BBC Faces Legal Challenge As Viewers Raise Thousands To Tackle ‘Bias’

From the GWPF

  • Date: 08/07/19
  • Daily Express
The BBC is facing a legal challenge over the way it monitors its impartiality amid accusations of biased coverage.

Crowdfunding group Stop BBC Bias is close to raising the £30,000 needed to seek a judicial review into the way the BBC meets its statutory obligation.

The case is being brought by ex-BBC producer and executive David Keighley. His News-Watch group has analysed the corporation’s coverage of issues such as Brexit for 20 years. The challenge comes as MPs urged viewers outraged at plans to scrap free licence fees for the over-75s to speak up.

Image result for GWPF BBC bias

People have until Friday to lodge their opinions with a group of MPs who will hold a public hearing this month.

Mr Keighley’s challenge is based on the fact that the BBC ensures impartiality by merely using two surveys of viewers.

“The idea that a small group of viewers in a survey thinks the BBC is impartial is different to it actually being impartial,” he said.

The BBC said: “The first [survey] is an ongoing monthly nationally representative survey by Kantar Media for the BBC that allows us to gauge public opinion on a regular basis.”

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73 thoughts on “BBC Faces Legal Challenge As Viewers Raise Thousands To Tackle ‘Bias’

  1. They are going to need a LOT more than £30,000. Like all these establishment bodies, the BBC has access to almost unlimited funds taken from taxpayers.

  2. At the bottom of the article is a reference to Dr. Christy’s recent presentation to the GWPF concerning model failures, plus other info. Read it!

    • Although WUWT covered the Christy-McNider paper this presentation was based on, I think it would be a good idea to have a separate post highlighting some of the additional work represented here. Lot’s of updated charts.

      Those who do go read this should note that the .095 C / decade warming rate was based on UAH 5.6. Not sure what this would be with 6.0. It also doesn’t take into account ocean cycles other than ENSO.

  3. What happened to the recent detailed GWPF complaint to the BBC about the many factual errors in the recent Attenborough Earth programme?
    Have the BBC responded or, like Booker’s past complaint of inconvenient evidence and facts detailing CAGW bias in the BBC ,will this complaint be ignored!
    What about the leaked internal BBC memo and instruction from the head of BBC News and Documentaries that no one having CAGW deniers views should be allowed on air?

  4. This is an opportunity for WUWT readers to hit one of the major Warmist propaganda outlets. May I encourage them to do so. Such opportunities do not come very often, as the BBC is usually careful to guard itself against accusations of bias by producing fake ‘justifications’.

    This is a clever legal ploy – asserting that these justifications are not fit for purpose. The issue of the BBC’s secret Global Warming committee is a good example, and may well be raised. You get a chance to comment when you contribute – remember to make this point…

  5. Funnily enough (nothing funny really) but I thought the last Australian Election was a shoe in for the left (a la Hilary) and more climate pain, power increases, Elon’s batteries etc etc.
    Not so and I wondered why, as my Millenial children’s generation had been fed the carp continuosly through biased media.
    I am an “old white man” so therefore have no entitlement to an opinion or a right to debate so when I approached one of my children about the Election she said “.. it is pretty obvious that this (climate change) has all happened before and frankly I was sick and tired of hearing predictions that never came true..”.
    My daughter is 30ish so this fear mongering had been part of her life for 20+ years.
    She was also sick of the ever increasing power bills that she now pays.
    Maybe swings to the conservatives are a world wide phenomena.
    Maybe the tide is turning????

    • Interesting how views change when people join the club of those paying for the posturing and virtue signalling of others.

    • The irony, is that our own generation, brought up with the constant brainwashing output of these public funded parasite corps are FAR more supportive of the extremism of the climate cult, than the younger generation, who as far as I can see never watch TV at all.

      The big differences is that the new “internet generations” are still relatively young, still young enough to be more left wing, as they are relatively unconcerned with where their money is coming from and where it is being spent.

      But as you highlight – as soon as they do start facing the realities of the real world, I’ve no doubt that they will be far far more sceptical than the current “oldies”. Indeed, I suspect that the intense brainwashing they have received combined with the readily available facts contradicting this brainwashing, could result in a bit of a backlash from those realising they have been duped.

      • Mike, all the polls I’ve seen show younger demographics are far more supportive of the climate nonsense.

        • They support it until they grow older, get a work, pay taxes, psy housing, pay cars, pay gasoline, pay daycare, pay everything. At that point they realise them others didn’t exist, there’s nothing free, but stuff that is free of charge is still paid by themselves.

          And some, thry just don’t get this.

    • Here in the UK, my daughter was told by her Geography teacher that she lost points in her essay because she could have referenced BBC and Guardian propaganda articles as evidence for climate change. Is that the lowest form of confirmation bias?

      • Tell your daughter to do as mine does. Give the lecturer what the lecturer wants to see, for the sake of her grades, but remember the truth, for the sake of her sanity. My daughter’s biggest complaint was trying to write coherent BS until she realised that the lecturers in question don’t care about the quality of writing, just the references.

  6. Well, for what it is worth, I had three stabs at complaining tothe BBC’s One Show over that raving leftist Guardian scribbler Lucie Siegle’s regular appearance to promote the globul warming scam, with her classic pronouncements that the “IPCC have proven” this or that, when in reality they had done nothing of the kind! The poor deluded child has yet to learn the difference between proof & claim, two entirely different words, & she supposedly being some kind of journalist who should know thedifference! Still, let’s hope that something will come of it although I don’t see it myself!

  7. GWPF complaining about bias.


    • The GWPF is not funded by the taxpayer but hey when have you ever cared about the real issues.

    • For those with defective reading comprehension skills:

      “The case is being brought by ex-BBC producer and executive David Keighley.”

    • Charlie Dodgson was a lot more than just a novelist. He was also renowned as a logician, mathematician and photographer. There is a least a theory that his most seminal works were political satire of the most cutting variety and not really intended for children.

    • Anyone want to bet whether Loydo went and read the Christy presentation? I think the obvious answer is NO. That’s how reality denial is maintained by the climate cult.

      • Reading and understanding are two different things. Understanding and reaching a reasoned conclusion is different from understanding and reaching an opposite ideological conclusion. With many, ideology trumps reality.

  8. For many years, conservatives have complained about liberal media bias in the US. The counter example would be Fox but it seems that most of the media do exhibit a left bias. Compared with other English speaking countries, the American public broadcaster is tiny and, unlike the BBC, it isn’t government funded. The vast majority of American media are for profit.

    It isn’t just publicly funded media that have a left bias. I didn’t know about Channel 4 until Cathy Newman’s disastrous interview with Jordan Peterson. link If that’s an accurate sample of Channel 4, then it’s just as bad as the BBC.

    Journalists are mostly university educated. That may be where the problem lies.

    • Exactly why journalism is a tertiary degree is also an interesting question.

      Journalism is at best a trade.

      • When I complained about inaccuracy of reporting, my local broadcaster told me they just go out, speak to “experts” and put the footage on a the air. The average “journalist” is no better or smarter or useful for that matter, than a YouTube channel presenter, assuming the woman was not lying to me. You don’t need a journalist for that.

        It could explain the endless preening and bragging by networks about how “they are here for us”. NO, they are here for huge checks and to get their faces on TV. We are just useful idiots to them. I change channel everytime one of the ugly mugs starts with that adolescent preening.

    • “Compared with other English speaking countries, the American public broadcaster is tiny and, unlike the BBC, it isn’t government funded.”

      Actually, the American Public Broadcasters (PBS for TV and NPR for radio) are partially publicly funded. They often claim they don’t need the public funding but if a politician comes along and wants to cut their public funding, it suddenly becomes critical for the good of the public that they keep their public funding.

    • Channel Four does generally have that bias but they have occasionally interviewed climate sceptics and they produced and broadcasted The Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007.

    • Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster that began transmission on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which was established in 1990 and came into operation in 1993. With the conversion of the Wenvoe transmitter group in Wales to digital on 31 March 2010, Channel 4 became a UK-wide TV channel for the first time.


  9. The fundamental problem is License Fee funding. This has no parallel in any other area of life.

    Its a simple tax on ownership and use of a TV, with the proceeds being paid to one broadcaster. It was always denied that it was a tax, but finally it has been classified formally as one, on account of the fact that its a criminal offence not to pay it.

    Imagine this was, lets say, the press. We would put a tax on reading any newspaper, and pay the result to the State Paper. We could call it ‘The Truth’. It would be a criminal offence to read a paper, any paper, without a permit card. License enforcers would go around entering houses of people who had not registered to get a permit card, and if they found any papers lying around, or any evidence of reading them, they would prosecute in criminal court.

    Or imagine it was food. We would make it unlawful to enter a supermarket without a permit card, and pay the results of the tax to the State Supermarket. Anyone caught shopping in Tesco without a permit would be arrested and prosecuted in magistrates court.

    Or imagine it was music. We would make it the law that you had to have a music permit card to be legally allowed to listen to live music, and we’d pay the proceeds to the State Orchestra. Whenever you entered a live music venue, you’d have to show your permit card. If anyone was caught putting on unlicensed music performances, or attending them without a permit, they would be prosecuted.

    Or imagine it was the net. We’d have a tax on Internet access, which would be paid to the State ISP….

    When you read the Guardian, the readers love this system. The fee, they say, is trivial, its only a latter or two a week, who cares? And they think its great value, it delivers all this stuff they like for only £150 a year.

    What they don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, is that £150 a year is charity shop shoes and clothes for the kids, its meat on the table once a month. And its only good value because they are taxing the poor to pay for the pleasures of the better off. Its like saying that beer from the state brewery is great value, because everyone pays for it in taxes, whether they drink it or not, and not only the 25% of the population who drink it.

    The only solution to this mess is to make the BBC subscription TV. If you really, really want to have a state broadcaster, make it like NOS in Holland. Small, restricted, rigorously objective, and news only. Then put all the other broadcasters on the same level, subscription, free to air, whatever, cooperatives, ad funded, whatever.

    The present system is a the imposition of a regressive tax on a necessity of the poor. Because think about it. You are a single mother on benefits. You are running short of money for necessities for the kids. But you cannot turn off the TV, you have to have access to news information and entertainment. You will williingly do without the BBC, probably rarely watch it. But you legally cannot do that. So you fail to pay your license fee, and your case like many others goes to the magistrates, clogging up the courts, and you get fined or even jailed.

    Its a positively wicked system and high time it was abolished.

        • I’m suddenly feeling old. There’s no truth in the News, and no news in the Truth.

          Democrats would have had a dossier told them that.

      • Old white men are greedy, living on their rents, unwilling to die while the young people must be modest while waiting for their inheritance.

  10. The Biased Corps supporters in the UK parliament are trying to manipulate a survey to get everyone to in effect say they support the Biased Corp. (URL:

    The questions are:

    1. How important is an independent, impartial news service?

    This is clearly intended to illicit a “important” response – thereby being interpreted as a need to keep funding the Biased Corp. In contrast, the actual bed rock of impartiality is a free market in news such that there is no public funding of the biased corp to distort that free market

    The next question is framed in a way that most who have been addicted to the Bias Corp will end up supporting the Biased corp:

    2. How important is it that we have a non-commercial, independent national broadcaster?

    The real question that should have been asked is how important is it that we don’t distort the free market in news that is the bedrock of impartiality?

    Finally the last question is easy for anyone who has lived their lives being brainwashed by the biased corp to answer:

    3. Should the BBC continue to be funded through the TV licence fee?


      • In the US there’s a trend, not really a “movement”, but definitely a lot of people doing it, to “cut the cable,” that is, get all their entertainment and information off the internet via YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, etc. One can get sports packages from,,, etc., for those fixes, and there’s just plain a lot of free stuff out there.

        Is that an option in Old Blighty, or is the internet in the same sweaty grasp as is TV?

      • You probably know already, that Australia has its own publicly funded broadcasting station ABC. We don’t have a licence fee, but everybody who works pays for it regardless. At least we don’t have fines and inspectors attached to the existence of a TV in the house.

    • Responses need to be submitted by Noon [London time, I guess] on Thursday, 11th July.
      Not long now . . . . . . .


  11. For a legal challenge to alleged bias, you need to start with an unequivocal, numerical example of bias to establish that it is not only possible, but present.
    As an example, do some research on kissing. Over a stated interval, for a nominated TV channel, count the total number of kisses, then allocate to normal heterosexual, homosexual male, homo female, other odd combinations. Compare the portions with the measured population splits to show (if it is so) that one portion is rather over- or under-represented, thus bias is present.
    With Australia’s ABC, it is easy to show bias with the relative times spent on normal horticulture versus the minority hobby of organic gardening pushed by the ABC.
    A legal argument can be stronger by using original research and objective observation, particularly if the other side is ambushed by the novelty and has no counter argument. Geoff S

    • Oh no the BBC made it easy you just need access on there internal memos because they have standing policy from a number of leaked emails that have cropped up. There are also a number of employees who are obviously willing to testify. You are trying to do it the hard way.

  12. funny they used to have licences for tv n radio? in Aus and canned it decades ago
    now its just12c a day per head via general revenue taxes i gather.
    and our ABC is still as CRAP and Biased as your BBC
    we have presenters at 80yrs of age still employed and looking forward to massive pensions after 40+yrs continual employment at taxpayers expense. said chap is admitted former? communist and sttill [pushing socialist green views daily.

    • That is because most do a Journalism or English degree at uni and so go thru the social sciences AKA the green leftist communist/socialist boot camp. There are a number of studies on why it’s like that because it tends to be a truth in any country, the reasons underpinning it are psychology.

      Studies in Australian universities in Social Studies showed you often find as few as 10% who identified as Liberal and in the USA the same for Republicans. The matter was formally investigated by the senate in 2008.

      You can see the pushback on 1.13

      Some submissions argue that the leftist teaching bias in universities across the social sciences and humanities is so entrenched and pervasive that institutional measures are required to restore ‘balance’ to what is being taught

      You can see the 5 recommendations they have come up with.

  13. I suspect the BBC bias “surveys” are being run by the same pollsters who predicted gigantic gains for Labor in the last election … or the one’s who predicted SHE had a 97% chance of beating Trump.
    Time to bring the leftist BBC to heel.

  14. Esteemed readers will be familiar with Orwell’s proposition of a world where productive capacity was such that ‘Need’ could become a memory, but where Oligarchal government ensured that populations (right flank of the Bell Curve) were kept gingered up by entirely bogus causes ?

    Clearly, western state broadcasters are a little more subtle than those portrayed in the book, but the net effect is much the same 🙂

  15. Well in Oz the lefties are running scared with the crowdsourcing outcomes with Peter Ridd and now Israel Folau (free speech) because while lefties are full of hot air and perpetually mortified on social media it’s conservatives and free marketeers that put their money where their mouth is for important issues like that. Lefties are used to slushfunding and not dipping in their own pockets.

  16. The BBC is an extreme left brainwashing institution. Has zero connection to either reality or normalcy.
    They use Asian when reporting on Pakistani crime (every ff-in day !) and speak of London youth when they mean black-on-black knive crime.
    The most ridiculous thing I ever read was the meeting that BBC oganised to decide if critics of the climate swindle would still be given air-time. The outcome was not surprising but the attendees were. One of them was the head of comedy. You cannot make this up. The head of BBC Comedy deciding on climate matters.
    Monty Phyton confirmed !

  17. I complained to the BBC about the David Attenborough programme, as I was unhappy with the first response I followed up with a second email. The response to this was unsatisfactory so I followed up with a third email, I’m still waiting for their response. Once I’ve exhausted all avenues with the BBC I will contact OFCOM. This also caught my eye today:

    • They try to appear open to criticism with their 15 mins a week show ‘Newswatch’ (07.45 on a Saturday I think – you have to be alert to catch it). Some smug, highly paid, exec will always be brought on to answer the charge of ‘bias’ with an inane ‘I don’t think we are’, questioned by one of their own minions, of course. The visit of Trump was one of the most outrageous cases in point where prominence was given to the protests and little to the substantial grassroots support for this great president.

  18. Even today the BBC delighted in reporting their crony, Sir David Attenborough, addressing a Parliamentary Committee with outrageous assertions about how much of Africa is going to become unlivable because of global warming.

    More disgusting than that, was the assertion that this will produce lots more migrants who are going to come here. He is trying to play the race card, thinking that this will gain him more political traction, without actually stating it. Utter filth.

    The BBC and others use him in the worst example of UK-establishment ‘paternalism’ I can recall in my life, calculating that his revered status, courtesy of the BBC, will be sufficient to win an argument they won’t actually engage in. He is a disgrace, and so are they. It makes me feel embarrassed to be British today.

    • Clearly he doesn’t know, or in his old age forgotten, what is happening on the east coast of Africa from the Afar region of Ethiopia right the way down the rift valley through Kenya and further south. Africa is splitting in to two and a new, in land sea, will be created. This will displace millions. It’s happening right now, has been for millions of years and is nothing to do with climate change. Not even the famine of the 80’s in Ethiopia was due to climate change.

    • “It makes me feel embarrassed to be British today.”

      I dropped the embarrassment bit decades ago and left.
      It was the only way out of what was clear from the 80s on.

      Some of my favourite expressions are “the cursed island”, and “CD”, not the “in thing” now, “gender fluidity” also pioneered by the Bollox broadcaster, but COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, the extra favourite of those being “remoaners”, also deliberately given air time and fostered by the Beeb dumbing down culture club,

      Oh and don’t start me on the Henry Wood season, which got kidnapped by the gushing, “amazing, fantastic, incredible, beautiful” snowflakes “haven’t got a clue what I’m on about” club deliberately to outgush Branson and his infantile, commercial laden, Classic FM!

      Pull the plug, the PUBLIC FUNDING plug.

  19. BCC biased? On just about every subject. Same as PBS.

    Gambling at Casablanca?

    Casablanca gambling? I’m shocked!

  20. Wanna see bias?

    “Here’s a WaPo reporter profiling Obama as a living god: ‘The sun glinted off his chiselled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week.’ But when WaPo’s editorial board wrote about candidate Trump’s plans against illegal immigration, it’s genocide time: ‘He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot.’ “

  21. The problem I have with Public Broadcasters – its the Australian ABC for me – is that they consider themselves to define the centre, and therefore by definition they cannot be biased. The “centre” for them is somewhere between the Australian Labor Party and the Greens. I imagine in America that would be close to Bernie Sanders. Consequently, I have never heard anyone described by our Public Broadcaster as “Far Left” – there simply isn’t any room – but even some members of the Labor Party can be “Far Right”.

  22. The BBCs Modern bias, in my opinion, all stems from Mark Thompson’s reign as DG in the late Naughties, when he invited Al Gore to present his Inconvenient Truth to an internal BBC audience in their biggest studio TC1 at the now sold Television Centre. I was at that time working for the technical contractors to the BBC so was eligible to apply to attend, which I did. It was actually hosted by Andrew Marr. It was also recorded. At the end Mark Thompson clearly told the audience including BBC journalist to go forth and spread the message! The rest is history really.

    I just remember thinking the BBC should not be influenced by what was effectively the political option of the then ex Vice President Al Gore.

  23. It is not just “climate change”.

    The 20,000 word internal Balen Report, on which the BBC spent more than £330,000 to keep details secret, found a consistent anti-Israel bias.

    Current biases include anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, anti-Boris, anti-Saudi and pro-Mullah.

    On the basis that every terrorist is somebody else’s Freedom Fighter the BBC has stopped their reporters and presenters from describing any incidents as Terror attacks ‘ (unless they are anti-Islamic, such as the recent massacre in New Zealand by a right wing fanatic).

    But this is not a new policy as this report from the left wing Independent shows.

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