Opinion
11th November 2025
The bias the institution cannot see
The BBC might not want to believe it has an institutional bias, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t. Unfortunately, that is often the nature of institutional shortcomings.
What rang the alarm bell for me was the outgoing head of news’s claim that “I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.” The problem with that is that every institution, however much it might regret it, will always be institutionally biased. It cannot be otherwise because any organisation is composed of people working together and people can only work together if they have a collective purpose, involving collective agreement about what that is and how it is to be implemented. That collective policy will contain and implement a particular viewpoint. It cannot be otherwise. To be impartial it is necessary to have an understanding of what impartial is, but the moment one has such a standpoint, one is no longer impartial. Any supposed impartiality will reflect that partial view. That Ms Turness apparently does not recognise that unfortunate reality is itself a cause for concern.
This website exists to challenge the Pseudo-liberal beliefs and assumptions many in politics and the media have fallen into. In other words, the bias which has crept into many of our political and cultural institutions under pressure from disparate groups of activists, who have banded together with each other to reduce a variety of viewpoints to a simple ‘them and us’ binary debate and swing public opinion, by constant repetition of beliefs which cannot be demonstrated, in an attempt to deem an argument, which has never actually been allowed to happen, won through constant repetition and suppression of opposition.
People who really know something do not constantly repeat it or celebrate it. Where is the annual gravity festival or the relativity celebration which should now have replaced it? Why is there no constant reminder in flags and slogans that one and one add up to two? The answer is because, these being common knowledge, there is no need to make a fuss about them. That is the nature of facts versus beliefs; they do not need constant reinforcemnt.
Yet many of the things the BBC and our politicians consider true are constantly repeated through its output over and over again, lest we forget. Anyone who dares challenge those beliefs is condemned and accused, censured and censored. At the very best they might be labelled controversial, whereas those who align with the orthodoxy are not. This is bias, but those holding it won’t see that, because none of us can see our own bias. I am biased in favour of what I see as truth and against what I see as questionable, but that does not look like bias to me because it’s the reasonable position to which my reason leads me.
So is the BBC’s news institutionally biased? Of course it is. What is worrying is that it does not recognise the inevitability of that simple fact.