I’m going to start by saying something that will shock a lot of people. The BBC is not impartial.
I realise that isn’t actually shocking of course. At least not to anyone with eyes. But while the BBC is rightly criticised for its biased coverage of Israel and Palestine, or its sometimes cartoonish portrayal of Donald Trump, there’s a deeper, subtler bias that often goes unnoticed.
You see, modern media bias doesn’t come from outright lies. It comes from framing: what’s emphasised, what’s omitted, and the way that stories are told. And there is no greater example of this than how the BBC covers protests.
I say that not merely as a critic from the outside, but as someone who once worked inside the hallowed halls of our national broadcaster.
From experience, I can tell you this: if the BBC supports your cause, your protest will be treated with respect, empathy, and context. If it doesn’t, you will be ignored, smeared, or presented as a threat to public order.
This was brought into stark contrast for me this past weekend, when thousands of people protested at migrant hotels across the UK.
I attended the protest in Newcastle, and what I saw there were ordinary Brits, many from working-class communities, expressing genuine concern about immigration and a government that has repeatedly broken its promises.
So how did our beloved BBC treat this coordinated display of national dissent?
A single article, with the headline “Arrests after asylum hotel protests in England”. The article is clearly framed around arrests and violence, while downplaying the scale of the protests across the UK. No depth. No context. Just enough to frame it as a public order threat.
There were no interviews. No photos. No quotes from any of the protestors. No meaningful wider context about why any of this was happening.
The only voice quoted in the piece is from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, spinning a line about how hotels will close by 2029. Though the fact that Labour promised to close the hotels within a year of being in power is not mentioned.
The way the protesters are described is also telling. They are “anti-migrant”, implying they’re against individuals, rather than the government’s immigration policy. It’s subtle, but labels matter. Call them “anti-migrant” and the public sees them as cruel. If the BBC called them “anti-mass migration” instead, they would suddenly sound a lot more reasonable.
Compare this to the BBC’s article on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which was described as “largely peaceful”, even though 27 police officers were injured, including one “who suffered a broken collarbone, a broken rib, and punctured lung”.
The headline: “London anti-racism protests leave 27 officers hurt” is written in such a way as to imply that the officers were hurt almost by magic, rather than by any action from protesters.
The arrests are given less prominence, but the wider context behind the protest is given a full hearing, and the protestors are given a voice to explain exactly why they are protesting.
Despite all the violence that occurred, the protestors are treated sympathetically — as though their cause is righteous and legitimate. Because the editors at the BBC think that it is.
The piece reinforces the legitimacy of the protest, even in the presence of violence.
This is just one example, but it shows how this game works. If the protest fits the BBC’s worldview, it gets sympathetic coverage that downplays any violence. But if it goes against the BBC’s worldview, it is either ignored or framed negatively.
I know first hand how this works. I worked at the BBC during the Sunderland protests and riots last year. And I was told: “The protests may go off peacefully, in which case they’re not newsworthy.”
When the BBC wants you to empathise with a protest, it gives you context: the history of systemic racism, the Gaza death toll, the science behind the climate crisis.
But when it doesn’t, that context vanishes. Why are thousands protesting outside hotels in towns across the UK? Why are people angry at the establishment? What specific crimes have triggered local anger?
What they fear most is people taking to the streets because they are rightly angry
If you only got your news on this weekend’s protests from the BBC, you would not be able to answer any of these questions. None of that is explored. The anger is portrayed as irrational or misinformed, and therefore not worth understanding.
Then, on Monday, the BBC decided to run this article: “I regret taking my son to a riot following Southport attack, says stepmother”. A piece deemed so important and so necessary that it sat front and centre on the BBC homepage all day long.
It features two individuals from last summer’s riots: a woman who brought her son to a protest and shouted at police, and a mentally ill man who vandalised an air-con unit, both of whom were convicted of violent disorder.
This piece is designed to do one thing: make the reader associate anti-immigration sentiment with violence, regret, recklessness, and even mental illness.
In other words: while thousands took to the streets peacefully across the UK to protest against the government’s immigration policy this weekend, the BBC offered its audience a morality tale about two fringe cases from last year’s riots.
This wasn’t an accident. Someone at the BBC made an editorial decision to run this piece, on this day, in this way, as if to say: “This is what anti-immigration protests really look like”.
The BBC wants you to think that protests against immigration are not from Brits with legitimate concerns, but from fringe people with criminal backgrounds. The BBC even admits it, dismissing the disorder last year as stemming solely from “a wave of misinformation, half-truths and lies on social media”.
There is no discussion on why people were angry in the first place, no mention of record levels of migration, no concern about repeated broken promises from the government, no thought that people might actually be genuinely pissed off about the murder of three little girls.
The BBC is not informing its readers, it is subtly instructing them which type of protest is respectable, and which type is beyond the pale of decent society.
This is narrative triage: a calculated decision about which causes deserve public sympathy, and which must be treated as threats.
When protestors align with the worldview of BBC editors, they are elevated, contextualised, and humanised. When they do not, like when they are working class, concerned about immigration, or critical of the establishment, they are sidelined, demonised, or erased.
This is how consent is manufactured in 2025. Not through outright propaganda, but through editorial discretion masquerading as impartiality.
Public broadcasting has a duty to treat all citizens equally. It should not elevate some voices while muting others based on political alignment. But that is precisely what the BBC does with protests.
Protests are a vital expression of democratic dissent. When media institutions decide that only some deserve a hearing, while the rest are dangerous cranks, they are trying to contain certain ideas and causes.
Because what they fear most is genuine working class frustration. Unmediated, unpolished, and rooted in everyday experience, aimed squarely at the establishment.
What they fear most is that a woman from Tamworth or a man from Rotherham might take to the streets not because they have been radicalised by lies on the internet, but because they are rightly angry, and are no longer willing to be polite about it.
As someone who once worked for the BBC, I find this betrayal of journalistic principle impossible to ignore.
Because this isn’t fair journalism. It is PR for an establishment that fears nothing more than a peasants revolt.
