The newly-appointed chairman of the BBC has called for the broadcaster to hire more “northern working-class” voices as he suggested there was a lack of diversity of thought.
Samir Shah, 73, began his four-year tenure as BBC chairman on 4 March having previously run for more than a decade, between 1987 and 1998, the corporation’s current affairs and political programmes.
In his first interview since assuming the role, he said that while the BBC has done “really well” diversifying the range of ethnicities of its employees, it has failed to hire a diversity of different thinkers.
He told The Times the BBC should focus on hiring from the “northern working class where we’re poor”.
He cited reporting of migration as suggestive of the BBC’s metropolitan, liberal leanings, which in turn means news coverage of important stories lacks balance.
“When you have people coming to Britain on small boats, there’s a great deal of sympathy. They’ve just gone through a horrendous journey,” he said.
But the BBC has not “taken up as much as it should the concerns of the communities receiving all these people,” he added.
“Concerns that your child can’t get into a school or see a doctor. Are there pressures on housing? We have people in various parts of the country who really object to having a whole load of migrants coming in. It is our job to hear their point of view. It’s not our job to say, ‘Oh, I don’t like those views.’”
Mr Shah, who was born in India but moved to Shepherds Bush as a young boy, said the broadcaster also needed to look into what caused the BBC to air a documentary detailing the life of the son of a Hamas official.
BBC2 screened a documentary last month called Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone that had to be pulled after it emerged that BBC editors had failed to inform viewers that the 13-year-old English-speaking narrator, Abdullah, was the son of an official in the Hamas administration.
The board has demanded that the corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie, investigate how the Gaza film was commissioned.
But the culture secretary Lisa Nandy recently accused the BBC of failing to show enough urgency in its review and she demanded answers from the broadcaster by early next week.
