A BBC radio editor who wrote a newspaper column criticising a pro-fox hunting demonstration in London was told on Friday to give up the column or face dismissal, officials said.
Rod Liddle, editor of Radio 4’s Today program, wrote the article in the leftist Guardian newspaper criticising last Sunday’s protest in London by 400 000 people to defend long-standing traditions in rural Britain. They include fox hunting, which faces legislation proposed by the governing leftist-centrist Labour Party that could soon make it illegal.
In a meeting with BBC executives Friday, Liddle was accused of breaching the corporation’s strict rules on impartiality, with the column called a “significant error of judgment,” officials said.
Afterward, the broadcaster released a brief statement saying: “The BBC has told Rod Liddle that he cannot continue to write a newspaper column while editing the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.”
He faces the choice of giving up the column or quitting the Today show, a position he has held for four years.
In Wednesday’s column, Liddle described fox-hunting as “depraved” and referred to the demonstrators as “angry, ruddy-faced people who looked like extras” from a film adaptation of George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss,” a novel about rural life in 19th-century England.
Liddle also mocked the “fusty” aristocratic background of many of the marchers, including Prince Charles, an outspoken, pro-fox hunting member of Britain’s royal family.
The BBC said Liddle usually cleared his columns with a senior BBC news manager before presenting them to The Guardian but that he had failed to do so with the fox-hunting one.
“Rod Liddle accepts this column was a significant error of judgment,” the statement said.
The conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper accused Liddle of “blatant bias, animus and even party allegiance” and said the Today program had failed to give the march sufficient coverage.
The BBC defended the program, saying it had given “considerable prominence to many of the concerns of rural Britain.” – Sapa-AP
Read The Guardian Leader: A Liddle hint of double standards