Now look, I worked for the BBC, I worked for them for them for many years, they gave me lots of really good training, helped me to become impartial, taught me balance and all the things that you’re meant to know if you’re going to work for a state-owned broadcaster as it were, as a licence fee payer actually pays for the BBC.
But the reason I left was because, well, I was not a full-time employee. I was what it really would be like a contractor, but they changed everything.
So as a contractor, they started putting stipulations on the sort of things you could say if you worked or did anything outside, yet the income I was receiving really wasn’t enough for me to sustain myself, even though I had set shows.
So I started doing things on, say, The Jeremy Vine Show and on Good Morning Britain and other channels, and giving what I could in terms of my opinion and trying to balance it and do all the right things so I wouldn’t get fired kind of thing, because I had to remain impartial.
Nana Akua opens up about leaving the BBC after ‘unsurprising’ bias in Panorama Trump clip
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GB NEWS
And I lost a couple of radio shows because I’d gone on one channel and said something that they didn’t like, didn’t even say it on the BBC, and then I’d go on another channel and say something else and I’d be cautioned.
So that’s why I used to get quite annoyed with Gary Lineker, because he was able to say whatever he wanted and get away with it. And if it had been me, I’d have been in a whole heap of trouble.
So what I did was I left. I left because I couldn’t have my own voice and have my own opinions or say what I thought. So for example, when I was doing my show, it was kind of about the time of Black Lives Matter. I was told, ‘oh, would you like to promote a Black Lives Matter event on your show? Tell everybody about it’, and I said no.
Because they’re a far left Marxist organisation, and you’re not really allowed to be doing that. I’m not really allowed to be promoting that on the BBC.
And as a result, I didn’t do it, but it was things like I would have liked to have questioned climate change at the time. It’s not that I don’t believe the climate is changing, but my question is the contribution that mankind is actually making to it, and I wanted to talk about that, but that apparently was settled science. I couldn’t do that either.
And so I left. I left to have my own voice, I left to have my own narrative, and also I left because I felt that what I was meant to be saying, I didn’t necessarily agree with, and I just find it quite egregious.
I’m so glad I did leave, because now looking at it and seeing, for example, talking about Brexit, I had to be very careful what I said about that, because I knew that within the organisation the support was against Brexit. So I would try and be neutral, but my support was for Brexit.
It was very difficult because I knew the narrative within the organisation. I probably wouldn’t have been challenged if I had said something positive about staying in the EU, but if I said something negative then that would have been bad. I don’t think that I would have got away with that.
So it comes as no surprise to me about the biased nature of some of the things that have gone on with regard to Trump. I love Trump, I loved him the first time around. I kept that quiet, if you see what I mean.
So looking at what’s happened in there, I’m very disappointed because there are some very, very good people in the BBC and there are some very good, good qualities about the BBC, for example, the training, and they use external providers and quite a bit of it is second to none.
I got good training, and I think there is a place for it as a sort of training ground for journalists using external training, not all the internal stuff, but I think there is a place for them, but they cannot they cannot continue in the way they are.
Not being held to account in the way that we are at GB News and at ITV and in fact, in particular, they should be held to higher account because the public are paying for them. And if they continue like this, I think they seriously risk losing the support entirely of the public and losing their funding.
