Londoner’s Diary
Voice of the Today Programme Justin Webb is unfazed after being put through the ringer by his BBC bosses last month. In February, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit upheld a complaint against Webb for saying on air “trans women, in other words males”, in relation to a story about new International Chess Federation guidelines.
The ECU said that Webb’s comment broke the corporation’s impartiality rules. It said that the case would be “discussed with Justin Webb and the Today team”.
“I’m pretty relaxed about the whole thing really,” Webb told The Londoner last night at a book launch. “And I’ve been speaking to my managers about how it happened. And I will keep speaking to them.”
“The Today Programme has been doing a really good job on this issue, with balance and impartiality,” he added, “much better than others.”
In its ruling, the ECU stated that Webb’s comment “could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex, and that, even if unintentional, it gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area.”
This is not Webb’s first run-in with the ECU. In 2022 he was rebuked by them for apparently revealing his personal views in the case of Kathleen Stock, an academic who was accused of transphobia by students and colleagues at Sussex University. Webb was also criticised by some Today listeners in 2021 for referring to “biological males” while he was quizzing Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey about the party’s position on gender self-ID.
The BBC has struggled with its presentation of the topic in recent years. In 2022, an article on its website about trans women was found to have fallen beneath accuracy standards.
We ran into Webb at Daunt Books in Marylebone, where BBC disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring was launching her new book Among the Trolls: My Journey through Conspiracyland.
