The BBC's Institutional Anti-Left Bias

The BBC's decision to scrap a planned Zack Polanski interview on the channel's flagship Laura Kuenssberg show has caused fury within the Green Party

The BBC’s decision to cancel a planned conference interview with new Green leader Zack Polanski on the Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday has caused fury within the party.

As I report today for Byline Times, the decision to scrap the interview came after the show also refused to have him on last month, following his election as party leader, choosing to instead invite Nigel Farage.

Green party sources are particularly furious with the reason they were given for this week’s cancellation, which is that the show needed more time to cover the Manchester synagogue terror attack.

This is particularly galling for Polanski, who is both Jewish and from Manchester, and yet was denied his chance to have his voice heard.

Polanski suggested on social media that the decision to cancel may have been due to his position on Gaza. The BBC declined to comment on their reason, saying only that he had been interviewed elsewhere on the BBC during the Green party conference and would be invited on the show in “the coming weeks”.

However, it is not the first time that the BBC has been accused of ignoring the Greens and others on the left of British politics.

As I reported last year for Byline Times, there have long been complaints within the corporation about the pressure put on journalists to profile the views of right-wing politicians, well above any similar pressure put on them to profile views of those on the left.

As one prominent former journalist at the BBC told me: “I don’t remember anyone [in BBC management] ever saying to us ‘oh I just don’t think we’re properly reflecting the Green Party view or the liberal-left view on this story”.

“It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian, Conservative direction.”

This tendency was reflected in the BBC’s decision, as I also revealed earlier this year, to draw up plans to alter their “story selection” in order win over Reform UK voters.

Asked whether they had also drawn up similarly specific plans to win over Green voters, a BBC spokesperson declined to answer.

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The Daily Mail Effect

Journalists I’ve spoken to at the corporation give me a number of reasons for this apparent imbalance.

The first is that the BBC as an organisation, tends to see its journalists as leaning liberal-left and therefore instinctively feels the need to overcorrect in the opposite direction.

The second reason given to me is that the level of media pressure about “bias” is just so much greater from the right than it ever is from the left. There is simply no left-wing equivalent to the screaming front page headlines about BBC bias regularly carried by the Daily Mail, Sun and Telegraph. They say the reason Gary Lineker was forced out for his political views, but Jeremy Clarkson never was, is because of this fundamental imbalance.

It is for this reason, say some journalists at the corporation, that the BBC feels so much more comfortable bumping Zack Polanski from its programmes, than it ever would Farage.

This obviously causes a problem for parties like the Greens, struggling to make a breakthrough in a media landscape that is so overwhelmingly hostile to them. Yet while most newspapers are unlikely to ever give parties of the left a fair ride, the Greens do expect a supposedly impartial organisation like the BBC to be different.

That’s why there is so much anger about the decision to cancel the Kuenssberg interview.

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