Why won't ANYONE interview Robin Aitken?

Jeremy Paxman, yesterday

Robin Aitken was a BBC journalist for 25 years. He left this year and has published a book which sets out claims that the BBC is institutionally biased. As such, he is fast becoming a darling of the British right, and especially those who see the BBC as the broadcasting arm of the Guardian.

Writing on his blog today, Iain Dale has championed Robin Aitken. Dale advertises Aitken's book and what appears to be Aitken's only TV interview under the headline "Why won't the BBC interview Robin Aitken?". "The book has received widespread coverage in the press but Aitken believes he is the subject of a blanket ban by the BBC", says Iain.

So - the BBC is ignoring a book which has had newspapers flying off the shelves in a manner unseen since the sinking of the Lusitania?

Well, no, not really.

The book has been reviewed: glowingly in the Telegraph (unsurprising since, according to the review, the solution to Aitken's biased BBC is "to hire more journalists from ... the Daily Telegraph") [no link - 18 Feb 2007] and less glowingly by Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times (but then, this is perhaps also not so surprising when you consider that Liddle was Aitken's boss at The Today Programme)

Although Liddle agrees that there is bias in the Beeb, he criticises the paradox inherent in Aitken's argument.

"He does not seem to grasp that all journalists have opinions and it doesn't really matter if they are right, left or centre so long as there is a profusion of all three across the output."

The Mail on Sunday gave Aitken about 1500 words to put his point across, but the MoS's weekly sister title appears to have only given the book a 60 word insert into a diary column - about the same as the famously lefty Observer.

And that, apart from Tim Montgomerie (of 18 Doughty Street fame) sounding off about Aitken in the Business, appears to be yer lot.

So - two book reviews, a couple of diary pieces and a Mail on Sunday rant. Nothing on Sky, ITV, C4 or any other broadcast news outlet. Hardly a news storm. Colleen McLoughlin got more converage than that. And yet the failure of the BBC to cover the story is evident of the BBC's Pravda status?

Rubbish.

As Liddle points out, journalists are inherently biased. There is no surprise that there are more left wing journalists in certain areas of news gathering - espcially in foreign policy. There are areas of news gathering that really get up the collective Tory hooter - coverage of American foreign policy ranks pretty highly on this list. Most British people believe that American foreign policy is a force for bad in the world today. It is unsurprising that most BBC journalists believe that too.

In his MoS piece, Aitken gives a number of examples of BBC bias:

• That Scottish coverage in the 1980s was anti-Conservative because of the decline of Scottish industry. Well, duh. What rankled most with Conservative policy in Scotland was not just the decline of Scottish industry, but the callous Thatcherite attitude to the newly unemployed. This was not just newsworthy but arguably the defining set of circumstances in Scotland in the 1980s.
  
• That, by 1989, Thatcherite monetarist economics were "working" but the BBC chose to focus on "doomed privatisations". Again, those that lost their jobs and houses didn't need the BBC to tell them that Thatcherite policies were emphatically not working.
  
• That Major was attacked over the ejection from the ERM and the sleaze scandals of his government. Well, given that he had promised "family values" while his Ministers were bonking anything that moved, you can't really argue with that. The BBC in 2006/7 haven't exactly been backward in coming forward in criticising Labour sleaze, have they?
  
• That the BBC was supportive of Blair's Kosovo war while it had been critical of the Falklands and the first Gulf War. Setting aside the issue of the Falklands war which remains a bone of contention between left and right, the first Gulf War was hardly the idealistic engagement that Kosovo - a humanitarian intervention - patently was.
  
• That the BBC was too critical of the second Gulf War. Well, they weren't wrong were they? And Aitken's precis of the Andrew Gilligan affair - who I'm prepared to bet doesn't know all the words of the Red Flag and doesn't drink his tea out of a "Benn for Leader" mug - neglects to point out that his criticism of the government certainly didn't come from the left.

He says "Today and the Corporation would certainly have disowned Gilligan's story had it not fitted so perfectly with their own narrative." But Gilligan is a right wing journalist (he now writes for the Mail and the Standard) - surely an anti-right organisation would have hung him out to dry at the first opportunity rather than defending what was patently a sloppy piece of journalism.

He criticises the BBC for their treatment of Kilroy's "what have the Arabs ever done for us" piece as being evidence of further anti-right wing bias, while glossing over the nature of the piece itself (he calls it "presumably contraversial").

And finally he points to Fox News as the "answer" to left wing bias.

Great. 25 years of journalism at the highest level and the answer is Fox News.

It's no wonder no-one (Apart from Fox News Lite) will interview him..

Something tells me Mr Aitken is not going to see his ambition of a state funded right wing broadcaster come to fruition. He will have to make do with the weekly column that will no doubt be forthcoming from the Mail.

The rest of us will be left wondering - as Greg Dyke was when confronted by Aitken's claims of bias - "Who was that fucker?"