BBC’s expensive religious affairs department accused of misrepresentation

The BBC is spending a minimum of £10 million a year on religious propaganda, it has been revealed, and the department that is spending the money has been accused of undermining the BBC’s obligation to impartiality.

The information was elicited through a Freedom of Information Act request by NSS member Alan Rogers, who asked the Corporation how much it spent on its religious affairs department in Manchester. In response, the BBC told him that the all-inclusive cost of the unit, programmes, staff and overheads in the financial year 2007/8 was £9.8 million.

But now, doubt is being cast on whether this department is observing the BBC’s obligations on impartiality. Not only is it still refusing to open up the Thought for the Day slot to non-believers (see this latest statement from Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer in which he makes clear that the policy of exclusion and discrimination will continue) but now a leading author has forced the religious affairs department to admit that it edited an interview with her in such a way that she appeared to be praising religion when in fact she had sharply criticised it.

The psychologist and writer Dorothy Rowe gave an interview to the Religion and Ethics Department last October to be used as part of a programme on Radio 2 called What Do You Believe? The interview she gave to John McCarthy lasted over 50 minutes, and was not complimentary about religion. In the edited product only a couple of short soundbites were used, and these gave the impression that Dorothy Rowe thought religion valuable and useful to people, the very opposite of what she had said.

The BBC has now been forced to publish an apology for this blatant misrepresentation and to include the interview in full on its website, along with a long article by Dorothy Rowe stating her actual position.

Read about Dorothy Rowe’s experience
See the BBC apology.

NSS President Terry Sanderson was interviewed for the same programme. He said: “I gave a long interview to the producer of this programme, but the finished product contained just a couple of very brief soundbites from me which were not representative of the thoughts I had expressed. When reporting What Do You Believe? in the 24 October edition of Newsline, I wrote: ‘This programme was the most blatant piece of religious propaganda I have heard for a long time. It was pure evangelism... It was completely unbalanced and a disgrace to a public broadcaster.’

This, of course, is only the tip of the religious iceberg at the BBC. Money taken from other budgets for religious programming is also substantial. For instance, the drama series telling the story of the last days of Jesus, The Passion, last year cost £4 million and that was from the Drama Department budget. The BBC launched accompanying literature with help from the Bible Society.

The NSS also accused the BBC of evangelising when it produced another Easter programme in the streets of Manchester

Separately, Alan Rogers had asked what programmes they had produced recently to cater to the religiously sceptical point of view. The BBC was unable to answer that one, saying that their “experience” showed that viewers weren’t interested in programmes that criticised religion. What exactly this “experience” is, given they’ve never produced such programmes, is not clear.

According to the BBC’s latest annual report the amount of religion broadcast on BBC radio rose from 1,078 hours in 2006/7 period to 1,114 in the 2007/8 period.

A few facts that might challenge the BBC’s repeated claims that there is a large audience for religious programmes:

1. Only four per cent of viewers in a trial of High Definition Television (HD) would opt to watch religious programmes, a study has found. The research carried out on Freeview in the London area in 2006 has found that of all the programme categories that the 450 trial viewers would most want to watch in HD, religion comes last – by a very large margin.

2. An Ofcom report into Public Service Broadcasting that asked viewers what types of programming they most valued on the terrestrial channels and found that religion came 16th out of 17.

3. The same report found that religion that came 16th out of 17 in terms of what programme genres people ranked as having societal importance.

4. Research from the Human Capital consultancy that showed that in homes that have access to Sky Television, religious programmes broadcast by terrestrial channels suffer an audience fall-off of 84%. It seems that when there is an option to switch elsewhere to something more interesting audiences do so en masse.

Meanwhile, the rumpus over the exclusivity of Thought for the Day continues. A Radio 4 programme iPM, which supposedly looks at news from a different, less reported, angle, allowed Ariane Sherine, the woman behind the atheist bus campaign to have a “Thought for the Afternoon” – a three minute slot that would give an idea of what a non-believer would be able to contribute to Thought for the Day.

Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: “Mark Damazer, the controller of Radio 4, obdurately sticks with this idea that Thought for the Day is somehow a small religious haven in an overwhelmingly secular news programme. Has he ever counted the number of times that bishops get into the news section of the Today programme or how many religious items it covers? And wasn’t Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor a guest editor for a whole programme last month – using the privilege to propagandise for the Catholic opposition to assisted dying? I suppose ‘secular’ means something different to Mr Damazer than it does to me.”

16 January 2009