How the BBC became Pravda for trans actvists

In an excoriating 10,000-word investigation, Burley, who spent 13 years at the BBC as a senior editor, describes how the corporation’s pursuit of younger audiences, its culture of intolerance, and its obsession with diversity and inclusion, transformed the national broadcaster into trans Pravda. Most shockingly, former director of news Fran Unsworth said she had been driven out by ‘progressive editorial issues’ and the bullying around them. What Burley has exposed is, of course, what many of us on the outside suspected. There have long been clues.

According to Burley, the problem began long before any of us would have given the question of trans ideology a fleeting thought. Beginning in 2011, the BBC funded Trans Media Action, the project that later became All About Trans. Senior staff were trained by trans activists and, by 2013, the BBC Style Guide was instructing journalists to toe the activist line.

Trans activism has poisoned everything from crime reporting to fictional drama at the BBC. Time and again, the BBC refers to bearded, violent sex offenders as though they were women, demanding audiences ignore not merely biology but also their own eyes. Last year, we learnt just how pervasive trans dogma was at the BBC. In November, a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC, revealed that a team of ‘specialist’ LGBT reporters had ensured gender-critical perspectives were kept off-air, resulting in a ‘constant drip feed of one-sided stories… celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity’.

As a recent paper by Oxford academics Michael Biggs and Ace North demonstrated, BBC audiences have repeatedly been presented with a distorted picture of violence involving trans-identified people. The researchers found that ‘BBC News published more than four times as many articles on transgender victims as on perpetrators, contributing to perceptions of exceptional vulnerability’.

The scale of the BBC’s failure is difficult to overstate. Make no mistake: thanks in part to the corporation’s capitulation to trans activism, and the relentless stream of affirming coverage it pumped into British homes, there will now be young adults living with lifelong medical problems. Teenagers who were encouraged to interpret ordinary adolescent distress as evidence they had been ‘born in the wrong body’. They were even signposted by the BBC to discredited organisations like Mermaids. BBC programmes, like the 2014 documentary I Am Leo, treated a girl’s belief she was a boy not as something to explore cautiously, but as an identity to celebrate and affirm.

In the years since, the BBC has railed against misinformation. But it seems fair to ask, where was Marianna Spring – the original self-described ‘disinformation specialist’ – and the rest of the ‘Verify’ team when, earlier this year, the BBC referred to murderer Scarlet Blake as a ‘woman’?

Small steps back towards sanity are at least beginning to appear in BBC coverage. The recent decision to keep Girlguiding for girls might have still been headlined as a ban on ‘transgender girls’, but the article at least clarified that this meant ‘biological boys who identify as girls’. Remember, it’s less than 12 months since BBC News presenter Martine Croxall was disciplined for rolling her eyes and correcting the phrase ‘pregnant people’ to ‘women’, while less than three years ago the BBC’s complaints unit reprimanded journalist Justin Webb for pointing out that ‘transwomen’ are biological men.

New director general Matt Brittin will need a thorough purge before he brings peace to the institution. Ideological bias is now embedded, as the cub reporters who bullied more experienced journalists out have made the institution their home. Within BBC offices, it is still reported that a system of de facto gender self-identification operates, despite last year’s Supreme Court ruling. Given that the Beeb sets the cultural tone for the rest of the UK, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many businesses are treating this law as optional.

Today, the BBC’s hard-earned reputation for journalistic integrity and impartiality has not merely been tarnished. It has been shredded, and used to mop up the drool of swivel-eyed gender zealots. The public may begin to trust the BBC again when accuracy and impartiality are restored in reporting on the clash between women’s rights and the demands of gender ideology.

That means sex-based language should be used routinely and without embarrassment. But it goes beyond the trans issue. Trust will return when the immigration status of rapists is reported plainly. When claims of ‘genocide’ are tested against reality. The BBC will deserve public trust again only when its journalists remember that their duty is not to flatter activists or protect fashionable orthodoxies, but to report reality plainly, fearlessly and without apology.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.