Bias blinders

To say that the BBC has a left-wing bias is like saying that killer whales are a very unfortunate thing to find in one's bath tub. Whether it's radio or television or the Web, if you tune into a BBC programme, you can be fairly sure that it will cover all sides of the issue: Left of centre, left, and far left with anything to the right of Clare Short reserved for the more exotic anthropology documentaries.

That's fairly sure, but not absolutely certain. That's because we're talking about "bias" here, not lock-step ideological conformity. Even the BBC can't afford to employ enough commissars to vet every second of airtime for ideological purity–not and pay their executives and, for want of a better word, talent the sort of salary the BBC condemns in every other industry. For that reason, Jeremy Clarkson has not been taken out by BBC snipers, Gordon Brown's face does not stare out of the telescreens ala Big Brother (and I don't mean the reality show), and the occasional report on global warming sneaks past that hints that manmade global warming might not actually have been pronounced true on golden tablets presented from the hands of Blessed Gaia herself.

That, however, isn't good enough for some people. Back in the 1980s, when the Grauniad was baying for Margaret Thatcher's blood with great passion and minimal copy editing, there was a cartoonist called Steve Bell whose Trotskyite strip "If" denounced all of the British news media as being firmly in Maggie's pocket. Aside from reasons that involve a lack of medication, Mr Bell seemed to base this opinion on the dismaying lack of inclination by everyone down to the junior copy boys to demand that the entire Conservative cabinet be drawn and quartered as part of coronation ceremony of King Arthur Scargill the First. Anyone who didn't agree with the agenda was clearly a raving Fascist with a picture of Ian Smith in his wallet.

Now those days are back with Sunny Hundal in the pages of the Guardian railing that the BBC is a hot bed of global warming "denialism" on a par, if not below, 9-11 truthers and holocaust denialists. Why? Because even though the Beeb never met a global warming scare story they didn't like (Yesterday they claimed it was killing off wolverines) the Corporation is clearly an implacable foe of Blessed Gaia. It's obvious; editors who allow a story or two that isn't a spit-lathered warmenist screed are clearly stooges of the Earth destroying capitalist death machine.

Keep taking the tablets, Sunny.