BBC may bow to pressure and open up Thought for the Day

Although the BBC Trust rejected the NSS’s complaint that Thought for the Day breaches impartiality guidelines and ruled that it was within the discretion of BBC Executives to keep it exclusively religious, Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer has hinted that the programme might be opened up anyway.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, Mr Damazer said the programme had improved since it had included a wider range of religious voices and although there was no immediate prospect of opening it up to non-religious voices, he remarked: “This is by no means a straightforward question. I don’t think the world would fall apart if we changed the remit of Thought for the Day. I just think in this particular instance an editorial definition of TftD which has faith at its centre works well enough for enough of the audience. But I don’t think it is beyond peradventure and internal verity that it has to be faith based.”

Meanwhile, the Today programme’s leading presenter John Humphrys reiterated in The Times his opinion that atheists should be included. “As a non-believer, I’ve always thought there’s an argument for a secular Thought for the Day — but not because of discrimination. I think we’d get some interesting views” he said.

Meanwhile, an editorial in today’s Tablet opines: “If the long-term effect of the secularists’ campaign is to propel Thought for the Day towards the safety of irrelevance, they may yet have succeeded in driving at least one nail into its coffin.”

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, said: “Although we lost this battle, I think we will eventually win the war. The opening shots were fired by our Executive Director’s predecessor in 1962 and we haven’t given up. It is clear from what Mark Damazer says that the BBC is conscious of the anachronistic nature of Thought for the Day. His own justification prompted over 500 comments, only a sixth of which supported his arguments. Similarly, the public reaction to the BBC Trust’s decision has been almost universally hostile, with only the churches and vested interests supporting it with any enthusiasm.”

Mr Sanderson said that a key plank of our complaint, and one in which we were very much supported by Honorary Associate Dr Evan Harris, MP, had concerned the use of Thought for the Day for political grandstanding when controversial issues were being debated in Parliament. It does seem this hit home; the Trust has practically said they now invite complaints about bias in individual editions of Thought for the Day. “I suspect this will already have led to a tightening of guidelines for the review of contributors’ scripts. It is now up to us all to ensure that when contributors to Thought for the Day overstep their remit and start agitating on a political basis (as some of them did, for example, when assisted suicide was being debated in Parliament), then we must make our objections known formally, loud and clear.”