BBC Director General Mark Thompson admitted to the UK Daily Mail in an article today that Britain's state-run news outlet has had a "massive" left-wing bias. He insisted, though, that the network is taking steps to remedy the ideological slant.
BBC has a history of promoting the ultra-leftist agenda on most issues. But to see the channel's top dog admit it in an interview with the Daily Mail was quite a sight.
Now if only some television outlets on this side of the pond would do the same.
While Thompson pleaded guilty to a liberal slant, he insisted that a new crop of journalists is changing the political face of the BBC.
The Daily Mail's Paul Revoir reported today:
The TV chief also admitted there had been a 'struggle' to achieve impartiality and that staff were ' mystified' by the early years of Margaret Thatcher's government.
But he claimed there was now 'much less overt tribalism' among the current crop of young journalists, and said in recent times the corporation was a 'broader church'.
He claimed there was now an 'honourable tradition of journalists from the right' working for the corporation.
His comments, made in the New Statesman magazine, are one of the clearest admissions of political bias from such a senior member of its staff.
The BBC has long been accused of being institutionally biased towards the Left, and an internal report from 2007 said it had to make greater efforts to avoid liberal bias.
Talk about honesty!
But while the BBC is looking into ways to remedy its "massive" slant to the left, swaths of the American news media have yet to even acknowledge that that slant exists.
First, do no harm...
