A former BBC Director of News and Current Affairs has revealed how the trans agenda played a significant part in driving her from the corporation.
Fran Unsworth, who stepped down from the top job in 2022, told UnHerd that it was relentlessly difficult dealing with “progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them”.
She pointed to a pervasive “social phenomenon” at the BBC, which prioritised being “kind to transitioning people” to such an extent that “maintaining impartiality became quite difficult”.
In an interview with ex-BBC editor Rob Burley, Unsworth said: “It was bullying. But it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them”.
“The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”
Regarding the transgender issue, she explained to Burley: “As you well know, editorial decision-making in the BBC isn’t top-down. It’s about editors deciding what they want to put on their programmes. And one of the big factors in it is because they took so much heat whenever they went near this subject.”