Whenever presenters on the BBC seemingly reveal their bias, people talk about “the mask slipping”. So it is today in the case of the BBC News Channel presenter Geeta Guru-Murthy. She commented as follows after the channel cut away from a Nigel Farage election press conference and back to the studio: “Nigel Farage with his…um…customary inflammatory language there.”
Yet since the bias exhibited in such episodes is almost invariably in favour of a Left-wing world view, it is odd that we talk about it being masked at all. Rather, it is almost always in plain sight if you bother looking out for it, but usually confines itself to phrases that indirectly imply that one view is to be favoured over another. Every now and then, however, the quiet part that underpins it all gets said out loud and a rumpus ensues.
Something similar happened back in autumn 2022 when Ms Guru-Murthy’s colleague Martine Croxall reacted to newspaper front pages revealing Boris Johnson would not stand in the leadership contest to replace Liz Truss by declaring: “Am I allowed to be this gleeful? Well I am.” She was taken off air for a short time amid an outcry over bias.
Given that Guru-Murthy’s comments today followed Farage having quoted Poland’s PM Donald Tusk about illegal immigration being a national security emergency, it might be said that the BBC generally thinks of him as belonging in the “basket of deplorables” famously referred to by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As the sister of a Channel Four News anchor and wife of a former Labour speechwriter, this is not even the first time Ms Guru-Murthy has exhibited an apparent bias on air. Back in 2020 she provoked another bias row by referring to those celebrating a Brexit Night event in Parliament Square as “very white”. The BBC stood by her that time.
Of course, there is no shame in BBC presenters holding political views, so long as they are discarded at the office door and are counterbalanced by others on the team holding contrary private views which likewise do not get taken onto air. Many brilliant BBC political journalists have been from the Left. One thinks of the 1980s political editor John Cole, who was so scrupulously unbiased on the job that he commanded the respect of every MP.
Today’s issue is different. The reality is that there is a systematic Left-wing bias bordering on groupthink in the BBC’s key editorial teams. Issues such as immigration control or Brexit are overwhelmingly disparaged while complaints about alleged Islamophobia or overzealous policing are amplified. Given many BBC journalists are London-based graduates, such a bias hardly comes as a surprise. But the Corporation’s executives should be doing far more to counter it.
Gary Lineker on Suella Braverman, Emily Maitlis on Dominic Cummings, Martine Croxall on Boris Johnson and now Geeta Guru-Murthy on Nigel Farage: it’s always the same basic pattern of London Lefty denigration of Right-of-centre voices. To force people to fund such a partial outlook via a compulsory poll tax is iniquitous and wrong. The bias is clearly never going to end but the licence fee really ought to.
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