BBC upholds complaint over pro-SNP bias in Radio 4 show
THE BBC has upheld a complaint of ‘pro-SNP bias’ over the broadcast of passages from a book by a Scottish Government health adviser.
Professor Devi Sridhar’s account of her experiences during the pandemic was serialised by Radio 4 less than two weeks before the Scottish local elections in May.
One excerpt from Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Prevent the Next One included her take on the damage done to public health policy by former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings’s visit to County Durham during lockdown.
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit launched an investigation after a listener complained that the broadcast contained material ‘which was politically partial in relation to the Scottish local authority elections, which were less than two weeks away’.
The BBC has now upheld the complaint and said the broadcast ‘fell short’ of its ‘standards of impartiality’. In response to the ruling, Professor Sridhar tweeted: ‘One person complained because somehow saying anything positive about Scotland (lovely lochs!) is seen as “bias”.’
Earlier this year Professor Sridhar – accused by trolls of being a puppet of the Scottish Government – called for harsher penalties for those who target public figures online.
Despite the complaint of pro-SNP bias being upheld, Nationalists have long claimed the BBC is biased against Scottish independence. In 2014, thousands marched in Glasgow attacking the BBC’s coverage of the referendum. Nationalists are planning another rally today outside the BBC’s Glasgow headquarters in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling against Nicola Sturgeon’s plan for an independence referendum next year.
In July, Alistair Bonnington, who was BBC Scotland’s in-house legal counsel for 16 years, said the broadcaster was ‘slavishly biased’ in favour of the SNP Government. He lodged complaints with the BBC and the regulator Ofcom.