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  1. Culture
12 December 2010

Does the BBC really have a left-wing bias?

If most of the corporation’s staff don’t vote Tory, that’s only a reflection of the country at large

By Daniel Trilling

In an interview with today’s Observer, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, accuses the BBC of having a left-wing bias. “I think,” he says, “if you were to discover how people vote at the BBC there are probably more who vote Labour or Liberal Democrat than vote for the Conservatives.”

I don’t presume to know how BBC staff vote. However, if a majority of them did vote for either Labour or Lib Dem at the last general election, this would not be evidence of “bias”: it would be a fairly accurate reflection of how the country at large voted. A quick reminder, these were the votes cast for the three main parties in May 2010:

Conservatives – 10, 692,131 (36.1 per cent)

Labour – 8,595,341 (29 per cent)

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Lib Dems – 6,822,741 (23 per cent)

(Which is always a good set of statistics to bear in mind any time you hear someone going on about the Tories being the “natural party of government”, or having a mandate for anything much, really.)

Hunt expanded on his comments, saying: “I think the BBC does recognise that on certain very totemic issues of the last decade it was out of step with where the public are, whether it was on Europe, on immigration or our approach to Northern Ireland.”

Here I will defer to my colleague Mehdi Hasan, who cogently argued last year against the popular misconception of BBC bias:

The BBC’s bias is thus an Establishment bias, a bias towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy. The accusation that the BBC is left-wing and liberal is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission. “The right in America has waged a long and successful battle to brand the news as liberal, and the same is happening here [in relation to the BBC] with the aid of a predominantly right-wing press,” says Barnett. “I fear they may have similar success in redefining the centre ground of politics to suit their own political agenda.” With a Tory government on the verge of power, it is time for liberals and the left to fight back and force the BBC to acknowledge its real bias.

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