Mick Hartley

After the Rob Burley expose of the BBC’s trans capture, here’s Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

Trans activism has poisoned everything from crime reporting to fictional drama at the BBC. Time and again, the BBC refers to bearded, violent sex offenders as though they were women, demanding audiences ignore not merely biology but also their own eyes. Last year, we learnt just how pervasive trans dogma was at the BBC. In November, a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC, revealed that a team of ‘specialist’ LGBT reporters had ensured gender-critical perspectives were kept off-air, resulting in a ‘constant drip feed of one-sided stories… celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity’.

As a recent paper by Oxford academics Michael Biggs and Ace North demonstrated, BBC audiences have repeatedly been presented with a distorted picture of violence involving trans-identified people. The researchers found that ‘BBC News published more than four times as many articles on transgender victims as on perpetrators, contributing to perceptions of exceptional vulnerability’.

The scale of the BBC’s failure is difficult to overstate. Make no mistake: thanks in part to the corporation’s capitulation to trans activism, and the relentless stream of affirming coverage it pumped into British homes, there will now be young adults living with lifelong medical problems. Teenagers who were encouraged to interpret ordinary adolescent distress as evidence they had been ‘born in the wrong body’. They were even signposted by the BBC to discredited organisations like Mermaids. BBC programmes, like the 2014 documentary I Am Leo, treated a girl’s belief she was a boy not as something to explore cautiously, but as an identity to celebrate and affirm….

Today, the BBC’s hard-earned reputation for journalistic integrity and impartiality has not merely been tarnished. It has been shredded, and used to mop up the drool of swivel-eyed gender zealots. The public may begin to trust the BBC again when accuracy and impartiality are restored in reporting on the clash between women’s rights and the demands of gender ideology.

That means sex-based language should be used routinely and without embarrassment. But it goes beyond the trans issue. Trust will return when the immigration status of rapists is reported plainly. When claims of ‘genocide’ are tested against reality. The BBC will deserve public trust again only when its journalists remember that their duty is not to flatter activists or protect fashionable orthodoxies, but to report reality plainly, fearlessly and without apology.

Their duty is to report the news, to inform, not to educate into the “correct” way of thinking as per the BBC’s “progressive” graduate intake – whether on trans, or on Israel.