BBC Bias Is Off The Scale Now

Take a look at this tweet from Aaron Bastani. In it you will be able to compare footage from Friday night's Question Time Leaders special. In the original live footage, a woman in the audience poses a question to our alleged Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who is immediately met with jeers and laughter. In the following day's BBC News at One, the footage is edited to remove the laughter and replace it with applause.

This is blatant corrupt bias. The kind of thing one would witness in dictatorships.

The BBC are, as ever quick to reply, arguing that the footage was 'shortened for timing reasons'. But that is utter nonsense. We see something with our own eyes and then we are fed it back in a complete different way, with a completely different implication for the powers that be. Like I say, it's the kind of action one would expect from state television in a dictatorship.

Only a week earlier, the BBC came under fire for showing footage from 2016 of Johnson laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday rather than the actual footage from the day before in which Johnson looked dishevelled, jumped the gun and laid the wreath upside down. I wrote about this on this very blog here. More, I complained about it to the BBC. Their reply to me was woeful, citing human error in a highly pressurised newsroom environment. That same excuse just doesn't cut it here, and I have sent a complaint specifically about this distortion of the Question Time footage.

Question Time itself of course is notoriously corrupt. On the same show, Jeremy Corbyn faced questions from the audience. He came off significantly better than Johnson despite the fact that one of those questions was posed by Hull West and Hessle Conservative representative and activist Ryan Jacobsz. The South African Jacobsz initially tried some play acting as he posed his question, claiming that he wanted to believe so very much in Mr Corbyn's promises in order to fool the audience that he was impartial, before launching into a deeply aggressive hectoring rant about perceived anti-semitism. This is not the first time that Mr Jacobsz has appeared on Question Time, in fact it's his fourth; as you can see here. Is this flagrant stitch-up all over the news? No. The Tory friendly media have instead focused on the actress Kate Rutter, stare of I, Daniel Blake, being in the audience and allowed to ask Jo Swinson about austerity. But, as a Sheffield resident, Ms Rutter had more right to be there than Hull's Jacobsz.

I have complained about both of these issues and I urge anyone who believes that their licence fee should be going to an impartial public service broadcaster who is beyond reproach to do the same.