The BBC’s attacks on Steven Bartlett reek of hypocrisy

A recent BBC investigation has accused entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den star Steven Bartlett of ‘sharing harmful health misinformation’ on his hit podcast. Last week, the BBC’s ‘global disinformation unit’ analysed 15 health-focussed episodes of Diary of a CEO. Apparently, each episode it looked at contains an average of 14 health claims that go against ‘extensive scientific evidence’.

Diary of a CEO, currently the second-most-popular podcast in the UK, mostly features conversations about business and entrepreneurship, but it has recently pivoted towards health and ‘wellness’. Recent guests have indeed made various woo-woo claims, including that cancer can be cured by adopting a keto diet and that autism can be ‘reversed’. The BBC says these guests are misleadingly presented as ‘leading experts in their fields’, and that Bartlett allows them to speak with ‘little challenge’.

Most of us probably wouldn’t need the BBC to tell us this stuff is bonkers. Bartlett’s audience can surely be trusted to make up their own minds about whether scented candles make you infertile, or if the Covid vaccines were really a ‘net negative’.

Still, for the BBC to criticise Bartlett for spreading misinformation is more than a little hypocritical. After all, the BBC has spent the past decade or so promoting the deeply anti-scientific idea that human beings can change their sex at will.

Indeed, trans ideology appears to have infected the BBC’s editorial line. It regularly reports that bearded ‘women’ are committing all manner of violent or perverted crimes. It even punished a Radio 4 presenter for accurately describing ‘transwomen’ as ‘males’.

Worse still, the BBC’s line on gender has led it to spread what can only be described as ‘dangerous health misinformation’ – and to children, too. In recent years, it has given trans activists vast amounts of airtime on TV and radio, and seemingly endless articles on the BBC News website, to peddle various quack medical treatments under the guise of ‘gender-affirming care’. In 2020, it reinforced the trans-activist talking point that failing to prescribe children puberty blockers could lead to a wave of suicides, despite there being no evidence for this at all. Then, earlier this year, the BBC found itself in hot water for employing a ‘nonbinary’ presenter called Dr Ronx Ikharia, who led a protest against a meeting of medics who were concerned about the harms of puberty blockers. In a 2020 BBC Three documentary, she also advised a young woman to continue wearing breast binders – a garment worn by ‘transgender women’ to flatten and disguise their female breasts. This was despite the fact that her past use of binders caused her significant pain and health conditions, including leading her ribs to pop out. Yet, instead of being rebuked, Ikharia was handed a permanent spot on CBBC’s Operation Ouch!, a science show for children.

When the landmark Cass Review into gender medicine was released earlier this year, highlighting the dangers of puberty blockers, the BBC remained unconvinced. Its reporting initially focussed on the growing waiting lists for children’s gender services, rather than on the dangers these clinics have exposed children to. While the evidence unearthed by Cass showed that puberty blockers cause significant harm, but for little proven benefit, the BBC countered this by interviewing young trans people who felt ‘failed’ by the review, treating their fringe opinions as equivalent to medical evidence. Last week, when the UK government made its ban on puberty blockers permanent, BBC Newsbeat covered the news by interviewing a trans person who extolled their (non-existent) benefits, while giving no detail on their well-documented side-effects.

The BBC clearly needs to get its own house in order before accusing anyone else of spreading dangerous health misinformation.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.