The BBC’s “liberal and secular” staff are “dangerously out of touch” with religious people, according to a prominent presenter at the corporation. Roger Bolton, who hosts Feedback on Radio 4, said the BBC’s workforce is “more liberal and secular than the rest of the country”, and shares little common ground with communities for whom religion is central to their lives. Bolton, who presented Radio 4’s main religious news programme, Sunday, for 12 years, branded the corporation “dysfunctional” in the wake of its decision to scrap its permanent Religion and Ethics department.

The BBC’s decision to weaken its religious programming team came just after Ofcom instructed the corporation to air at least 115 hours of new religious programming per year. Writing for the Church Times, Bolton said it was hard to disagree with the broadcasting trade union BECTU, who said the fact that Songs of Praise would no longer be produced by the BBC but by an independent company showed “an abject lack of forward planning.”

In its defence, a BBC spokesman said that no other broadcaster was doing more on religion. However, the BBC was recently criticised for employing a disproportionately high number of LGBT people when it was revealed that 11.5 per cent of bosses and 10.6 per cent of staff are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual. According to the Office for National Statistics, only 1.7 per cent of the UK population are lesbian, gay or bisexual. Former BBC Political Editor Andrew Marr has previously described the corporation as a “publicly-funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people… it is “not impartial or neutral”.

Source: Christian Institute

Bible Study: John 10:10-13

JUNE: PRAISE GOD for programmes still providing a positive Christian message. Pray for more Christians to work for the Corporation, and for those already working there, to prayerfully, and in close fellowship with each other, seek ways of influencing the BBC’s output.