. Alright, it was a light-hearted remark. Still, can you to imagine the Grauniad describing someone as “a self-confessed Labour supporter”?

and there's this as well

This picture of a corrupted BBC culture that is ideologically skewed towards the left is blindingly obvious to anyone who does not share those assumptions. It is a far deeper problem than the political partisanship recently let slip by Today presenter Jim Naughtie when he inadvertently referred to the Labour Party as ‘we’.

With a few honourable exceptions, the BBC views every issue through the prism of left-wing, secular, anti-western thinking. It is the Guardian of the air. It has a knee-jerk antipathy to America, the free market, big business, religion, British institutions, the Conservative party and Israel; it supports the human rights culture, the Palestinians, Irish republicanism, European integration, multiculturalism and a liberal attitude towards drugs and a host of social issues.