BBC Radio 4 strikes the wrong tone at The Game Fair

BBC Radio 4's Today programme broadcast from The Game Fair on Saturday 28^th July in an attempt to pay some attention to rural Britain. Yet by choosing to use this opportunity to debate banning grouse shooting, the BBC showed it still has not learned how to discuss a rural issue without reducing it to an absurdly simplistic binary.

The Countryside Alliance has persistently campaigned for the BBC to improve its rural coverage, demanding that the BBC implement the findings of its own review into the coverage of rural affairs. The Alliance recently submitted evidence to Ofcom pointing out that the review was undertaken three years ago, however the BBC has yet to appoint a Rural Correspondent and continues to report on rural issues as conflicts between protest groups rather than delving into underlying issues, in direct contradiction to the report's findings.

Given the Alliance's record on this issue, we were pleased BBC Radio 4's flagship current affairs programme, Today, was broadcast from The Game Fair in an attempt to redress the persistent bias we see directed at the countryside. However, there are now serious questions to answer about why this broadcast chose to repeat the failings highlighted in the BBC's review by spending time debating driven grouse shooting.

This is a perfect example of the BBC's inability to discuss game shooting without reducing the discussion to an oversimplified battle between protest groups. The Game Fair was in Worcestershire, hundreds of miles from any grouse moors. There are many interesting and diverse topics to be discussed around game shooting, many of which were debated by industry experts in the Carter Jonas theatre at the event. Yet air time was given to an incredibly narrow topic of interest to a very small group of protesters.

The Countryside Alliance will be writing to the BBC's rural champion Dimitri Houtard to request a meeting to discuss why this decision was taken.

Countryside Alliance Chief Executive Tim Bonner said: "The only relevance banning driven grouse shooting has to the people of rural Britain is to the thousands of people who would lose their livelihoods if this were ever to happen. Grouse shooting is a vital and thriving activity that is the lynchpin of upland conservation and community, and its abolition is a fantasy of a very small group of activists. There were so many interesting debates and discussions being had at The Game Fair, yet once again the BBC defaulted to its same old failings, serving its predominantly metropolitan audience by reducing a rural issue to its most simplistic level. In so doing, the decision to host the Today programme at The Game Fair was turned into pure tokenism, showing just how much work we still have to do to achieve a genuinely neutral BBC."