James Harding says he is ‘astonished by ferocity and frequency of complaints’ and says politicians of all parties made threats to funding

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The BBC’s news chief James Harding has said politicians “from all parties” threatened the BBC’s future funding over its election coverage, and poured scorn on allegations that it had a leftwing bias.

Harding said he was “quite astonished by the ferocity and frequency of complaints from all parties” over the way the BBC covered the election, an experience he likened to “hell on wheels”.

Harding said criticism of the BBC’s newsrooms was “unfair and unfounded”, including the “fabled leftwing bias” which he said he found “increasingly hard to take seriously in the light of the Conservative victory”.



“What’s the argument? That the BBC’s subtle, sophisticated leftwing message was so very subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by?” Harding told a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference in London on Tuesday.

“I find equally implausible the Labour critique that the BBC is too rightwing. Let me be clear: the BBC is scrupulously impartial. Of course, we make mistakes. I’m not saying we’re perfect; but we are impartial.”

Harding, the former editor of the Times and a key lieutenant of BBC director general Tony Hall, said he “got it in the ear from politicians and their spokespeople from all political parties”.

He added: “I’ve been asked whether politicians made the link between the BBC’s election coverage and the future funding of the BBC? Mostly, not.



“But, along the way, there were people from all parties who made the connection between their dissatisfaction with the election coverage and the fact that the next government will set the licence fee and the terms of the royal charter.



“Some did so explicitly. Nigel Farage, for example, said he was unhappy at Ukip’s treatment on the BBC and proposed cutting the licence fee by two-thirds. Others left it hanging in the air.”

“Labour was angry about the focus on the SNP, the Tories regularly questioned our running orders and editorial decisions, the Lib Dems felt they weren’t getting sufficient airtime, the Greens complained about being treated like a protest movement not a party,” he said.



“Ukip railed against what they saw as an establishment shut-out, the DUP felt Northern Ireland parties were being treated as second-class citizens, the SNP questioned what they saw as metropolitan London bias at the BBC.”

‘The BBC must be alive to its critics’

Harding also hit out at criticism that the BBC was “all in the grip of some public sector groupthink”.

“How does that square with the fact that a Conservative prime minister, a Tory chancellor, a proudly pro-enterprise business secretary and a London mayor who is a cheerleader for the City all recruited their spokesman from the serried ranks of pinkoes at the BBC?”

He welcomed the appointment of John Whittingdale as culture secretary despite it being described as the government “declaring war on the BBC” by the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.



“John Whittingdale really knows the media,” he said. “It must be a good thing to have a secretary of state who really knows and understands issues in the media including the BBC.”



Allegations of bias came from “all sides” not just left and right, but from smaller parties and different regions and nations. “I’ve a tendency to think that if being told off by everyone you must be doing something right,” said Harding, who added that “the BBC must be alive to its critics”.

Harding denied that rightwing newspapers dictate the BBC news agenda, particularly during the election.



“That’s not my experience of the 9am conference at the BBC,” he said. “If stories in newspapers are relevant or important it’s absolutely right that [the BBC] follows it up.”

Harding said it was an “unhappy coincidence” that charter renewal, due before the end of 2016, and the level of the BBC’s future funding would be decided so soon after a general election.

He suggested there might be a new measure to ensure the two mechanisms were kept apart in the future.

‘Fraught’ discussions over TV debates



Harding said the media had spent too much time analysing election polls – which subsequently proved to be way off the mark – with too much “coalitionology” as a result and not enough discussion of policies.

He also questioned whether the media “did enough to hold in check” the increasingly sophisticated political machines of each party. He said: “Sometimes, the result wasn’t news, but messaging.”

Harding described the negotiations over the TV debates as “fraught, to put it mildly”. He said “we should promptly agree a timetable for accepting the dates and formats of future debates”, including in the runup to the EU referendum.



The “hell on wheels” comment was made to Harding by the BBC’s head of editorial policy David Jordan when the BBC News chief suggested before the election that it would be “fun”.

Harding said: “It turned out to be both.”

‘Unbelievable value for money’

With a meeting with the unions set for Tuesday afternoon to discuss the redundancy programme due to cut 415 jobs from BBC News before the next charter period, Harding said: “We keep on looking for efficiency. We have to reassure the public that every pound being spent as efficiently as possible ... My own experience is that BBC News offers unbelievable value for money.”

He described the £49m cut to news budgets, “roughly the cost of a newspaper newsroom”, as a “colossal saving” to have to make.

With his colleague Danny Cohen criticised for suggesting that programmes would be threatened if the licence fee was cut, Harding said: “You’ve got to protect what’s on screen but at some point you run out of road.” There was a “rational” conversation to be had about cutting some services or programmes rather than quality, he said.

Victoria Derbyshire ‘exceeded expectations’

Harding defended Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC News Channel morning show, going so far as to say that it had had an “absolutely brilliant start”.

The 9am show has suffered low ratings, receiving brickbats from the audience and commentators alike. However, Harding praised the show saying: “By the standards we set, it far exceeded expectations.”

The programme was designed to allow more coverage of national issues from domestic courts to dementia and across different platforms, he said.

“People find out what’s happening in Syria but not really what’s on people’s minds in Swindon,” he added.