The exec launching a probe into BBC leftie bias hates Boris and Brexit
IT’S the type of bureaucratic stitch-up a scriptwriter from W1A would have deemed too absurd to include in the comedy that lampoons the BBC.
The corporation is using taxpayers’ money to hire a top news executive to launch a tough review on the way Beeb news presenters use social media to ensure they stop expressing their obvious left-wing bias online.
He’s certainly got a lot to go at.
From Emily Maitlis and her defiance after coming out as a fully paid-up member of the Boris-hating club, despite being an apparently “impartial” host of Newsnight and the BBC election coverage to Huw Edwards — its top news presenter — favouriting anti-Tory tweets just before the election.
It would take a brave and bold executive to get in and lay down the law. It would require someone who has spent their entire career in news without revealing their political leanings, in order to show they are not biased themselves.
But here’s the stich-up.
The person who has been hired — former BBC News head honcho Richard Sambrook — is even more brazen than Maitlis or Edwards.
His hatred of Boris and Brexit, like all BBC News staff, runs so deep it’s splattered all across his own social media.
'COMPLETELY FUTILE'
An investigation by the centre-right website Guido Fawkes revealed he branded the PM and Donald Trump “post-truth politicians”, before calling Boris a liar and “a man of zero integrity”.
He claimed Brexit is “utterly, utterly stupid” and “like a Premier League side wanting to be relegated”, then said it was not the “will of the British people” because turnout was 72 per cent.
I’m sure Mr Sambrook is a perfectly likeable bloke and he’s allowed to have an opinion in his private life, but whatever recommendations he comes up with regarding social media impartiality are now completely futile.
That’s a great shame because, boy oh boy, someone needs to take control soon of this growing BBC scandal before all credibility is lost.
Another example of blatantly inappropriate Twitter use, this time by Breakfast presenter Dan Walker, slipped under the radar this week.
After announcing he is releasing a book, a Brit called David replied to him: “Lovely to be able to take licence fee money and also promote a book on it.”
This member of the public also copied in the growing and perfectly democratic campaign to Defund The BBC.
Walker then suggested the Twitter user was, in fact, a Russian fake account known as a bot, saying: “What’s the weather like in Russia big man? #DefundDavid”.
David replied saying he was in “dear old Blighty” and “actually have paid my TV licence . . . for the last time I might add”.
That’s right, a Beeb news presenter used his Twitter account to accuse a campaign to defund the BBC set up by a university student in Glasgow of being driven by Russian bots!
He had no evidence or journalism to back up such an outrageous claim.
This sort of dangerous misinformation shows why the corporation desperately and urgently needs an impartiality tsar to make clear to its news staff: If you continue to be partisan on Twitter, you can’t continue to report for the BBC.
But given Sambrook once claimed that Brexit Twitter bots influenced the result of the EU referendum, he’s clearly not the man for this near-impossible task.
WHEN I heard yesterday morning that Dame Vera Lynn had died at 103, I shed a tear.
Not just for one of our most important ever performers, but for my beloved grandma, who credited that voice with helping get her through World War Two with a certain spirit and unlikely joy.
Dame Vera never forgot what she meant to veterans, who would be overwhelmed emotionally by her presence.
As she said: “They come up and they start to talk to me and then they have a little few tears come, then they just walk away.
"Because they have their own memories. Who knows how they heard the songs, where they were at that time and what they went through.”
The voice of our greatest generation may be lost on this earth, but will live on in history for ever.
God rest her soul.
Vern's not o-Kay
PAGE 3 queen Rhian Sugden said in last night’s Channel 4 documentary that a sexting fling with Vernon Kay ruined her career, while “he just got away with it”. I’m not so sure.
At the time of his indiscretion, Vernon was a star presenter on BBC Radio 1, host of two ITV gameshows and working on primetime TV in the US.
A decade on and he presents Formula E (me neither) coverage on YouTube.
Strictly Come Dancing presenter Tess Daly, who stood by her husband during the scandal, is now the biggest star in that marriage by some way.
Divisive Lammy a phoney
LABOUR frontbencher David Lammy accusing the Tory government of trying to start a culture war is perhaps the most hypocritical statement since Jeremy Corbyn said he was against anti-Semitism in the party.
After all, this is the party that last week saw its BAME MPs send a letter to our BAME home secretary Priti Patel belittling her shocking personal experiences with racism that she so bravely shared in the House of Commons.
This is the party that poured scorn on the PM’s bold new Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities set up to directly address many of the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rather than welcoming the Government making an important bid to level up our society, Lammy said the announcement was “written on the back of a fag packet”, making it clear Labour will oppose this work for petty political reasons, even though it could result in important and positive changes.
And it’s the same party that then condemned the whole project because it is being led by Munira Mirza – the very talented head of the No10 policy unit whose family has Pakistani origins.
Diane Abbott branded the commission “dead on arrival” because Ms Mirza “has never believed in institutional racism”.
That’s two talented and successful BAME women whose experiences Labour has belittled, simply because they have a different political ideology.
If there’s one party trying to stoke a divisive culture war at this highly sensitive moment in our history, it’s Labour.
Why else did they spend months telling the public they would honour the results of the EU referendum only to cause three years of angry division after Brexit won?
Why else have Labour activists supported the desecration of Churchill’s statue and laughed at a female police officer being badly injured after falling off her horse?
The Government should come down hard on their attempts to stoke further fear, division and anger
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