Guido can reveal the BBC’s had another top broadcast face poached by Global. Newsnight’s resident lefty, Lewis Goodall, has been scooped up by the radio station as their new “Analysis & Investigations Editor”:
“Lewis will be joining Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel as the third host on Global’s major new podcast, which will launch this autumn. In addition to presenting the podcast, Lewis will also take on the role of Analysis & Investigations Editor, working alongside Antony Garvey’s team”.
Guido’s mole jokes, “this is just what LBC was crying out for, another leftist ex-BBC type to come in and steer the ship.’ Following in the wake of Maitlis, Sopel and Marr, Broadcasting House seems to have the air of rats leaving a sinking ship at the moment…
Something tells Guido that Lewis fancies himself as a crooner. You be the judge…
The BBC won plaudits from the left-wing media establishment yesterday after the Mail on Sunday dropped them in another Jess Brammar controversy. The paper’s award-winning showbiz editor, Katie Hind, came under sustained attack from the usual corners after claiming the BBC had repeatedly refused to answer her questions about whether a fair recruitment process had taken place. The BBC press team said they did answer this question, replying with their ‘statement’ in full:
For the record, this is the statement we sent you last night:
— BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) August 22, 2021
“The role has been advertised under fair and open recruitment and we will make an announcement at the appropriate time.”
Despite many Twitterati members thinking this showed the MoS to be in the wrong, Guido would simply point out it doesn’t prove anything regarding fair recruitment processes. It’s not uncommon for a job to be publicly advertised despite the new hire already having been decided on. It also doesn’t answer the paper’s questions on whether the corporation’s own rules about ethnic minority shortlist candidates for all appointments were followed…
To compound the row, the BBC’s resident Labour spokesperson Lewis Goodall waded in, claiming the paper’s simple questions about her suitability for the job were “unhinged, simply misogynist attacks”. Shortly after he was told by his bosses to delete the offending tweet, replacing it with a hissy fit tweet:
At the risk of being accused of misandry for criticising Goodall’s manifest political bias, the very political divisiveness of Brammar raises obvious questions. Does Goodall seriously believe his and the rest of Twitter’s media lefties’ open support for Brammar will lessen the questions about her political bias?
Newsnight interviewed former electoral commissioner and Cambridge law professor David Howarth to discuss the ongoing flat-gate scandal, during which he claimed “this is not a trivial matter, or just a convention“, and that “it’s about transparency and openness“. Wise words indeed from the professor…
Ironically, it seems Newnight had little interest in “transparency and openness” because at no point did the interviewer, Lewis Goodall, disclose that David Howarth is a former LibDem MP, having sat in Parliament for five years (2005-10) and previously served as both the Leader of Cambridge City Council, and as a member of the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee. Hardly trivial background details, given the topic he was invited to discuss was party political and BBC guidelines state that viewers should be informed of party affiliations…
Newsnight kicked up a storm last night after Len McCluskey was broadcast in an interview with the BBC’s Lewis Goodall, saying Peter Mandelson – who has Jewish heritage – should go away and “count his gold”. A classic antisemitic trope. This morning McCluskey apologised. In other words…
Before this gets out of hand, let me say language is important and I apologise to Peter Mandelson and anyone else if mine has caused hurt. #newsnight @lewis_goodall @BBCNewsnight
— Len McCluskey (@LenMcCluskey) October 19, 2020
An impressionable young interviewer publishes a discussion with a well-known controversialist who comes out with a phrase widely understood to be racist and historically used to stir up racial hatred. The young interviewer doesn’t directly challenge him on it. There is an outcry and the controversialist later apologises. How soon can it be before the woke police summon Goodall for questioning? Will Lewis Goodall end up sharing a cell with Darren Grimes?
The BBC press office is being quite evasive even by their standards, we have got from them that Goodall’s New Statesman piece was apparently signed off by his superiors. They claim the blanket ban post-Hutton on BBC journalists writing about political controversies has been rescinded. The BBC press office further claims, with a straight face, that Goodall’s piece isn’t controversial.
All we got on the record from the BBC press office on the record is the following:
“It’s a piece of journalistic analysis, based on evidence, that holds to account the handling of examinations by all of the political parties that govern the UK.”
The piece spectacularly breaches the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality on three grounds; it expresses strong views, advocates against a policy and exhorts a change in policy.
- The claim that “a government led by technocrats nearly destroyed a generation of social mobility” is a strong and controversial view.
- Expresses the view that “even if a set of algorithms could ever predict with certainty how an individual might perform then, for reasons of politics and, yes, morality, they probably shouldn’t.” A clear statement of self-defined – by Goodall – political and moral opinion.
- Expresses the view that the exams crisis “demonstrates the weaknesses of this form of technocracy” and is evidence that the data driven government as espoused by Dominic Cummings is a flawed “dataocracy”.
The whole article’s thrust implicitly advocates a change in government policy. That is not appropriate from the supposedly neutral policy editor at BBC Newsnight. Goodall should resign. Or be fired.
