Was Today trying to tell us something?

The top headline for the Today programme on 11 March was that the Archbishop of Canterbury believes it is not racist to be concerned by high levels of immigration.  In the news bulletins that headline was supplemented by other points from the archbishop's interview with House magazine, such as the need for a Europe-wide response to the migrant crisis, the inadequacy of the current response, that the UK should take its share of refugees and that the government's proposed 20,000 in four years looks "very thin".

The overall impression of the story, however, reinforced by repetition of the headline several times an hour, was that fear is a reasonable response to large migration flows and that it is "absolutely outrageous" to label such a response racist.

I agree with every point quoted in the programme, but they make up a small part of the whole (the interview may be found at the archbishop's own site), and the headline about fear being reasonable and not racist makes up a small part of that small part.

Iain Duncan Smith then came on for the 8:10 interview and ventured into the same subject area as he presented his case for leaving the EU.  I will not dwell here on the content of that interview, though I thought he sailed through quite easily with little interrogation.  My concern is with the last two minutes of the programme.

At approximately 08:58:22, John Humphrys repeated the "fear is not racist" headline yet again, then introduced without comment a clip from Iain Duncan Smith's interview.  I cannot remember such a pay off to the programme before, and can only assume that listeners were supposed to go away with that message ringing in our ears.

Complaints about BBC bias are frequent, and I do not agree with all of them at all, but I can see this particular item in no other way.


[I have sent this as a letter to the Radio 4 Feedback programme, and will copy it to others.]