I always knew the Scottish referendum would become a heated affair. I knew that the mass media and social networks would be full of passionate debate. I suspected, but hoped I was wrong, that the privately owned newspapers and channels might show bias in their coverage of issues and events. What I never dreamed in my worst nightmare however is that in the course of this campaign the BBC, the longest-established national broadcasting service and respected throughout the world as a reliable, impartial and trustworthy presenter of news, would blatantly cast aside its public broadcasting ethos and become so clearly biased against the Yes Campaign in its political coverage.
For those who do not know, I should point out that the BBC is a public-owned media service mainly funded by TV licences (mandatory for all owners of television equipment in the UK) and does not make money from advertising. The BBC is bound by a code of conduct which is generally known as the public service broadcasting ethos. This requires that all coverage of current affairs is presented in a balanced, fair and impartial manner. Now that, in my submission, is a very difficult thing to do, and I have some sympathy with those who claim that over the many decades of its existence it has generally made a reasonable fist of it. Yes there have been complaints of BBC bias from time to time over the years. Some were investigated, and occasionally the complaints upheld and the appropriate people rapped on the knuckles. Strangely enough, right-wing liberal politicians have complained of a left-wing bias at the BBC, beginning with Norman Tebbit in 1982 and continuing through the intervening years, though impartial consumers may have found little evidence of this. However, it has become very clear now that recent changes at ‘Auntie Beeb’ have seriously twisted the corporation’s public broadcasting ethos in precisely the other direction.
In March of this year columnist Owen Jones wrote in the Guardian: “The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne’s special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian’s Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.” *
Now Jones is a left-winger, but I remember reading this article at the time and feeling there were certainly some worrying signs. Yet it was only this week that the full extent of the problem became clear. In my fifty years of watching BBC news coverage I have seen absolutely nothing like the total abandonment of impartiality that we have seen in the last few weeks concerning the referendum campaign. Since they have covered it so well, I point the reader to some of the recent incidences of anti-Yes bias provided by Newsnet Scotland:
Only today, after the above article was written, did the extent of the problem become crystal clear. BBC chief political correspondent Nick Robinson, quite out of control of his emotions, launched a vitriolic heckling attack upon First Minister Alex Salmond in front of the world’s TV cameras. Salmond remained calm and unflustered and answered his questions with good grace, not once but twice.
Later the BBC heavily edited the video for broadcast, cutting out Robinson’s disgraceful episode and claimed that Salmond had not answered the questions. It took my breath away, and I realised at last that Auntie was dead. It is time to move on and leave the corruption of the British establishment behind. Scotland will hopefully press the reset button on their political and social life by voting Yes for independence next week.
*It’s the BBC’s rightwing bias that is the threat to democracy and journalism, The Guardian, March 17, 2014
The Scottish Malcontent 
it is so sad that everything that retains at least a facade of democracy is now firmly in the pockets of the money magnates. We need to rediscover what people power really looks like and knock them back a step or six.It should not be about a minority base of filthy rich power brokers. Our own ABC also known as Aunty has been under serious threat from our current government which would like to gag and dismantle it. I hope the desires of the greatest number of people actually prevails in this endeavor for Scotland.