Nick Reynolds, then working on the BBC’s guidelines for the personal blogs of its staff, wrote up the corporation’s running skirmishes with Biased BBC, a watchdog blog that made a habit of accusing the broadcaster of bias and was a standing irritant to its editors. The piece appeared in the BBC’s in-house magazine Ariel, and Reynolds posted the longer version — more than a thousand words — on his own blog.
His case was that the BBC should talk to its critics rather than ignore them, and he made it while conceding very little to the substance of the criticism. “In two years there’s only been one piece of BBC content highlighted by Biased BBC where I thought there was a real problem,” he wrote. “There have been three or four where I have thought they might have half a point. But these have been sloppy journalism or poor phrasing, not bias.” Measured against the volume of pages the BBC publishes, and the fact that the people writing them are human, he called that “not a bad record” and concluded that “Biased BBC proves its opposite”.
Martin Belam, responding to the article, made the counter-point that bias is very much in the eye of the beholder. The item was picked up by Jemima Kiss at the MediaGuardian.