"The BBC Trust has ruled that a controversial programme about welfare reforms, written and fronted by the Today presenter John Humphrys, breached its rules on impartiality and accuracy.
The programme The Future of the Welfare State was first broadcast in November 2011 and featured Humphrys going back to his "poor, working-class" birthplace of Splott in the centre of Cardiff...
...Before the programme was broadcast, Humphrys wrote a personal opinion piece in the Daily Mail to publicise his views and the programme. In it he wrote of "the predictable effect of a dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past years. A sense of entitlement...
... in recent weeks, the welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith,
who used to preface his remarks on Today about benefits with a positive reference to Humphrys' programme, has become exasperated with an apparent leftwing bias of the corporation. Earlier this month the cabinet minister hit out during a bad-tempered interview with Humphrys on Today over his cap on benefits,
accusing Radio 4's flagship programme of using "politically motivated" people to attack his policies. Duncan Smith had the day before been rapped by the official statistics watchdog for misusing benefits cap numbers...
...Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said: "These are major issues of public interest deserving of robust debate and challenging media coverage but which, crucially, also require journalists to speak truth to power, rather than speak untruths about the powerless. If they don't, television audiences and the public at large will continue to be denied the debate they deserve.
"This programme, like too many media stories, failed the public by swallowing wholesale the evidence-free myth of a 'dependency culture' in which unemployment and rising benefit spending is the fault of the unemployed.
"As well as telling the truth about the lack of evidence for the 'dependency culture' narrative, media coverage on social security must give due coverage to important matters like the lack of jobs, poverty pay, zero hour contracts, the high costs of childcare, the high cost of housing and the disappointing performance of the Work Programme."..."
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jul/30/bbc-welfare-reforms-impartiality-john-humphrys