American readers will be familiar with the enduring notion that the media has a liberal bias. Sensible ones will know that this notion is absurd, or at least requires a rather loose working definition of the word “liberal”. There isn’t quite the same feeling about the media in Britain, at least not taken as a whole, and this is all the more effective in sustaining the myth that freedom of press and speech are more or less protected and culturally ingrained. British people can buy a “liberal” newspaper or a “conservative” one and be happy in the knowledge that they are consuming more or less independent news, spun in their favoured direction. Conservative citizens may howl at the supposedly extreme-left views churned out by the various Marxist propaganda mills, such as The Guardian, or the Daily Mirror, and the liberal centre-left can find refuge in these texts from the right-wing forces of darkness in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.
The supposed ideological biases of these publications are known and accepted. The only media outlet truly accused of bias as though it were crime is the BBC, which has long been accused of having a liberal agenda. This idea has received some support from those who ought to be in the position to know, for example the former business editor, Jeff Randall, who now works for Murdoch’s Sky News. Randall claims a “very senior BBC person” told him that “the BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and promotes diversity”.[i] Andrew Marr, a former editor of The Independent, a newspaper which defines itself by its apparent freedom from party-political bias, moved in the opposite direction and now works for the BBC.
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