It's now verified, the BBC is biased - "There are numerous examples of how BBC News pushes its own liberal Left agenda and distorts the facts to that end – most recently in its coverage of the Gaza war. But there have been few more striking and utterly damning accounts of this than the internal memo on its Panorama programme about Donald Trump put together by Michael Prescott, an adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee for three years until resigning in June. Even for those of us who have scrutinised BBC News’s distortions for many years, it is shocking to see how contemptuous its reporters and editors have been of the truth, and how they prepared a complete distortion of reality for broadcast. In the main example, Panorama edited a speech by Trump outside Congress on the day of the Capitol riots in January 2021 so that when he actually said he would walk with the protestors “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”, he appeared instead to be inciting violence, telling them to “fight like hell”. Panorama had spliced together different and unrelated sections from the beginning and end of an hour long speech – then blended the video so the joins could not be seen, making it seem that President Trump had said something he did not. Who needs AI deepfakes when you have the BBC instead? When Mr Prescott highlighted what had happened, he was met with a wall of obfuscation. He writes in his memo: “I have been surprised at just how defensive Deborah [Turness, chief executive of BBC News] and Jonathan [Munro, the senior controller of news content] in particular have been whenever issues are raised.” Concerned he was getting nowhere with them, he then contacted the BBC’s chairman, Samir Shah: “This is a very, very dangerous precedent. I hope you agree and take some form of action to ensure this potentially huge problem is nipped in the bud.” He did not receive a reply. This is the same Turness, of course, who presided over the catastrophic editorial failure of the BBC broadcasting the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone without mentioning that it was narrated by the son of a Hamas minister in Gaza – who had been paid for his participation. In an address to staff afterwards, Turness defended the programme by saying the father was “a member of the Hamas-run government, which is different to being part of the military wing of Hamas” and that “we need to continually remind people of the difference”. The idea of two separate wings of Hamas is a fiction pushed for years only by those who believe Hamas is a legitimate organisation. You would expect even the most junior reporter covering these issues to know that for the past four years Hamas as a whole has been a proscribed organisation on the basis that “the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial” and that it is “a complex but single terrorist organisation”. That BBC’s most senior editor still insists there are two wings helps explain so much about the BBC’s slant, with Turness demanding that viewers are led to think that Hamas are simply another bunch of politicians rather than, in reality, genocidal terrorists."
Only fascists hate the (left wing) media. The BBC editing Trump's speech is a nothingburger, and the ones complaining about it are the problem. Anyone alleging BBC bias is a far right extremist
Nine ways the BBC misled viewers over Trump - "An internal BBC whistleblowing report listed ways in which the corporation allegedly displayed anti-Trump bias during the 2024 US election. Aside from a Panorama documentary which “doctored” Donald Trump’s 2021 speech on the day of the Capitol Hill riots, the author of a letter sent to BBC Board members highlights nine other alleged examples. They include amplifying a “rogue” poll that favoured Kamala Harris, giving “excessive” coverage to Mr Trump’s comments about people eating pets, and dwelling too much on Harris campaign issues while failing to grasp issues that appealed to Trump supporters. In the letter, Michael Prescott, who until June sat on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, said that “one of the most misrepresented comments of the presidential campaign” was made by Mr Trump about his Republican critic Liz Cheney, who campaigned for Kamala Harris despite being a former chairman of the House Republican Conference. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the political talk show host, on Oct 31 2024, Mr Trump said Ms Cheney “always wanted to go to war with people”. Describing her as a “radical war hawk” he said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her face. OK let’s see how she feels about it.” He then attacked politicians “sitting in Washington in a nice building saying ‘oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy’”. Mr Prescott said in his letter: “Mr Trump was clearly criticising politicians who readily send US troops to war without thinking about the human cost.” The Harris campaign claimed Mr Trump had advocated shooting Ms Cheney, and “alas, the BBC repeatedly pushed this inaccurate version of what Trump said”. BBC News presenters and reporters said Mr Trump “wants people to shoot Liz Cheney in the face”, and that “Liz Cheney should face a firing squad”. Sarah Smith, the BBC’s North America Editor, said Mr Trump had been “ratcheting up the violent rhetoric” and “he suggested that one of his political opponents should face guns, have them trained on her face”. Mr Prescott went on to list eight more ways he believed the BBC displayed anti-Trump bias during the US election. His list was a summary of concerns highlighted in a longer internal report compiled by David Grossman, the senior editorial adviser to the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, who investigated BBC election coverage and delivered his findings on Jan 16 2025. The BBC “ignored its own guidelines about not giving undue weight to a single poll” and gave excessive coverage to a rogue poll conducted in Iowa days before the election that suggested Ms Harris was on course for victory in the state. The poll “dominated coverage” in the days before polling day “while other polls that contradicted its findings were underplayed”. The BBC focused too heavily on campaign issues promoted by Ms Harris, such as abortion and women’s rights, “at the expense of giving greater weight” to the economy, immigration and employment, which proved to be a significant factor in how people voted. Coverage of Mr Trump’s May 2024 convictions for falsifying records “often failed to highlight that many US prosecutors are political appointees” which meant viewers did not have a good understanding of the so-called lawfare at play during the election campaign. The BBC over-emphasised certain events, such as Mr Trump repeating false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which received “excessive” coverage for a week and risked compromising impartiality. The BBC sometimes fell into using contested language such as “reproductive rights” without attributing the phrases to the campaigners that promoted them, which signalled “a biased mindset” to viewers, particularly those in America. There was a tendency to frame issues in a way that was similar to the Harris campaign and there was less fact-checking of “questionable statements” she made compared with those made by Mr Trump. The use of aggregate economic and immigration data skewed coverage because “it masked important class and regional variations which contributed to the election result”. The balance of more in-depth programmes was “markedly anti-Trump/pro Harris”. The internal review of BBC coverage “couldn’t find a single programme that looked more critically at Harris and her record than Trump”. Mr Prescott said in his letter: “From what I witnessed, I fear the problems could be even more widespread than this summary might suggest.”"
‘I broke the BBC bias story. Its silence proves there is a serious problem’ - "After an entire week of claims about BBC bias, censorship and fakery, we await any form of apology from the broadcaster’s leadership – or even an acknowledgement that there is a problem. Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, and Tim Davie, its director-general, clearly believe that if they just ignore The Telegraph’s revelations, the whole thing will go away. Parliament, Ofcom and, most importantly of all, licence fee payers may not allow them that luxury... Michael Prescott, the former BBC adviser who wrote the 19-page letter on which our disclosures were based, will give evidence before the Commons culture, media and sport committee, which has begun an inquiry into the issues he raised. Mr Shah has received a letter from the same committee asking for answers, and if the MPs are not satisfied with his response, he too will be called to give evidence. Mr Davie might well find that he is next on the list for a public inquisition. Lord Grade, the chairman of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, wrote to Mr Shah urging him to take Mr Prescott’s concerns seriously, as did Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, in a statement issued via Number 10... Mr Prescott, who served as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) for three years before leaving in June, had written to the BBC Board in desperation after trying and failing to get managers to address the bias he saw. .. Mr Prescott and David Grossman, the senior editorial adviser to the BBC’s standards committee, had forensically examined BBC output and found evidence of bias to make your hair stand up on end. What I had not expected, though, was to see evidence that the BBC’s flagship documentary programme, Panorama, had doctored a speech by Donald Trump to make it appear that he had said something he had not. I read Mr Prescott’s description of how the BBC had spliced together different parts of Mr Trump’s speech on the day of the 2021 Capitol Hill riots to make it seem that he had exhorted supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” when, in fact, he had told them to go there and protest peacefully. Surely, I thought, it couldn’t be as bad as the memo was making out. But then I watched the Panorama footage – and the original recording of the speech – and I was genuinely astonished at what I saw (not something that happens very often after more than 30 years in journalism). The BBC had seamlessly edited together two parts of Mr Trump’s speech, spoken almost an hour apart, to create what appeared to viewers to be one fluent sentence, which neatly fitted into the BBC’s narrative of Mr Trump inciting the riots. For good measure, it then showed footage of people marching on the Capitol when, in fact, that happened an hour before Mr Trump started speaking, deliberately creating a false narrative, all backed by a soundtrack of foreboding music to help set the tone. Mr Prescott was so alarmed that he told the EGSC that if the BBC was prepared to run a coach and horses through its own rules on impartiality, then “why should the BBC be trusted?” In a meeting in May this year, Jonathan Munro, the global director of BBC News, glibly replied that there had been “no attempt to mislead the audience” and that such editing was “normal practice”. Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, “tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline” by saying it was in line with a Democrat-packed committee’s findings that he had helped cause the riots. Mr Davie and Mr Shah said nothing at all... I have since been contacted by senior journalists at the BBC – of which many good ones remain – who suggested that because the BBC as an organisation hates Mr Trump, and believes he did cause the riot, Mr Munro and others can see nothing wrong with doctoring his words. The inescapable comparison that comes to mind is of corrupt police officers fitting up someone they are convinced is guilty, but against whom they lack sufficient evidence... Patrick had found that Samer Elzaenen, who had suggested Jews should be burned “as Hitler did” had appeared on BBC Arabic more than a dozen times, but Mr Grossman’s internal audit found the true figure to be 244 times over an 18-month period. Ahmed Alagha, who had said Jews were “devils” and not human, appeared 522 times over the same period. Mr Prescott concluded that BBC Arabic was swallowing Hamas propaganda and its treatment of stories was designed to “minimise Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor”. This was a conclusion many people on the outside of the organisation had already come to, but this was a BBC insider setting out examples of bias on page after page in a letter to the BBC Board. Mr Prescott told the board that his motivation in writing the note was “despair at inaction by the BBC executive” when such matters were raised internally... bias did not just come from what was being said, but from what was being omitted, particularly when it came to reporting transgender issues. He had been approached by several BBC employees who believed that the specialist LGBT desk within BBC News was guilty of “effective censorship” by refusing to cover stories that raised difficult questions about the gender ideology they had been “captured” by. Likewise, people running the BBC News app’s news alerts service were accused of “selection bias” by largely ignoring major stories about migrants – including a record number of small boat arrivals on one particular day – while sending three times as many notifications about stories involving Russell Brand as those that involved immigration. The BBC’s Verify service had been suckered into wrongly reporting issues about racism, Mr Prescott said, in particular when it reported that people from ethnic minorities were being charged more for car insurance by “racist” insurers. The story seemed so unlikely that Mr Prescott, using the “professional scepticism” that BBC Verify seemed to lack, looked into the claims and found them to be based on dodgy statistics that failed to take into account factors such as how many uninsured drivers lived in a particular area or how many false claims there had been. The story was eventually taken down. When it came to the BBC’s history programmes, Mr Prescott examined another Telegraph story about “non-expert” academics providing comments about racism and prejudice in Britain’s past to fit in with the broadcaster’s “distorted narrative” on colonialism. He found the story – based on a report by Oxbridge professors – to be “fascinating and compelling”, but the concerns were ignored and a proposed meeting between a senior BBC executive and one of the professors was cancelled by the BBC. As many of our readers have pointed out, it is striking that the BBC is continuing to trumpet its own fight against “disinformation” in a promotional video fronted by Clive Myrie, while believing that “making people ‘say’ things they never actually said”, to quote Mr Prescott, is “normal practice”. BBC journalists who have contacted me this week say many of their colleagues have deep concerns about this “sanctimonious” back-slapping, with one describing it as “embarrassing”."
How ignorant. How can anyone criticise BBC Verify? Don't they know that if you have a problem with fact checking it means you hate facts?
BBC editor sues Owen Jones over Israel bias claim - "A BBC editor has sued Owen Jones, the journalist, over an article claiming the corporation is biased towards Israel. The article about coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the BBC’s online news editor for the Middle East to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege. Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Mr Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year. Mr Jones spoke anonymously to 13 BBC staffers who claimed Mr Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”. Mr Berg denied the claims. The article also said that staff had told Mr Jones that Mr Berg “reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images” and “repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity”."
Terrorism supporters won't be satisfied till they can kill Jews in the streets
The new BBC bias evidence is shocking even to experienced Corporation watchers - "Fascinatingly, the BBC appears to have been aware of many of these issues, with multiple reports landing in front of the Editorial Board, with no apparent response from the broadcaster to address the problems, or even acknowledge that these were serious matters: in one meeting, the Director General and Chairman stood by as other members of the board attempted to defend the patently indefensible... At present, it appears quite evident that the tail has been allowed to wag the dog: the BBC’s management seems to be letting staff run rampant, apparently scared of the backlash should they insist on proper impartiality and enforcement of editorial standards. Should this continue, then pressure for reform must be applied from without the organisation. There is little hope that the Labour Government – which likely shares the BBC’s biases – will apply the requisite pressure. The task therefore falls either to the MPs of the culture, media and sport select committee, or to Ofcom in its role as regulator responsible for the BBC’s editorial standards. One way or another, our national broadcaster must be jolted from its complacency."
The BBC will soon learn that hubris unfailingly leads to ruin - "The insouciance of the BBC in the face of this newspaper’s exposé of its outrageous bias speaks volumes. Once revered as the gold standard for impartial journalism, the corporation now seems unwilling even to investigate reports of its own decline. The BBC doesn’t appear to think there is a story in the leaked memo revealing that it doctored Donald Trump’s January 6 speech; that it “pushed Hamas lies around the world”; that it ignored experts to promote “woke history”; or that its trans coverage was “censored” by its own reporters... The corporation’s fundamental flaw is that it genuinely believes its journalism is superior to everyone else’s. This righteous arrogance has fostered an institutional culture incapable of recognising its own failings. The BBC still clings to its self-styled image as the arbiter of truth, a cut above partisan media and the “gutter” press. Yet in recent years, it has repeatedly been found wanting, both in editorial judgment and in its awareness of how its own biases appear to the public. Consider this week’s preposterous announcement that the BBC had upheld 20 impartiality complaints over presenter Martine Croxall’s decision to alter a live script on the BBC News Channel earlier this year. The original wording referred to “pregnant people,” but Croxall, introducing an interview about research on heatwave risks, changed it to “women,” rolling her eyes slightly as she did so. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit concluded that her expression gave “the strong impression of expressing a personal view on a controversial matter”. Even the BBC’s own report on the ruling managed to misstate its findings. A correction was later added, clarifying that it had “mistakenly quoted the judgment as referring to ‘trans ideology’” rather than “trans identity”. As ever, the priority was to placate activist groups rather than confront the absurdity of the situation. This episode encapsulates where the BBC’s priorities now lie. It seems more concerned with appeasing internal ideologues and lobbyists than with maintaining common-sense standards of accuracy or impartiality. The contradiction at the heart of the ruling is glaring: that it is somehow “controversial” for the national broadcaster to describe a pregnant person as a woman. The BBC’s self-policing of language is less about neutrality and more about compliance with a narrow world-view. These are the rabbit holes down which the BBC has willingly jumped in recent years. Whether on gender identity, colonial history, or climate policy, its journalists often approach complex issues not as dispassionate observers but as advocates for a predetermined moral stance. This has alienated swathes of the audience who once regarded the BBC as a trusted source. I vividly recall appearing on The Andrew Marr Show for a newspaper review when a producer, half-jokingly, told me I would never be given my own BBC show because I had “too many opinions”. The irony is that Marr himself has never been short of opinions. The difference is that his views broadly align with the BBC’s internal orthodoxy: socially liberal, anti-populist, and instinctively suspicious of anything that smells of Brexit, nationalism, or conservatism... Many BBC journalists strive sincerely for balance, current political editor Chris Mason being a prime example. But the problem is structural. The BBC recruits heavily from the same social and educational milieu: metropolitan, university-educated, Left-leaning graduates who share similar assumptions about politics and culture. When groupthink becomes the default setting, genuine diversity of thought becomes almost impossible. This licence fee funded monoculture explains why the BBC so often misreads public sentiment. It misjudged the scale of support for Brexit, failed to grasp the frustration with lockdown, and continues to treat scepticism about gender ideology as a moral failing rather than a legitimate debate. Its coverage of Donald Trump has frequently veered into editorialising, favouring scornful dismissal over clear-eyed analysis. By contrast, reports on Left-leaning figures are couched in the language of empathy. The “democratic socialism” of New York’s newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani was this week described by the BBC as “essentially meaning giving voice to workers, not corporations”. No mention, naturally, of the communist nature of some of his lunatic policies. Critics of the BBC’s approach are often accused of “attacking” public broadcasting. But accountability should be the cornerstone of journalism. The BBC has an obligation to reflect the full spectrum of the public who pay for it, yet it too often treats that duty as an inconvenience. Much of the bias is subtle. It lies not only in what the BBC reports, but in what it chooses not to report, or how it frames a story. The consequences are profound. Public trust in the BBC has declined sharply. A 2024 YouGov poll found that fewer than half of Britons now believe the BBC is impartial. Among younger audiences and working-class viewers outside London, the figure is even lower. And it is all self-inflicted. What the corporation fails to understand is that impartiality is not achieved through bureaucratic box-ticking. It requires intellectual curiosity, a willingness to challenge internal assumptions, and humility about one’s blind spots. Instead, the BBC’s instinct is defensive. Each exposé is met not with reflection but with deflection, an insistence that critics simply “don’t understand” its mission. How can they continue to lack introspection when they have presided over a series of scandals from Jimmy Savile and Martin Bashir’s Panorama deceit to the Huw Edwards affair, the pulled Gaza documentary, and even the “Death to the IDF” chants broadcast from Glastonbury? The BBC still has a crucial role in British life but its survival depends on rediscovering what once made it great: balance, honesty, and courage in the face of political pressure from any direction. At the moment, it seems more like Sir Keir Starmer’s stenographer than the nation’s impartial broadcaster."
Damn far right undermining public trust in the BBC! They need to be stopped before they do even more damage!
The awful truth about the BBC is now too monstrous to hide - "Fuelled by billions of pounds extracted via the licence fee, the BBC has spent forty years shrinking the Overton window, waging war against centre-Right dissidents, bullying politicians into following destructive orthodoxies and promoting an anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-conservative worldview. Its output, riddled with group-think, lapped up by our decrepit establishment, reeks of oikophobia, economic illiteracy, soft socialism, suicidal empathy and luxury beliefs. Seduced by critical theory, the BBC backs the “anywheres” against the “somewheres”, supports global institutions, from the EU to UNRWA, and barely conceals its disgust at those who prefer power to be located at the national level. One of the BBC’s foundational biases is to assume more government – spending, regulation, intervention, censorship – is the answer to every problem, rather than private initiative and markets. It often describes those on the Left as “respected experts” while labelling others as “Right-wing”. It is indulgent towards virtue-signalling “charities” and NGOs, and has no interest in who funds them or in gauging the efficacy or track record of their ideas; but is always ready to slam, trash and interrupt their opponents. The BBC assumes the worst of business, and the best of “environmental” or “human rights” campaigners. It rightly holds politicians with genuinely fascistic views to account, but is soft on far-Left extremists such as the repellent Zohran Mamdani, mayor elect of New York. The BBC never forgave itself for the modicum of balance it displayed during the EU referendum, and spent the next few years taking Brussels’ side in the Brexit negotiations. It still assembles audiences that over-index on metropolitan Lefties... Our pathetic growth and diminished living standards? The BBC made life hard for any politician who had the temerity to call for lower spending, reduced red tape or lower tax rates, the obvious solutions. Years of excessive immigration, which has, inter alia, fuelled Islamism? For decades, it wasn’t possible to propose lower migration without accusations of racism. Net zero, which destroyed industry and pushed up energy prices, was pushed almost uncritically by the BBC. Lockdowns? The BBC turned itself into a hysterical purveyor of the official line, claiming the problem was not shutting down fast enough and cancelling anybody who (truthfully) blamed a Chinese virus leak. Our second-rate NHS? The BBC, to its credit, does expose individual cases of wrongdoing, but overall has played a central role in defending the NHS’s role as our unofficial secular religion. One reason the Tories’ 14 years in office were a disaster is because they were wrongly terrified of the BBC. Convinced the corporation could make or break any government, they ensured the top 10 per cent of earners were hit at every Budget and dreamt up Leftist policies to pass the “BBC test”... Why hasn’t the BBC deployed its ludicrous “fact-checkers” against itself? The memo reveals BBC bosses were “dismissive” and defensive when academics accused it of rewriting history to promote a woke agenda, especially with regards to slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine. The BBC regularly behaves as a propaganda channel, a campaigning organisation for extreme views, not as a middle of the road, dispassionate news media for all of Britain. Damningly, the report accuses BBC Arabic of deciding to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the Gaza war to “paint Israel as the aggressor”. Allegations against the Jewish state were “raced to air” without proper checks, as were Hamas’s made-up casualty figures, implying either incompetence or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”. It’s not just BBC Arabic, in my view: the corporation’s overall output has propagated incendiary libels against Israel for years, and especially since October 7. Given its influence and reach, this has played a central role in fuelling the return of anti-Semitism in Britain and around the world. It’s a shameful, foul betrayal. Heads must roll. Tim Davie, the director general, must resign. BBC Arabic needs to be shut down. The licence fee must be abolished, as well as all subsidies for any part of the BBC. The corporation should become a member-controlled charity, funded through advertising, subscriptions or donations, or disappear. We need private Left-wing media, and we need private Right-wing media, but it is madness to force taxpayers to underwrite the warping of our polity. Enough is enough."
Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC as broadcaster plunges deeper into crisis : r/gbnews - "BBC trying to interfere in the democratic election of a US president by making and broadcasting a doctored video. No wonder Trump will sue."
"Was it democratic when he tried to overthrow the election and called for Georgia to interfere in the votes count?"
"It doesn't matter, it's the BBCs job to report not lie."
"Is quoting someone a lie?... Poor editing yes. Editing that brings political pressure on the bbc yes. Lying no. He did what they claimed 🤷"
The cope is amazing. Doctoring footage is just "poor editing". It's this sort of mindset in the BBC that led to the scandal. Misinformation is good when it pushes the left wing agenda, of course
Of course, if the Daily Mail reports something left wingers don't like, it's fake and proof that they cannot be trusted, even if it's true
BBC bosses ignored experts to push ‘woke’ history - "BBC bosses were “dismissive” and defensive when Oxford and Cambridge professors accused the corporation of rewriting history to promote a woke agenda, a leaked internal memo says. In December 2022, The Telegraph reported on complaints by leading academics that the BBC was allowing “politically motivated campaigners” to present tendentious views of British history as fact. Rather than acknowledging that documentaries on subjects including slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine distorted the truth, BBC executives accused the academics of “cherry picking” examples... In 2022, university dons who were members of an organisation called History Reclaimed said that documentaries on subjects including slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine distorted the truth about Britain’s past through inaccuracy or the omission important facts. Rather than seeking a balanced view of history from the country’s most knowledgeable historians, they said, the BBC sought out fringe figures who agreed with its woke view of Britain’s imperial past. They criticised a programme that suggested the Bengal famine of 1943 was a consequence of racism on the part of Winston Churchill when in fact Britain sent large shipments of food to the Indian region in the face of wartime food shortages. An episode of the archaeology programme Digging For Britain claimed that British policy during the 19th-century Irish potato famine amounted to the “extermination” of a people and that aid was refused, even though prime minister Robert Peel ordered the purchase of American maize to feed 500,000 people in Ireland and ruined his career by suspending the Corn Laws to allow untaxed imports. After The Telegraph’s story was published, Michael Prescott, an independent editorial adviser on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) suggested a meeting of BBC programme commissioners, producers and editors to review History Reclaimed’s findings. Mr Prescott, a descendant of Guyanense indentured labourers, found the History Reclaimed report “fascinating and compelling”, and a senior BBC executive was lined up to meet some of the members behind it – but that plan was later withdrawn. The EGSC was later told that a meeting “was judged inappropriate”. In a letter sent to the BBC Board in September and now circulating in government departments, Mr Prescott says: “I remain slightly mystified by this. History Reclaimed seemed reasonable, were making limited claims and suggested an easy solution – why ignore the whole thing and allow the questionable practice, apparently identified, to continue?” At the time The Telegraph’s original story was published, the BBC accused History Reclaimed of “cherry-picking a handful of examples” from thousands of hours of output that was not a fair representation of BBC content. Mr Prescott described this response as “dismissive” and wrote: “This defensiveness when challenged over contested areas is something the BBC demonstrates time and time again and was an issue I had raised at the EGSC.” The BBC has faced repeated criticism over its presentation of history. As well as the examples highlighted by History Reclaimed, it was accused of giving children a “dishonest” view of communism earlier this year because of material on the BBC Bitesize website, which is intended as a learning tool. After outlining the central tenets of Marxism and the emergence of the Soviet Union, it conceded that some people thought communism placed “too many limits on individual freedom” but made no mention of dictators such as Joseph Stalin or of the millions who died under communist regimes."
