Politics
Polanski slams BBC Reform-friendly hypocrisy after Newsnight ambush
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has taken aim at “absurd” editorial decisions by the BBC. In particular, Polanski slammed the Beeb for giving far more airtime to Reform UK than the Greens.
His comments come after tge BBC was seemingly ambushed on Newsnight by presenters last week. There, Polanski’s interviewers read anonymous texts from “senior” Reform figures live on air.
For context, Reform UK’s unelected spokesperson Zia Yusuf has appeared on BBC Question Time a whole 38 times. That’s more than the Green Party’s people have appeared collectively on the show.
After multiple such failures at the BBC, it’s quite clear which direction the corporation is pandering.
Polanski sets the record straight
Polanski made the fierce comments during a weekend interview with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe. Dale asked why Polanski had seemingly been appearing in the media less in recent months.
In comparison, Dale spoke of major media interest in preceding months. These included Polanski’s sweeping victory in the Greens’ leadership contest and the Greens’ historic Gorton and Denton by-election win.
Polanski said it was not “true that I disappeared” from the media by choice. He added:
I feel like the media has changed their technique towards me. …
On Wednesday I called a press conference, an emergency press conference.
It was a bit of a tactic that I’ve seen Nigel Farage do over and over again, where he says, ‘I’m having a press conference, I’m not telling you what it’s about’. The media get very excited when Farage does it.
An hour before, the BBC will spend an hour having lots of talking heads speculating what it might be. They’ll then stream it in full, including the Q&A, and then hours afterwards, probably including Newsnight, they’ll be talking about what happened.
This is where Polanski underscored the blatant double standards on display by the BBC:
The BBC this week, when I held a press conference – including a firefighter, a medic, someone who used to serve in the army, and Chris Packham, so I’d say it was definitely newsworthy and interesting – the BBC completely ignored it. They didn’t stream a single thing about it.
Dale suggested that Chris Packham’s involvement — as somebody who presents nature shows for the BBC — could’ve been the reason why the broadcaster didn’t cover the press conference. However, Polanski said he struggled to see why exactly that could be the reason, explaining that:
They did do an article later on in the day, but it didn’t even make the front page of their [website].
Polanski went on to explain the absurdity of BBC journalists’ failure to engage seriously with him:
Now my point here is not to whine, because actually I always think as a politician, you’ve got to just go, ‘OK, how can we find attention differently, how can we grab people differently?’
But my point is that much of those media organisations who a month ago or three months ago would have booked me, started to cancel on me, or not put me on their show. Then I would see these same presenters saying, ‘Oh, he has a visibility problem at the moment’, or ‘He’s disappeared’.
I was like, you were literally the person who just cancelled me today, and now you’re saying I have a visibility problem.
It’s hard to call that anything but absurd behaviour. Among other scandals, like parroting Zionist hasbara talking-points, it calls into serious question the BBC’s so-called “public service journalism“.
Chris Packham destroys Reform over its dodgy donors, live on the BBC
T-shirt-gate and a Newsnight ambush
Later in the show with Dale, Polanski further criticised the BBC’s coverage of an incident on Newsnight. (For the non-institutionalised among us, Newsnight is the BBC’s flagship politics and news programme.)
For context, Polanski inadvertently shared an image of a man wearing a T-shirt. On it was a guillotine with a now-infamous message about “making plans for Nigel”. (The phrase comes from an old XTC song.) Polanski realised his mistake and quickly deleted the post, only a ‘collaboration’ of 20 images on Instagram.
In typical melodramatic fashion, “free speech” Reform UK called the police about the Instagram post, which they alleged was “inciting murder”. The police quickly responded that there was no incitement.
Nonetheless, the diligent BBC dedicated an entire edition of Newsnight to this bonkers non-story. In essence, the BBC’s editorial policy, apparently, was to track onto a far-right media bin-fire. (In fairness, the BBC isn’t alone here — see vast pre-election scaremongering around Greens in May, across the media sphere.)
Newsnight rightly drew sharp criticism after one of their journalists, Nicholas Watt interrupted the broadcast to read out live reactions to the show from Reform UK. Watt simply read out text messages from unnamed, inflammatory Reform figures. This took up over three minutes of the show’s 30-minute run-time.
During those three minutes, Polanski was filmed live on air, forced to sit and listen. Meanwhile, the BBC’s Watt proudly showed off to the nation that he gets DMs from Nigel Farage. ‘Wow!‘ It was maddening.
Addressing this shameful and “absurd” Newsnight episode, Polanski told the Fringe crowd:
I talked about the climate crisis not being covered by the BBC, the fact that they went on about [T-shirt-gate] for three or four days, I think is pretty shocking.
At one point, wildfires were a story that was lower down [on the BBC website] than something about an Instagram [post].
I think, as soon as anyone takes a deep breath and goes, ‘what’s important in the world?’, that just seems like such an absurd editorial decision.
The team at the National approached the BBC for a response. None came by the time of writing.
(The article below is from 2024, by the way, when Polanski was deputy leader. Nothing changes.)
Newsnight Green Party snub shows the abysmal state of BBC general election coverage
Featured image via the Canary
You must be logged in to post a comment Login