Ryan Bourne, of the Centre for Policy Studies, said he was ‘astonished’ when a researcher at the BBC World Service asked him to debate against veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell simply because he works for an organisation associated with the Centre-Right...
He said he was contacted by a researcher for the BBC World Service radio programme World Have Your Say for a debate to be aired on May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia.
The programme wanted someone willing to argue against Mr Tatchell, 61, who has campaigned for gay rights for decades through his organisation OutRage!.
Mr Bourne told the Daily Mail: ‘They said, “This might not be up your street but we were wondering whether, as a free marketeer, you would debate Peter Tatchell on our programme about whether enough is being done to combat homophobia across Europe”.
‘I was astonished. It made no sense at all. The researcher seemed to assume that because I believe in a free market economy I must also be homophobic. It seemed to reveal a deep-seated, unthinking bias against right-of-centre points of view. I am not homophobic at all.’
Fagburn's problems with this story in fine...
1. It's in the Daily Mail.
2. It's the Daily Mail writing about the satanic communist death cult (allegedly) the BBC.
3. The man quoted is a right-wing loon.
4. They haven't checked it with the BBC.
5. That is all.
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It's not entirely not up his street at all. Perhaps they were going to ask him whether he thinks there should be trade sanctions against Russia or whether he thinks the free market should prevail against any such interference with the free market.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the researcher was young and inexperienced and had been only recently been promoted from being a runner.
ReplyDeletePerhaps phone calls from junior researchers are not the way the BBC promulgates its policies, given that it has a number of radio and television channels to do that.
Perhaps it's not really ethical to make a news story out of what was essentially a private phone call, there'd have been all hell to play if the BBC had broadcast the content of the call.
Perhaps the Centre for Policy Studies has so few policies to study that it thinks this is newsworthy.