Evan: No one at BBC cares when we’re accused of bias
THE BBC does not take claims of bias seriously, according to the presenter of Newsnight.
Evan Davis said the corporation constantly received email complaints without taking any action.
Addressing the Hay literary festival in Wales, he insisted the BBC was Britain’s answer to the New York Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers. ‘All the time we get those emails,’ said the 55-yearold. ‘And honestly, no one at the BBC takes those kinds of things into account. Maybe people at the very top of the BBC do, I don’t know. Maybe they do. But none of the people who are making programmes do.’
Mr Davis’s remarks come days after the corporation was accused of Left- wing bias in its Election Debate programme. But he told the festival: ‘There are some diktats at the BBC. They’ll be on certain specific things like “You have to interview a Lib Dem during this part of the campaign”.
‘That sort of diktat is imposed, where there’s a fairness issue. The BBC isn’t one thing. It’s a competing fiefdom of large numbers of different programmes competing with each other, sometimes co-operating with each other, more often competing with each other.
‘So if one programme is trying to be convenient to the corporate interests of the BBC, another one will not be.’
Mr Davis was at the festival to promote his book Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak B******t and What We Can Do About It.
ACCORDING to Newsnight presenter Evan Davis, no one at the BBC takes any notice of complaints about bias. In a sentence, he sums up the corporation’s smug insouciance towards criticism – and explains why the audience in last week’s leaders debate was said by furious Tories to be ‘the most Left-wing ever’.