Peter Sissons on his time with the BBC - left-wing bias written through its very DNA

For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current ­affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to ­answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased? In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the ­pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left. By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. ­Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ­running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’. Published in, shock horror!, The Daily Mail. We can pretty safely substitute ABC for BBC. But as Sissons notes about the BBC, and others about the ABC, people working in both institutions would be aghast at the suggestion that they were biased. They sincerely hold this view by and large, the problem being a pervading mind-set that overwhelmingly sees the world from a limited and partial perspective.