The Lies Of The BBC

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, goes ballistic on the BBC. The recent spate of outright fraud the BBC has admitted is symptomatic of a deeply flawed, ideologically driven operation where the truth is simply not valued. It is all about twisting stories to fit a predetermined world view. And it is destroying the BBC brand name.

The BBC is in serious trouble. In the space of one week it has suffered three serious blows to its credibility as a broadcaster of integrity which can be relied upon to tell the truth.

First, it was fined £50,000 after it faked the results of a Blue Peter competition last November.

The show allowed a child visiting the studio to pose as a caller when technical problems stopped real calls getting through. The BBC was criticised for 'negligence' and for 'making a child complicit' in the deception.

In the wake of this disaster, its director of vision Jana Bennett seemed to be tacitly admitting that the BBC cupboard was packed with skeletons about to come tumbling out, when she urged staff to identify programmes 'where you feel there may be a risk that in some way audiences could have been misled'.

She didn't have long to wait. Within a few hours of her panicky request, the BBC was engulfed by a fresh and even more explosive revelation that it had put out a false accusation about the Queen.

The Controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, gloated at a press launch of the BBC's autumn schedule that a forthcoming documentary would show the Queen had 'walked off in a huff'.

He showed the Press a trailer which purported to show the Queen storming off from a photo-shoot after being asked to remove her crown by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

This turned out to be an outright falsification. The footage had been edited in such a way as to reverse the actual sequence of events. The Queen did not storm out; she made the remarks on her way in.

Yesterday, in an echo of this most damaging debacle, it was revealed in addition that BBC TV's Newsnight had similarly reversed a filmed sequence of events, this time apparently to present the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in a bad light.

The sequence purported to show that Mr Brown's press officer had told the police to question a Newsnight reporter under antiterror laws in retaliation for an earlier confrontation between them. In fact, the two events had taken place weeks apart and in reverse order.

As a result, Mr Brown's officials complained to the Corporation about an 'unfair, unbalanced, unnecessarily personal and disingenuous' film which they claim was altered to make Mr Brown look like a thug.

Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, has admitted that the sequence of events was reversed, but has refused to apologise. The BBC has insisted there was no intention to deceive. Disingenuous, or what? …..

…..And that certainly fits with the institutionalised infantile Leftism that passes for neutrality at the BBC.

Indeed, questions about the integrity of the BBC's processes are intimately bound up with questions about the integrity of its journalism.

In recent months, concern has steadily mounted that our public service broadcaster is abusing its position by systematically presenting events through a distorting ideological prism.

That was the mild part - from there it gets scathing, go see for yourself. I very seldom link anything from the BBC - I have known of their bias for a long time. But the world - who has come to trust the BBC - is getting a rude awakening. A series of scandals this close together can only be considered the tip of the iceberg. And people are a whole lot smarter than the leftist elites give them credit for. The BBC is in trouble, the question is: are they smart enough to realize it and fix it?