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A report released today by the New Culture Forum finds that over the past 15 years, Britain’s public broadcaster has given “greater weight to pro-migration voices”
A study released today claims that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Britain’s publicly-funded broadcaster, has given “overwhelmingly greater weight to pro-migration voices” over the past 15 years.
The report, produced and published by the New Culture Forum, analyses BBC coverage of major immigration events and issues over the past decade and a half, taking into about the corporation’s radio, television and internet coverage of the subject. The report focuses on the BBC’s most influential programmes such as Newsnight, the Today Programme and the News at Ten.
Ed West, the author of the study, writes that like any organisation, the BBC has a “tendency towards groupthink” and one that perhaps reflects “minority – even elitist – viewpoint[s]”.
Examples of the bias include the use of “unanimously pro-migration interviews” for a special feature on migration in 2002 – a feature which has been slammed as “propaganda”. Even the television soap opera, Eastenders, has been criticised for masking the real truth about immigration in Britain, with the report suggesting that the predominantly white cast in East London is not reflective of reality. It states, “a realistic East London soap opera would have to show a white family moving out every year, to be replaced by Bangladeshis or Somalis, and much of the programme would need to be subtitled.”
Broadcaster Jeff Randall, formerly of the BBC, suggested that the organisation’s attitudes to multiculturalism were not impartial, stating, “When I was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was ‘a good thing’. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: ‘Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that’.”
Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk