Andy McDonald, Labour’s shadow transport secretary and key ally of leader Jeremy Corbyn, has furiously hit out at the BBC for “consciously” playing its part in the party’s worst election defeat since 1935.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Monday, McDonald was asked by presenter Justin Webb whether he thought the public service broadcaster had “consciously” contributed to Corbyn’s loss. “Consciously, yes,” replied McDonald.
The 61 year-old conceded that his own party had to take a lot of the responsibility for the heavy election defeat, that saw huge swathes of long-held Labour seats in the midlands and the north, turn Tory blue, but suggested the BBC’s ‘biased’ reporting was also a factor.
McDonald highlighted the example of a BBC News reporter who talked about Boris Johnson getting “the majority he so deserves." A charge that was rebuffed by Webb, who insisted that it had been a “slip of the tongue.”
The BBC have been widely criticized for a number of “mistakes” that happened to benefit the Conservative party during the election campaign.
In November, the broadcaster apologized for a “production mistake” involving Johnson. They aired a 2016 Remembrance Sunday clip of Johnson - and not the 2019 footage where the PM made an embarrassing gaffe, laying a wreath at the cenotaph in London the wrong way up. It led to accusations of a cover-up.
The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg came under fire on Twitter days before Brits went to the polls after tweeting, without evidence, that a Labour activist had punched Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s adviser outside a Leeds hospital. The ‘incident’ turned out to be fake news.