The Guardian

The broadcaster behaves like Starmer’s government: suppress the left, cave to your critics, and undermine your own survival.

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Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

It’s no longer even pretending. Last week, the BBC, already the UK’s most prolific censor, instructed the presenter Evan Davis to drop the podcast he hosted in his own time about heat pumps. It was a gentle, wry look at the machines, with no obvious political content. But the BBC, Davis says, saw it as “steering into areas of public controversy”. It should cease forthwith.

So are BBC presenters banned from saying anything controversial? Far from it. Take an article published earlier this year by Justin Webb in the Times. It praised the “political genius” of Donald Trump, suggested that Democrats are now seen as the extremists, and claimed that Trump is widely regarded as “making [America] normal again”. The BBC was fine with that, and complaints about it were rejected.

I believe Webb had every right to write that article. But his claims were indisputably matters of “public controversy”. So why shut down Davis’s non-political podcast on heat pumps, but not Webb’s inflammatory support for Trump? The answer is simple: economic power. (...)

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Tags: #english #bbc #media #journalism #journalist #news #press #lobby #thinktank #censorship #fossil fuel #climate #climate change #climate crisis #media bias