A cricket team of tories at the BBC?

For the past few months I have been attending the New Culture Forum, which, back in September, hosted a meeting with the former BBC journalist Robin Aitken as the guest speaker.

The topic for the evening was "Can We Trust the BBC" and it was an enlightening discussion in which Aitken asserted that the BBC was "institutionally leftist" to the point that most journalists there don't always realise that they're doing it.

The example he cited at the time which struck a chord at the time was that of public spending. In BBC reporting there is a clear presumption of "spending = good", "less spending = bad". That presumption is never challenged by the BBC. The quote of the evening was "you couldn't make a cricket team of Tories out of the BBC".

Anyway, I bring this up because Robin Aitken has now completed and is publishing his book, "Can we trust the BBC?" And, with a nod to Iain for pointing it out, it has been serialised in the Mail on Sunday.

If anyone is interested in reading some contemporaneous notes from the original New Culture Forum event visit Croydonian here.