THE PROBLEM WITH THE BBC

It doesn’t appear to be on-line yet, but the text of Damian Thompson’s feature about Robin Aitken, the respected, ex-BBC reporter who is laying into the Corporation’s centre-left bias, has been posted at Blithering Bunny.

Unmissable stuff. Aitken, who has written a yet-to-be-published book about his experiences on programmes such as Today, clearly has a lot to get off his chest. He accuses John Birt, Greg Dyke and the BBC governors of ignoring evidence of tendentious coverage. As for reporting of the Iraq war, here’s what he has to say about his former colleagues:

"They cannot bear President Bush because he’s a Republican and an evangelical Christian. The sight of a Labour Prime Minister going into battle alongside such a man was more than many BBC people could stomach."

Dislike of Republicans is close to being a BBC article of faith, say Aitken. "I remember being in the Washington office during the Lewinsky affair and saying that I rather sympathised with the Republicans. I think it would have gone down better if I’d confessed to being a paedophile."

Is it all part of a conspiracy? No, there’s a simpler explanation, which will come as no surprise at all to anyone who knows how the Beeb works:

"There were no secret instructions to distort stories. Reporters did not set out to be unfair - far from it," he explains. "What we are talking about, to adopt the language of the Macpherson report into the Metropolitan Police, is a sort of unconscious, institutionalised Leftism. And when so many people working together share a particular world view, groups who do not share it are bound to be marginalised."