Yesterday, BBC Radio 5 Live News, amongst other BBC news productions, reported on Migration Watch UK's analysis of the government's until recently (i.e. until after the election) secret estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the UK. Migration Watch's analysis carefully argues that the true illegal migrant number in the UK is approaching 750,000.

But don't worry Beeboids - the reports were as brief as possible (for example, Illegal migrant figure 'too low', appeared ever so minimally on BBC News Online's home page after 1am, disappeared to the UK home page early in the morning, and disappeared completely as soon as possible thereafter - 'blink and you really do miss it'!), and, in many cases, smeared Migration Watch, who describe themselves as, and who are, by all reasonable accounts, 'an independent and non-political body', as "a right-wing think tank" - the usual leftie approach - "we don't like what they say, however rational and fact based it is, so they must be right-wing, and we all know right-wing is really bad", so that's alright then!

Just to make sure that Migration Watch's figure were given the full BBC spin treatment, a later update to the story added a John Kerry "I voted for it before I voted against it" style quote from Keith Best, 'Chief Executive' of the so-called Immigration Advisory Service (part of Britain's enormous immigration human-rights, except for those who already live here, industry):

Failed asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants. They are people who are subject to removal but have not yet been removed.

Ah, so that's clear - that'd be them all queued up at the airport ready for the off then Keith. Still, Keith's no stranger to double-dealing, though unusually for the BBC, in his case, they almost always forget to mention his previous role as an early example of "Tory Sleaze", even though "Tory Sleaze" usually gets dragged up whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Meanwhile, in a related story about the lamentable shambles of Britain's passport controls (the ones that permitted the successful flight abroad of one of the most high-profile of wanted crime suspects last week), Hoon ponders new passport checks, BBC News Online manages to omit the ever so minor detail about which governmment it was that scrapped passport exit controls and other immigration checks and balances. Does anyone, outside of the BBC, need a clue?

Following on from much disparaging blogosphere comment (for instance Stephen Pollard, Clive Davis, Harry's Place, etc.) about the dreadfully biased studio audience selected to appear on last week's BBC news special, Questions of Security (surely Questions of Terrorism?), the BBC has admitted that "there was a deliberately disproportionate number of Muslims in [the] studio audience". Truly astonishing.

'Disproportionate' hardly begins to describe the situation - according to the BBC, "around 15% of the audience" was Muslim, "as opposed to 2.7% of the country as a whole" - in other words, Muslims were more than five times over-represented. Judging from the aggressive self-righteousness of so many of the apparent Muslims among the questioners, they weren't even representative of British Muslims as a whole.

In the BBC's admission, Anger at news special audience, hidden away in their Newswatch graveyard, Sue Inglish, Head of Political Programmes, says:

Huw Edwards explained at the start of the programme [that] the studio audience was made up of a variety of people from a range of communities, particularly those most affected by the questions we were discussing in the wake of the bombings of 7 July and the incidents on 21 July.

Unsurprisingly, Inglish is being more than a little disingenuous. At the beginning of the programme, after a long preamble, Edwards did slip in: "well now, our audience tonight includes representatives from some of the communities most affected by the recent events in London and of course elsewhere in the United Kingdom" - but that is a long way from saying "oh, and by the way, we've loaded the audience with five times more Muslims than you might expect", which is how Inglish now expects us to interpret Edwards blather.

Moreover, it's rich to imply that Britain's Muslim population constitutes "some of the communities most affected" - leaving aside the fact that the community most affected by the appearance of Islamist terrorists (sorry BBC, bombers) in the UK happens to be all of us (as potential victims) - Muslim or not, the communities "most affected" surely start with the victims, families and friends of the 7/7 atrocities, followed by those who use London Transport and those who live and work in and around London.

This scandal of loading the Question Time audience (even more than usual), without admitting so up front in the programme, has shades of the nationally embarrassing Question Time following the 9/11 atrocities, which was so bad that Greg Dyke, then Director General, apologised to offended viewers and personally to Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, for his treatment on the programme. Was the selection of that audience similarly loaded? Is the BBC going to be honest and tell us?

The time has come for transparency in the selection of audiences for Question Time and other political programmes with audiences. No longer should it be down to the programme makers to screen audience members, selecting those who will participate, those who will get to ask questions and the questions themselves. Audience selection should be carried out by respectable independent organisations, by lottery from the electoral roll if need be, accountable only to the BBC's governors, so that the producers and researchers may not skew the audience or influence the questions, intentionally or otherwise. And then perhaps Question Time will once more be for the people of Britain to ask questions of our leaders, rather than for the selectorate of the BBC to promote their perception of what matters (or what they think should matter) to the ordinary telly-tax payers who are forced to pay for the BBC.

One last point, just to add insult to injury, for those of us who are as proud to be British as our English comrades, when Inglish says "But the rest of the audience - around 85% - included representatives of a number of other different ethnic and religious groups, including Christian, Hindu, Sikh, African Caribbean, English, Irish, Kashmiri and Turkish", she makes the classic BBC faux-pas of conflating English with British, whilst remembering to name just about every other ethnic group of any size in the UK. Typical.

You can view the programme and its loaded audience for yourself here:

Real Video format: Standard 34kbps or Higher quality 224kbps

Windows WMV format: Standard 34kbps or Higher quality 224kbps

Request: Does anyone have any links to or recordings of the dreadful edition of Question Time that followed the 9/11 atrocities? Thank you.

Update: This story has since been picked up by the Daily Express, a national newspaper in the UK. See above for updated Biased BBC coverage.

It's the way they tell 'em! Going back a couple of weeks, on the day of the BBC's Annual General Meeting, Michael Grade, Chairman of the BBC's governors, was interviewed on the Today programme. I believe he was interviewed once, however, looking at the reports of his words on BBC News Online and in the Daily Telegraph, one has to wonder if the Beeboids at News Online were wearing their rose-tinted ear-muffs that day (as usual). Using your skill, judgment and experience of BBC bias, see if you can figure out which of these two introductory excerpts is the BBC version and which is the Daily Telegraph version:

'Repeat-free zones' aim for BBC

Prime time viewing hours on BBC One and BBC Two could be "repeat-free zones" within 10 years, the broadcaster's chairman Michael Grade has said.

It is "not good enough" that one in 10 programmes currently shown at peak times is a re-run, Mr Grade said.

Answering licence fee payers' questions at its annual general meeting, director general Mark Thompson said plans for 15% spending cuts would improve value.

and:

Licence payers neglected for years, says Grade

Television licence-payers have been "neglected" for years by the BBC's governors, chairman Michael Grade has said.

Mr Grade said the governors had followed their own opinions and tastes and had failed to ensure the BBC responded to the requirements of viewers.

He also set out an ambition to make BBC1 and BBC2 "repeat-free zones" within the next few years, while attacking "inefficiency" within the corporation

The corporation plans to cut staff by 15 per cent and Mr Grade backed this by saying that over-complex internal management and contract structures needed to be simplified.

Note particularly the contrast in the reporting of the BBC's restructuring plans - one report describes "15% spending cuts", whereas the other reports "plans to cut staff by 15 per cent". Unless the BBC is planning to cut the licence fee (as if!), that ought to nail any lingering doubts for you!