LAST week I promised (to huge reader endorsement) that until the broadcasters treated Reform UK and Nigel Farage fairly – without bias and reflecting the strength of his party’s support in the country I would ‘balance’ our coverage of him in his favour.
When I wrote that, I knew the BBC and rest of the ‘mainstream’ channels were congenitally incapable of according him that democratic respect. I knew this because with David Keighley, director of News-watch, we’ve tracked the extraordinary editorial bias against him, encapsulated by Patrick O’Flynn here, but that we monitored back in his UKIP days and from the 1999 EU Parliament elections onwards. Then he was not only consigned to the margins of the schedules but openly sneered at by the BBC’s main news and current affairs presenters. It was a bias that carried on through to his Brexit Party days, in a continuing mistreatment and demonising of him by the BBC described here by David.
Read more…
