The BBC has had many critics down the years accusing it of institutional bias. Normally these accusations have come from people who are supporters of conservatism (not necessarily the Conservative Party) who believe the BBC are full of the soft left/liberal wing of the country's elite. There is a blog on it (link) and even a book by Robert Aitken entitled Can We Trust the BBC? (link)
Charles Moore explained this well in The Telegraph in 2003 (link) "The BBC's mental assumptions are those of the fairly soft Left. They are that American power is a bad thing, whereas the UN is good, that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel isn't, that the war in Iraq was wrong, that the European Union is a good thing and that people who criticise it are "xenophobic."
Bearing this ideology in mind, the soft left are exponents of the politically correct scourge coursing through the veins of the UK especially the state. This means men = bad : women = good rather than treating people as equal individuals. It is why there has been a call for a Minister for Men (when there is a Minister for Women) to help raise issues which are purposely ignored by the state. This includes male domestic violence victims or other intimate crimes.
A feature run by the BBC in January 2007, shows this bias clearly. The feature concentrated on a report produced by the Home Office based on the 2006/07 British Crime Survey (link). The report's chapter (see page 54) showed that during 2005/06, 9% of women and 7% of men were victims of stalking.
The lengthy report (link) headlined "Living In The Fear of Stalkers" published on 26th January 2007 states that "According to the latest British Crime Survey, one in 10 women in Britain now say they have been stalked in the past year."
What makes the report biased and symptomatic of this men=bad : women = good attitude pervading the soft left is the fact that no mention in the report is made of the 7% of men who feel they have been stalked.
To make matters worse, a week earlier an infamous case came to court where a male psychiatrist had been stalked and had led to a conviction of the female stalker. This was covered fully by the media including the BBC (link). However, again, no mention was made in this feature of this case, it only concentrated on female victims.
If this report was not biased then there would either have been a feature on male victims or better still a report on stalking that discussed both male and female victims, thereby treating the issue of stalking as a social problem not that only females are victims.
In keeping with the editorial policy of this site, this is not saying that more stalking victims are men when the statistics show women are slightly more likely to be victims. The issue is that the debate about stalking, just as in domestic violence, is so one-sided that only women can be victims. Reports like this from the BBC entrench the views of the politically correct soft left of which the BBC are a crusading force.
Comments