EXCLUSIVE: BBC's 'Tremendous Waste' in Buying More of The Guardian Than Any Other Newspaper

The BBC buys more copies of the Guardian newspaper than any other paper in Britain – and spends over £600,000 – the equivalent of 4500 licence fee contributions on newspapers – Breitbart London today can exclusively reveal.

A Freedom of Information request showed that the BBC, for the third consecutive year on record, bought more copies of the left-wing newspaper which fails to command as high a readership with the British public, instead being Britain’s 11th best read newspaper. 

While the BBC’s procurement of the Times and Telegraph have increased from last year, Britain’s publicly-funded broadcaster is still purchasing quantities of the Guardian in disproportionate terms to public consumption. The figures represent the total purchases made by BBC managed services between February 2013 and January 2014. The information states that “outside of this arrangement newspapers may have been delivered to BBC buildings by local newsagents.”

Over the past 12 months, the BBC bought 75,555 copies of the Guardian, against just 60,216 copies of Britain’s most popular paper, the Sun. Even in a like-for-like comparison with fellow broadsheets, the Guardian comes out on top, with Britain’s most popular broadsheet, the Telegraph, almost of a full 4,000 copies behind in the BBC’s estimation.

In 2014, the Guardian sold just 207,958 copies per day, while the Telegraph hit 544,546, and the Sun reached 2.2m. 

The BBC is known for what its own presenters describe as a “cultural liberal bias”, but questions will also be raised as to why the BBC is buying so many thousands of copies of newspapers that are, for the most part, available online, and on PressDisplay.com, the login details for which can be shared amongst departments and organisations.

At a time when BBC bosses are bemoaning spending cuts, and even cancelling entire television channels in order to save money, an expenditure of around £590,000 on daily newspapers alone will seem extravagant. The number including Sunday papers would mean the BBC spends the licence fee contributions of around 4,500 Brits on newspapers.

In terms of Sunday Papers, the BBC showed a slight preference to the Sunday Times over the Observer (the weekend’s Guardian), with 8,730 to 8,092. 

Conservative Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen told Breitbart London: “This news underlines what we already knew, that the BBC has an endemic left wing bias. We have often been told by the people who work there that they take their editorial lines from the Guardian. Given that most of this is available online, buying over half a million newspapers is a tremendous waste of taxpayers’ money.”