Mick Hartley

As an offshoot of Rob Burley’s report on the BBC’s trans obsession, here’s the Telegraph – BBC News boss: I was driven out by trans activism:

A former BBC News boss has claimed she was driven out of the top job by trans activists.

Fran Unsworth, the director of BBC News from 2018 to 2022, said she had been bullied out of the role by gender ideologues employed by the corporation.

Speaking for the first time since leaving the BBC, Ms Unsworth said: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult.”

In an interview with her former colleague Rob Burley, published by UnHerd, Ms Unsworth said BBC News had become “increasingly unmanageable” during her tenure….

Ms Unsworth suggested that programme editors had avoided critical reporting on trans issues for fear of being attacked by their own colleagues. 

She claimed that news reporters came under an “awful lot of pressure” from “other parts of the BBC if they felt that the editorial direction of the story was not supporting their particular point of view on it”.

She said “maintaining impartiality became quite difficult” for the news division, given pressure from BBC staff in drama and entertainment to adopt what she described as a “mono perspective” on trans issues.

However, problems with the BBC’s coverage of trans issues continued after Ms Unsworth’s departure.

Last year, The Telegraph published a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, the corporation’s editorial standards adviser, in which he claimed its trans coverage had been subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters.

Now, as Matt Brittin, the former Google executive, prepares to take up the post of director general next week, Ms Unsworth has sought to explain her own record on the issue.

She said the BBC’s problems at the time had reflected the “progressive madness” engulfing other institutions.

“This wasn’t something that just affected the BBC,” she said. “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”

A reasonable point perhaps, but no organisation should have been more clear about the need for impartiality than the BBC, given their importance within the UK’s media landscape, and their tax-funded status. But they failed, miserably.