THE BBC has been accused of failing audiences after platforming “wall-to-wall Tories” as the party’s leadership contest rolls on.
The news comes after a BBC presenter acknowledged on air that one Tory MP – Ben Bradley – had been “almost ubiquitous” in their coverage of the race to replace Boris Johnson.
Bradley has courted controversy on multiple occasions, including being forced to pay former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s legal fees after falsely accusing him of “selling British secrets”, and being publicly corrected on a statement about Martin Luther King by the civil rights campaigner’s own daughter.
During the BBC News channel’s coverage of Kemi Badenoch’s exit from the race to replace Boris Johnson, Bradley was asked for his views.
The Tory MP for Mansfield said it would be a close race between Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt to compete against Rishi Sunak in the final two.
Journalist Nick Eardley thanked Bradley for his "interesting analysis" and invited the Tory to go back on air later.
The BBC anchor then explained why the MP had been “almost ubiquitous on this channel in the last 48 hours”.
He said Bradley had been “pretty much the public face of the Badenoch campaign”, adding: “We do ask everybody on this channel … it just happens to be that some people are being put out by the campaigns.”
SNP staffer Erik Geddes quipped on Twitter: “'Everybody'... Or did BBC News Channel anchor mean to say 'every Tory'?”
📺 "Ben Bradley has been almost ubiquitous on this channel in the last 48 hours.... We do ask everybody on this channel... " 'Everybody'... Or did BBC News Channel anchor mean to say 'every Tory' ? pic.twitter.com/V18yRFM8QN
— Erik Geddes (@erikgeddes) July 19, 2022
The BBC announced on Tuesday that it would be hosting a debate between the final two contenders to enter No 10 on Monday, July 25.
Alongside this debate, the two remaining Tory hopefuls will also be offered the chance to appear in a separate one-to-one interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson.
One SNP source told The National the broadcaster’s extensive coverage of the Tory leadership battle was “ignoring the reality in Scotland”.
They said: “The BBC is treating this contest – in which 0.2 % of the UK population picks the next Prime Minister – as a sport.
“Tory MPs swan on to the news channel and share their views like pundits without any scrutiny.
“Wall-to-wall Tories on the BBC is failing audiences and inadvertently highlights a democracy in decline.
“Tory-centric coverage is sadly typical of the BBC failing to recognise the complexities of devolution – and ignores the reality in Scotland where we haven’t voted Tory since the 1950s.”
Writing for The Sunday National, the former top Channel 4 executive Stuart Cosgrove said the media’s coverage of the Tory leadership race had taken “a wrecking ball to fairness”.
Cosgrove wrote: “The much-loved concept of impartiality, which sits at the heart of public service broadcasting, and is a byword for BBC internal discipline, has taken a monumental doing this week, exposing deep fault-lines within how our media covers elected politics.
“The Tory’s internal selection process, and the marginal characters who have made up the numbers in this race, have been given far too much airtime, and been allowed to set the political agenda by virtue of over-exposure.
“Notwithstanding the farce that permits the winner of the internal party battle to automatically become prime minister, the process itself has led almost every news bulletin for a week.”
The BBC has been approached for comment.
