The BBC's Stephen Nolan having a few problems with listeners...

The BBC's Stephen Nolan having a few problems with listeners...

Update:

Well worth £400,000 to £449.999 a year?

BBC in full hide the bad news mode

For the first time since records began in 1993, the government had to borrow money in January, a month that usually sees huge Corporation Tax income. Economists were said to have been expecting a small surplus of around £2bn in January's budget, allowing a small start to repaying the UK's huge debts. However tax receipts dropped 11.8% compared with January last year, when the government was able to repay £5.3bn.

Appalling news, really dreadful and so the BBC have been leading news bulletins today with the claims that Israel were behind the 'execution' of a terrorist (oops sorry militant) leader in Dubai and on Radio London behind the Nicholas Winterton story. Meanwhile on the BBC News website the parlous state of the UK economy doesn't even merit a place in the top three stories but currently sits at number 2 in the "OTHER TOP STORIES" section. Somehow I doubt that the BBC would have been so quick to minimise coverage of such "pretty ghastly" figures had they emerged under a Conservative government, indeed I seem to remember coverage of bad economic news being lengthy, in-depth and repeated ad-nauseum during the 1980s.

The BBC are moving towards full election mode at present and are concentrating on setting "the narrative" to be as pro-Labour and anti-Tory as possible. Unfortunately it seems that 5Live is to be the flag-bearer for this campaign and with broadcasters like Stephen Nolan on-board the bias will be heavy and hard to avoid.

BBC 5Live on the attack

Take a listen to the Stephen Nolan show this morning. It would seem that the show invited Sir Nicholas Winterton on to discuss Argentina's sabre rattling over the Falklands but instead was used as a way of portraying the Conservative party as out of touch. Stephen Nolan tried and occasionally succeeded in getting Sir Nicholas to make unwise statements which then became the lead story on the news ahead of that of the UK economy suffering another appalling set of figures.

Stephen Nolan's 5-Live show

Stephen Nolan had Sir Antony Jay on his show tonight and Stephen Nolan seemed incredulous that anyone could think the BBC might be biased or bloated. I posted a question on the programme's "Get in touch" page thus:

"You say the BBC isn't biased, you seem to think it can't be.

Take a trip over to http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com and read what people think about the BBC's bias.

As one example, why won't the BBC publish the Balen Report? If Malcolm Balen had reported that there was no anti-Israel bias (contrary to the claims of those now asking for the report to be published) then I think it likely that the BBC would have published it. The fact that the BBC has refused to publish the report and has spent taxpayers money on fighting a legal challenge leads many to believe that the report does document the BBC's bias against Israel."

I doubt it will be read out during the phone-in.