Good Old Boy #29

Sir Digby Jones, former head of the CBI and currently a skillz envoy for the government, is cross about the BBC.

His specific criticisms are that many people on the BBC speak with regional accents which he finds difficult to understand, that their rugby commentary is biased in favour of the Welsh, and that the starting point of all the reporting on business is 'the implication that you’re a moneygrabbing, over-remunerated, exploiting forcer of children up chimneys'.

Some of these criticisms are quite easy to deal with, even by the low standards of the usual anti-BBC attacks. I think I have been watching the same programmes as Sir Digby (of itself quite a disturbing thought). It is true that many people on the BBC have regional accents, though in fairness this is also true of many British people, though possibly not the ones who Sir Digby knows. Eddie Butler was indeed quite pro-Welsh in the Six Nations coverage, though Austin Healey was more pro-English. And Wales were playing better and did beat England, which may have influenced the tone of the commentary.

But the one which baffled me is his idea that the BBC is biased against businesses. To check this out, I went for the first time ever to the business section of the BBC News website. Many of the stories are quite boring (the most popular one when I looked was about people training to become home inspectors), but I couldn't find any about money-grubbing and exploiting businessmen, which considering how many money-grubbing exploitative businessmen there are out there is really a bit of an omission.

Sir Digby's example of this bias was Alan Sugar telling people that they were fired in 'The Apprentice'. Apparently any boss which did that these days would last five minutes. Which must be bad news for bosses at Burton's Foods, say, which has just sacked more than 600 people on the Wirral. (The report is from the BBC, which I suppose is just another example of their anti-business bias).

To recap:

BBC - not biased.

Provisional BBC - biased (but hilarious).

Sir Digby Jones - good old boy, but bit of a wally.

Making Sir Digby Jones government skills envoy - confusing.