Farage and the BBC

On his blog, Mainly Macro, Simon Wren-Lewis has written about Nigel Farage and the BBC:

On Monday, 22 September I watched a party political broadcast on behalf of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. It was on the BBC, and it was entitled News at Ten …

It starts 16 minutes into the bulletin, with Chris Mason, Political Editor of BBC News, interviewing the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Ed Davey. The Liberal Democrats are having their party conference, so this is a chance for its leader to make a relatively rare appearance on the news, and perhaps explain what the Liberal Democrat’s policies are, or what their political aims are. But Chris Mason had other ideas.

‘Do you feel a moral duty to keep Nigel Farage out of power?’ is his second question. His third is: ‘You say that Nigel Farage gets too much attention, but …’ He holds up a little figurine of Farage that he bought at the conference: ‘You are obsessed with him, aren’t you? Frightened even.’ And so it continues, with pretty well every question from Mason being about Reform. Finally he takes on Davey’s claim that the BBC is giving too much uncritical airtime to Farage, and accuses Davey of behaving like Donald Trump! Mason’s summing up at the end is about Nigel Farage.

This segment was then followed by the man himself, with Farage announcing a new policy to remove settled status from immigrants who have been in the UK for a number of years. Despite apparently discussing the Farage policy, the BBC failed to say clearly that there was no basis to his claim that this would save public money.

Read more here.