Owen Jones: ‘the BBC is stacked full of right wingers’

Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight’s appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of ‘left wing bias’ at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from ‘myths and deception’ and that the ‘BBC is stacked full of right wingers’.

Now, now, no laughing at the back please – we ought to take the Guardian’s star columnist seriously.

Jones names 10 people who are connected to the right (some of them very tenuously so): Chris Patten, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb, Thea Rogers, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Andrew Neil, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys and Craig Oliver. He neglects to mention the BBC’s other 26,000 staff, and concentrates instead on the right’s ‘extraordinarily clever’ campaign to ‘police the BBC’. The campaign is so sharp, he says, that it makes ‘the corporation fearful of crossing certain lines, and to ensure that the right sets the political agenda.