Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

This is a shocking exposure of how the BBC has been captured and disciplined by government minders. It might explain why, almost every day, the BBC still lets corporate lobbyists from Tufton Street junktanks pose as independent, objective commentators.🧵prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/64…

This is in direct contravention of the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. It breaches them day after day. Almost the only times when these corporate lobbyists are held to account is when guests challenge them about the way they hide their funding.

I don’t want to have to do this. I want to get on and argue about the issues. But transparency is essential to democracy, and when corporations and oligarchs can get what they want by hiding behind their secretly-funded lobbyists, we are all the poorer for it.

Poorer in all sorts of ways. Especially since these dark-money junktanks, through their pet Prime Minister Liz Truss, trashed so many people’s lives.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

But it's as if none of it happened. Immediately after the crisis *they had caused*, the BBC invited these tossers onto its programmes, not to hold them to account, but to get their independent, objective views on whose fault it was (not theirs, obvs), and what needed to be done.

I wrote this at the time.
"I’m sure there’s more to this story than we yet know. It’s hard to believe how freely the BBC breaks its own rules to promote and normalise an extreme neoliberal cult."
Now, thanks to @arusbridger's article, we have an answer
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

It's time for @BBCNews and @BBCPolitics to stop pretending none of this is happening and start engaging with the fact that they keep breaking their own guidelines.
This is #InstitutionalBias.