STEPHEN GLOVER: Even its own bosses have little idea just how much of the BBC has been captured by Left-wing ideologues

Everyone knows that the BBC is sometimes biased. It would be childish to deny it.

Even its new director-general, Matt Brittin, suspects it isn’t impartial. When he took over in May he said he wanted to build a ‘satnav around bias’, whatever that means exactly.

A previous director-general, Mark Thompson, admitted in 2010 that the Corporation had historically suffered from a ‘massive Left-wing bias’.

Yet pundits, among whom I count myself, tend to make a mistake. We concentrate on the main news and documentary programmes, and complain when the Beeb oversteps the mark.

Because the organisation is wary of criticism – probably more so now that it has begun to shed licence payers at an alarming rate – its bosses try to keep a weather eye on excesses in its main output.

But there are huge swathes of coverage that usually go unexamined, where bias can be far more rampant than in Auntie’s most prominent programmes. BBC News Arabic is one such case, which I’ll come to later.

Another example is BBC Bitesize, an educational website used in most state schools and accessed by almost 1.7 million pupils every week.

When I was at school, BBC Bitesize wasn’t even on the horizon, as it was launched in 1998. But younger readers and parents may have fond memories of a website that made learning a little more painless.

Somehow it has since been captured by the Left, as a brilliant exposé by yesterday’s Mail on Sunday showed. The website is promoting extreme Left-wing views on net zero, immigration and much else.

That self-righteous pest and activist Greta Thunberg is championed. A video asks pupils if they skipped school to join her well-publicised protests against climate change. Black marks for those who didn’t!

Other progressive causes such as the 1980s campaign group Lesbians And Gays Support The Miners and Black Lives Matter receive an approving pat on the back. The Mail on Sunday, by the way, reviewed material aimed at secondary school pupils aged 11 to 14.

It is perhaps on the subject of immigration that BBC Bitesize goes into full Left-wing mode, embracing values barely distinguishable from those of the Socialist Workers Party.

In one mind-boggling game called Increasing Immigration, pupils are encouraged to make decisions aimed at boosting the number of incomers.

Instructions to players state: ‘We don’t have enough people of working age to keep our society running smoothly. We should try to attract migrant workers and incorporate them into our economy.’

Actually, it may be unfair to attribute such views solely to the Socialist Workers Party as they seem also to reflect the position of successive governments. According to the Centre for Social Justice think-tank, migrants have accounted for four in five of the net increase in British payroll jobs over the past decade.

Anyway, back to the game. Pupils win points for suggesting that immigrants living here illegally should be granted an amnesty, and they lose points if they are politically incorrect enough to back deportation.

And so it goes on. Elsewhere on the Bitesize website, geography pupils in Wales are informed that migrants pump a ‘staggering amount of money into the economy’. Let’s have more immigration then!

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, famously said: ‘Give me a child until he is seven years old and I will give you the man.’ This was his way of saying that the minds of young people can be moulded permanently. Which is what the Beeb’s website is trying to do.

Doubtless there’s some good stuff on it. BBC Bitesize is not bent on brainwashing the young in every way. But why is Auntie involved to any degree in promoting hard-Left views?

This is a very good example of a lot happening at the BBC (which employs more than 5,000 journalists) without the director-general or senior bosses willing it, still less being aware of it. The folk who run the Corporation aren’t particularly Left-wing, though some of them are rather woke.

It is the rank-and-file in less scrutinised parts of the organisation who sometimes, left alone or poorly supervised, push their own hard Left agenda with impunity. BBC Bitesize is evidently one instance. BBC Arabic is another.

Let’s face it: most of us don’t usually take much interest in that news service, though it’s funded by licence payers and taxpayers. Yet it is shocking that those working for it appear to have breached the broadcaster’s impartiality rules, including by celebrating the brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

An internal report written by senior BBC adviser David Grossman (never officially published) found significant differences between BBC Arabic and the BBC’s own reporting of the Middle East.

For example, while the Beeb’s main English website published 19 separate stories focusing on the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, BBC Arabic published none. Not that this proves the BBC as seen by you and me is always even-handed. It clearly isn’t.

One Arab reporter who has appeared hundreds of times on the news service reportedly described Israelis as ‘less than human’ and Jews as ‘devils’.

How telling that, despite the many inaccuracies and the egregious bias of BBC Arabic, no senior journalists or presenters have been sacked for their misdemeanours in the past year.

Yesterday it was reported that the Algerian-born Hicham Yezza – who has served time for immigration offences, accused Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and defended Hamas terrorism – is now employed by the Beeb to advise on the use of AI in its news output. It could only happen at the BBC.

Let me, while on the subject of Auntie’s absurdities, mention an alarming report in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph that 39 civil servants have been seconded to the BBC over the past eight years to work alongside journalists.

This raises the possibility of government appointees surreptitiously influencing the Corporation’s coverage. How could this have ever been allowed to happen? Last night the BBC suspended the scheme.

I wonder what the fatuous BBC Verify would say about all this. This body presents itself as a superior caste of journalists able to determine in a God-like way whether the claims of others are valid or not.

Would this organisation (said to employ 95 staff) agree that BBC Bitesize is disseminating Left-wing propaganda, and that its Arabic service is bursting with Hamas supporters? Or that it is a damn fool idea to embed civil servants in the news room? Of course not.

Forget BBC Verify. It may loftily pass judgment on the rest of the world but it’s never going to point out the shortcomings of the mothership of which it is part.

And Matt Brittin? The truth is that a director-general is barely able to direct such a vast – and general – media organisation as the BBC. Most of what goes on there happens in spite of the DG, not because of him.

Yet wouldn’t it be bracing if Mr Brittin were to turn his attention to the wayward departments I’ve mentioned? Will he? Dare he really ‘build a satnav around bias?’ I fear we know the answer.