A senior news broadcaster has accused the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of being anti-Christian in its approach to news stories.
Peter Sissons, a senior broadcaster who has anchored leading evening news slots, has said in his memoirs titled ‘When One Door Closes’, that the BBC’s leftist bias is so deeply engrained it is not so much a bias as a ‘mindset.’
“At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left,” Sissons said. “The one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects at the BBC is letting it be known that you are at odds with the prevailing and deep-rooted BBC attitude towards life, the universe and everything.”
One of Britain’s leading newspapers, The Daily Mail, is serializing Sissons’s memoirs.
“Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended,” he says in those memoirs explaining the BBC’s ‘pervading culture’ of anti-Christianity.
Most BBC executives and staff read the country’s two far-left newspapers – The Guardian and The Independent, according to him.
“Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ¬running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover,” he said.
“I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.” And those who want to read The Daily Mail are well advised, he said, to keep quiet about it. “Wrap them in brown paper or a copy of The Guardian.”
According to him, though the BBC’s editorial policies are ‘rarely spelled out’ they ‘percolate through’ the organization. One of the tenets of the policies is that “whatever the United Nations is associated with is good” and it is ‘heresy’ to question it, he said.
“Soaking the rich is good,” and “government spending is a good thing … The Royal Family is a bore … All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint.”
Sissons, who left the BBC in 2009, was a presenter of the BBC’s flagship political panel program Question Time. He had also anchored one of BBC’s most-watched news shows BBC Nine O’Clock News and the BBC News at Ten from 1993 to 2003.
The BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster that receives the bulk of its budget from license fees, set by the government at £145.50 per household for color televisions, and £49.00 for black and white. The license is required to receive any television transmission, whether it is received via terrestrial, satellite, cable, or the Internet.
According to Life Site News, the total income from the nation’s estimated 24,877,070 licensed homes was £3.45 billion in 2009–10. The license fee is classified as a tax, with evasion considered a criminal offence. Since 1991 the BBC has been allowed the role of collection and enforcement of the license fee in its role as TV Licensing Authority.
Related news: BBC casts slur on King David of the Bible
