Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
I apologised to James in a later post where I said it must have been you, but I'm not going to apologise now because my point still stands, you were looking for what you understood to be non Conservative correspondents at the BBC (or at least I think you were because your explanation above is not clear on that as it contains a double negative)and you had so few candidates that you had to include someone who retired in 1992 among your three examples - for what it's worth, John Simpson has always struck me as a bit of a lefty, but, like you, I have nothing "official" to back that feeling up with.
I've been listening to the News Agents podcast in recent weeks and the three presenters on it are all ex BBC employees who are often critical of the Government on it - Emily Maitlis got her knuckles rapped for anti Government editorialising when she was presenting Newsnight during the Covid crisis, Lewis Goodall is a former Labour activist who has made reference to his past proving somewhat problematic during his time at the BBC and Jon Sopel I'm not sure about, but he was most definitely anti Donald Trump.
In the message I referred to earlier, I also said that I preferred the approach which has applied during the large majority of my life whereby you often knew of a correspondent's personal political views, but it didn't matter because they didn't let it effect their "day job". I used Andrew Neil as a recent example of this who certainly didn't take things easier when interviewing Conservative politicians.
However, this has changed in recent years - I think it's significant that the three News Agents are now former BBC employees and I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that Laura Kuenssberg is scrupulously unbiased while carrying out her duties at the BBC.
Andrew Neil is a clear example of a BBC political journalist putting his personal opinions out there on Twitter and no one batting an eyelid among the BBC management at this. As I mentioned, this never particularly bothered me, but now it reeks of double standards when you compare it to how the sports presenter Gary Lineker has been treated and begs the obvious question, would any action have been taken against Lineker if he had tweeted in favour of the Government's "stop the boats" approach?
I agree with you that Sharpe should have resigned over his links with Boris Johnson, but he is part of a Conservative hierarchy which has been installed at the BBC at a time when they are more anti the Corporation than ever. For most of my life, Id say the BBC were given a degree of latitude by the public when it came to views about its neutrality and no one got too worked up about a certain presenter being a Tory and another Labour or Lib Dem, but that's changed now and at a time when I believe the BBC's future depends on them being able to somehow restore their former reputation for neutrality, it is making decisions which appear to be politically motivated.
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