Document:Is The BBC Anti-Labour?
| The antidote to BBC Panorama's "Is Labour Anti-Semitic?" |
Pamphlet by Paddy French dated December 2019Subjects: BBC, John Ware
Source: Press Gang (Link)
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IS THE BBC ANTI-LABOUR?
On 10 December 2019 – two days before the General Election – we will know if Panorama has won the Politics Journalism prize in the 2019 British Journalism Awards for its programme "Is Labour Anti-Semitic?" If presenter John Ware, director Leo Telling, executive editor Neil Grant and Panorama editor Rachel Jupp win, it will be a bad day for journalism in the UK. Labour branded the 59-minute film, broadcast on July 10, an “authored polemic” by John Ware, a reporter who has made no secret of his personal contempt for Jeremy Corbyn. Labour also condemned the programme as “an overtly onesided intervention in political controversy by the BBC”. The Corporation hit back saying the “BBC stands by its journalism…we completely reject any accusations of bias or dishonesty.”
This interim Press Gang report presents the initial findings of a long examination of the Panorama programme. We believe Labour’s criticisms are sound – the broadcast was a piece of biased journalism.
The first part of this report is taken up with a detailed “charge sheet” which shows how the Panorama programme systematically broke key sections of the BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines.
The second is a reprint of a more general article which has just appeared in the international magazine ColdType, based in Toronto. There’s little or no appetite for this type of reporting in British mainstream media.
