The BBC has criticized research that accuses the British broadcaster of feeding viewers a “steady diet of vigilante biases”, including news stories about slavery and storylines about gender diversity in dramas.
The BBC accused the Campaign for Common Sense, a free speech group, of cherry-picking so-called “woke” topics from thousands of hours of publication.
The Campaign for Common Sense has not yet released its research, but the group appears to have collected examples of content that upset relatively few viewers. The BBC said it was not an “analysis”.
The results were shared The Daily TelegraphIt reported that the Campaign for Common Sense was investigating the BBC’s content to uncover racial and gender bias.
The group said BBC News had published 55 separate stories about slavery, including people reflecting on their historical links to the slave trade.
The Campaign for Common Sense pointed out how dramas tackled issues around race, describing how an episode of Waterloo Road in which students rebelled against their school’s ties to slavery.
The inquiry added that gender issues were also explored in BBC dramas. It included a June episode Victim in which non-binary character Sah Brockner (Arin Smethurst) discussed how it works.
As Deadline reported, the Victim storyline received 142 complaints from disgruntled viewers.
More recently, Doctor who received 144 complaints from people who felt the inclusion of Yasmin Finney’s transgender character Rose was “inappropriate”.
The Campaign for Common Sense said: “This investigation shows that, far from maintaining these high standards of impartiality, parts of the BBC continue to maintain a steady diet of vigilante bias, both in the storylines of popular dramas and in some of their news stories.” . .”
A BBC spokesman said: “Highlighting a handful of examples or highlighting actual errors across thousands of hours of output is not an analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content.” We are proud that our production aims to appeal to all audiences and represents a range of stories and perspectives.
“Of course there will be cases in our services where people disagree with or want to challenge what they have seen or heard, and we have well-established ways in which they can do that.”
The Campaign for Common Sense was founded by Mark Lehain, who works as a special adviser to the Department of Education.
Source: Deadline
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