The Mail on Sunday

Tories are right to shun BBC’s biased shows

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Who can blame the Tories for giving Radio 4’s Today and BBC2’s Newsnight a wide berth, especially when, as you reported last week, the latter programme has employed as its policy editor someone who openly backs Labour? Has any broadcaste­r in the UK ever employed so many out-of-touch producers, directors and presenters?

Even the comedy shows, such as BBC1’s Have I Got News For You and Radio 4’s The News Quiz, are so Left-wing that I can’t listen to them. The same now applies to anything that the Brexit-insulting luvvie Steve Coogan appears in. And if that Remoaner Gary Lineker is going to continue presenting Match Of The Day, I’ll never watch it again.

Hopefully, under Boris Johnson the BBC will be exposed to the real world without the licence fee and allowed to sink or swim.

Alan Aitchison, Wakefield

You really have to question the intelligen­ce of Newsnight’s new policy editor, Left-wing serial tweeter Lewis Goodall, and those who employed him. Not because of his political views – I’m Left-wing myself – but because he has been so desperate to air them. Has it not occurred to him, or those who hired him, that as a supposedly objective reporter or editor, you should not be so publicly partisan?

What good is this going to do the BBC? Maybe Goodall can be excused because he is only 30. But, on that point, why is Newsnight hiring a relative kid in such a senior position?

Alas, I fear that we will be seeing a lot more of Mr Goodall in the future: his keenness to be heard shows that he clearly wants to be famous, and Newsnight’s apparent faith in him will do nothing to stop that. And what are the odds that one day he won’t try to be the news rather than reporting and commenting on it, by standing as a Labour MP? C. Dodd, Durham

Before he died, Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent a total of 12 years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatri­c hospitals, urged people not to pay their BBC licence fee, saying the BBC was biased.

Nothing has changed. On the Today programme recently I heard a woman with MS talking about how she had decided to break the law and take cannabis. Instead of interviewi­ng the families of those people who had taken cannabis and ended up in mental hospitals or committed knife crimes and robberies, the programme-makers seemed to condone taking the drug.

Josephine Juden, Bournemout­h

Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a masterpiec­e, yet the recent BBC version destroyed it. The same can be said of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which has just finished on BBC1.

A. Still, Ilford, Essex

After years of paying for a TV licence to watch very good programmes, we now find we are paying to watch shows we have already seen. Anne Eggins,

Woking, Surrey

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