Senior Labour MP Admits He Pushed Biased News While Working as Senior BBC Journalist

Shadow Treasury Minister Clive Lewis has admitted pushing political bias in his work when he was a journalist at the BBC.

The Labour politician told left-wing supporters: “I was able to use bias in my reports by giving less time to one than the other.

“I reported on both but the angle and words and the language I used — I know the pictures I used — I was able to project my own particular political positions on things in a very subtle way,” reports the Sun on Sunday.

Mr. Lewis, who previously worked as the BBC eastern region’s chief political reporter, made the disclosure at a Momentum rally in September, according to The Sun, which reported his comments were discovered in a secret recording.

A spokesman for the corporation told The Daily Mail: “BBC reporters come from a wide variety of backgrounds and views and our editorial guidelines ensure impartiality.”

The damning revelation from Labour’s MP for Norwich South came shortly after the publication of a study which found BBC coverage of issues relating to the European Union (EU) to be “overwhelmingly” biased in favour of Brussels.

The Civitas report revealed that just 3 per cent of guests discussing EU matters on the flagship Today programme between 2005 and 2015 backed leaving the bloc.

Supporting Mr. Lewis’s apparent admission to biased reporting as a journalist “by giving less time to one than the other”, the Civitas report said “bias by omission” in its coverage rendered the BBC an organisation which “pays lip service to impartiality but acts more like a political party with a policy manifesto”.

The study said the corporation tended to present support for leaving the EU “through the prism of Tory splits”, and consistently excluded voices of left-wing Euroscepticism, resulting in keeping its audience “in the dark about left-wing/Labour support for leaving the EU”.

Report authors David Keighley and Andrew Jubb wrote: ‘When opinion in favour of leaving the EU has featured, the editorial approach has – at the expense of exploring withdrawal itself – tended heavily towards discrediting and denigrating opposition to the EU as xenophobic.”