When it comes to BBC coverage of assisted suicide – or anything, really – the foremost UK public broadcaster should rebrand itself the British Bias Corporation and be done with it. This is because, any claims to impartiality the BBC could claim to uphold, has been well and truly demolished once again. This time, it’s over its news site’s stacked coverage of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill.
BBC bias on assisted suicide
Journalist Dan Hitchens dug into the BBC’s output across its news site in the last six months. He looked at the period between October 2024, and the end of March 2025. Specifically, he analysed news stories for their inclusion of different representatives and groups.
And what he found was blatant bias in favour of the pro-assisted suicide lobby:
In covering the assisted suicide bill, the BBC news site appears overly reliant on a single campaign group: pic.twitter.com/ivo2fbKqlP
— Dan Hitchens (@ddhitchens) April 7, 2025
The “single campaign group” Hitchens flagged is none other than the opaquely funded Dignity in Dying. The organisation has spearheaded lobbying efforts to push MPs to back the bill in parliament.
Ahead of the vote at second reading in the House of Commons, the group spent vast sums peddling the bill to the public on social media.
So, Hitchens essentially revealed that the BBC has platformed the lobby group in a whopping nearly 60% of its stories on the bill.
By comparison, it has given over its coverage to groups/individuals against assisted suicide in only a third of its articles.
If that weren’t bad enough, Hitchens noted the pitiful excuse the BBC had previously made for this staggering disparity:
When I complained to the BBC last year about publishing twice as many pro articles as anti (36 to 17), their response was that BBC impartiality transcends “mere ‘balance’”: https://t.co/TUFUpX39Vr pic.twitter.com/25Rz1DVABj
— Dan Hitchens (@ddhitchens) April 7, 2025
In short, to the BBC, it doesn’t give a shit about amplifying the voices of those the assisted suicide bill could impact most. As the Canary has consistently articulated, this will be chronically ill and disabled people.
BBC bias: we’ve been here before, we’ll be here again
Of course, none of this is out of step with the public broadcaster that’s anything but ‘impartial’ in reality. The notion that the BBC is a trustworthy, non-partisan source of information is about as believable now as a Labour cabinet minister refusing to drink to a round of “Never have I ever taken vast donations from sleazebag corporate lobbyists”.
What it passes off as impartiality is really just a complicit client media. It unabashedly maintains the status quo of the establishment and corporate capitalist classes. That is, the BBC has long laundered the agendas and reputations of the neoliberal right. In doing this, it has kept them soundly in power. Political editor, Boris Johnson suck-up, and all-round slimy Conservative grifter Laura Kuenssberg is a case and point of precisely this.
Throughout Israel’s abhorrent genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, its disgusting capitulation to the war-criminal-led state has been nothing if not obvious and relentless.
So the BBC really is no stranger to laying cover for the perpetrators of unconscionable deaths either. Be it the Covid fatal “let it rip” legacy of Tory administration past, or genocidal Israel, it’s a blatant vehicle for this type of establishment-sustaining propaganda. In that sense then, its overt lean into the lead org of the assisted suicide lobby, is arguably right at home.
Not its first time promoting assisted suicide with DiD’s help
Nor is this the BBC’s only foray into sanitising assisted suicide either. Dignity in Dying’s own annual accounts detail how in 2023, it:
provided consultancy support on Casualty and Coronation Street storylines
That is, the lobby group input into two of the broadcaster’s most popular programmes. As the Telegraph highlighted:
In September last year, a major plot line in BBC medical drama Casualty revolved around Jan Jenning, a paramedic played by Di Botcher, helping Gethin West – a Motor Neurone Disease (MND) sufferer portrayed by Robert Pugh – to end his life in Switzerland.
Two months earlier, Coronation Street showed Paul Foreman, another MND sufferer, asking his boyfriend Billy Mayhew, an archdeacon, to help him die.
Of course, the effect of it normalising assisted suicide in two prominent soaps, cannot be overstated. These stories promote assisted death, over provision of genuine support assisting people to live.
Now, Hitchens has blown open the BBC’s broadscale bias over this once again. Who it chooses to amplify speaks volumes. This is especially the case when it has put out this coverage amid parliamentary and committee votes on the bill.
It should be a scandal that a vested lobby group has such enormous monopoly over its output on such a contentious issue. However, it should also be no surprise from the establishment stooge that is the BBC.
Featured image via the Canary
