The website Biased BBC brings together people dissatisfied with tendentious or evidently slanted BBC reporting and analysis.

I have had my own moments of supreme dissatisfaction with poor BBC work, so I share their pain.

See especially this, when the BBC got it 100% damagingly wrong at the height of a huge story.

But bias is one thing – slanting consciously or otherwise a story in favour of one political viewpoint (almost always a ‘progressive‘ one, of course).

Ineptitude is something else – a slant emerges from technically and professionally poor work by the reporting team.

This happens a lot for one very good and little understood reason.

The BBC like other media organisations to save money has fused the quite different tasks of Reporting Facts, Analysing Facts and Commenting on Facts into one person on the spot.

This of course suits the egos of the reporters. They no longer have to send back merely dry, balanced accounts of what is happening.

They can opine on those subjects too! See the hi-octane rubbish talked by BBC (and other) reporters embedded with troops when Iraq was invaded – it was astounding how much these over-excited people knew about the conduct of war when enclosed in a military personnel carrier trundling across sand in the middle of nowhere.

And lo, the more dramatically (if dishonestly) they opine, the more impact the report has as ‘real’ and ”punchy’ – maybe even ‘controversial’ if the words pour out well. 

But NB too a tendency also to trivialise things, to make a facile but seemingly meaningful statement.

The BBC World front page on the BBC website has a ‘Have Your Say’ facility, where global members of the public can bung in a view on currently hot topics. And the BBC lifts a sentence from one of these to appear on the front page itself.

This week the comment from one Richard in Montpon, France has been left standing for several days for the edification of the planet. Richard warns us about the world’s food problems: "I fear we are on the threshold of a bigger food crisis than we might imagine".

Eeek.

Except that we aren’t.

The fact that as of this morning far more people have far more food than ever in world history does not count? Maybe Richard does not recall the 1960s/1970s when there was ‘triage’ talk of letting Bangladesh starve itself into oblivion, on the grounds that it was so badly run that nothing could be done to save it, and food aid was effectively wasted there. We are very far from that point.

Why has Richard’s not very profound comment been left up for so long? Why not use the rather better if rather longer observation from Lee in the UK on food problems: The main reason for this is the growing world population and the fact that millions are being lifted out of poverty in countries like China and India.

Lee is right. Current food problems are a function not of failure but of global success which has been spoiled by all sorts of government meddling.

By leaving up for days on end Richard’s empty gloomy warning to be seen by millions of people, the BBC dumbs down the issue.

Biased, Inept or Facile?

They report. You decide.