BBC has bias to the left, but seeks to combat it, says president of the broadcaster

The president of the BBC, Richard Sharp, said, in an interview with The Sunday Times published last weekend, that the broadcaster has left-wing tendencies, but that they are being fought.

It is the first time that the former banker, who was at the head of financial groups Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, has spoken to the press since taking office, almost two years ago. He is right-wing and has already donated 400,000 pounds (about R$ 2.5 million) to the British Conservative Party, in addition to having voted for Brexit.

The BBC’s coverage of the British exit from the European Union was, incidentally, one of the examples of what the executive called the channel’s mistakes. For him, the victory of separating the country from the bloc after holding a plebiscite took the broadcaster by surprise. “The BBC doesn’t understand how the country thinks.”

Sharp credits the problem with the organization’s overly cosmopolitan mindset. So BBC Director General Tim Davie began moving departments from London to the north of England, Scotland and Wales.

The executive also condemned the conduct of presenters such as Emily Maitilis, who in May 2020 said on the Newsnight program that the British government was acting blind while the whole country could see that Dominic Cummings —then prime advisor to the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson— he had traveled by car with his family and therefore disobeyed the lockdown.

“Our job is not to campaign, it’s to present the facts,” Sharp told the Sunday Times. He and Davie set out a plan with ten resolutions aimed at impartiality and less biased reporting.

The BBC president extended his criticism of the broadcaster’s business coverage, which he said needed more rigor. Praising Bloomberg, he said that the correspondents and editors at the company he leads are top-notch, but lack in economics. “We need to explain this better, especially when inflation is forcing the government and the opposition to take difficult decisions,” he said.

The BBC turned 100 in October. Sharp took over the broadcaster, now the world’s largest by number of employees, in February 2021, as the outlet faced increasing scrutiny over issues such as equal pay for men and women and diversity, liberation. of fees for people over 75 and competition with streaming services.