EMILY Maitlis, the former presenter of BBC2's flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, has given a lecture as part of the Edinburgh Festival in which she confirmed something that observers of the BBC's declared impartiality have strongly suspected for a long time. The board of the BBC does indeed frame the broadcaster's output with the interests of the Conservative Party in mind.
Maitlis warned of an "active agent of the Conservative Party" on the BBC board, referring to Theresa May's former communications director Robbie Gibb, who Maitlis said was "acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”.
Supporters of Scottish independence have called out the blatant bias from the national broadcaster against Scottish independence and the parties that support it ever since the 2014 referendum, only to be gaslighted, ignored and discredited by the Corporation and accused of "Trumpian" tactics and of undermining one of the pillars of democracy.
READ MORE: What we learned about the BBC from Emily Maitlis's Edinburgh speech
We have been forced through the Kafkaesque and self-serving BBC complaints procedure, shunted from pillar to post for months, only finally to get a passive-aggressive ruling telling us that the BBC has investigated itself and decided that it has done no wrong. As far as the BBC is concerned, the real problem here is not that it has lost the trust of such a large proportion of the public in Scotland – it's that people "attack journalism".
It should be self-evident that when a public body such as the BBC in Scotland loses the trust of a large part of the public whose duty it is to serve, it's the public body that needs to change. However, all too often the BBC gives the impression that it is just fine and dandy – it's the public which needs to change.
There is now a large and ever-growing pile of evidence that as far as the debate on Scottish independence is concerned, the BBC is not a dispassionate and impartial observer on and reporter of events whose goal is to provide the Scottish public with the information that it needs in order to make up its mind on a question that goes to the heart of democracy in Scotland.
Rather, the BBC is a dishonest actor, posing as neutral and impartial when in fact it is an active participant in the debate very much on the side of those opposed to independence and the maintenance of Scotland as a part of the British state.
As long as it was just rebellious Scots who were complaining about the obvious British establishment bias, the BBC could contain the discontent about how its reporting fell far short of the high standards that it proclaimed for itself. Sidelining and marginalising Scotland has, after all, been one of the operating principles of the British state for as long as anyone can remember.
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However, the narrowness of the Brexit vote means that there are now millions of people in England who are encountering for the first time the establishment bias of the BBC, and that is far harder for the Corporation to shrug off. For a long time, there has been growing discontent about how the BBC is highly reluctant to mention Brexit in its reporting of the problems which beset the British economy. Everything but Brexit is blamed, as in the recent reporting of problems at airports, a primary cause of which are labour shortages created by Brexit. But you'd not know that from the BBC.
The BBC was just as keen to airbrush out the comments made by Emily Maitlis about the Conservative framing of its editorial policy, omitting them from its first online report about her speech and only later including them after being subjected to a barrage of criticism.
What we can be certain of as we move towards a second vote on Scottish independence is that the BBC will continue to insist that it is an impartial and unbiased reporter on events, even as it ignores or sidelines any developments which are beneficial to the cause of independence and trumpets from the rooftops anything which assists the campaign against independence. The difference is that this time round, few people in Scotland will be willing to take the BBC's assurances of impartiality at face value. And the BBC has only got itself to blame for that.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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