Crying BBC bias is an old party trick Mark Damazer

During the closely fought 1992 general election campaign – Major v Kinnock - the main BBC TV news bulletin, which I was editing, ran an item on NHS health budgets (yes, even then).

- Mark Damazer

At the end of the programme I trotted back to the newsroom. Two producers held up telephone receivers: one cradling an incoming blast of complaint from Conservative HQ, and one from Labour about the selfsame item.

In a disgraceful act of self-indulgent theatre, and only for a brief moment, I grabbed the receivers, one in each hand, and placed them in a loving embrace, mouthpiece to earpiece for maybe 15 seconds. Only after that did I speak to them in sequence to discover - surprise, surprise - that they had nothing of substance to say.

They were going through a ritual, doing what so many have done before and since, in the hope that their accusations of bias would lead to a change in the balance of future coverage. They would not have bothered to phone a newspaper in the same way, because they would have calculated they would have been laughed at. Laughing at complainants is not the BBC way.

For all the decline in its audience numbers, the BBC still matters hugely. In part because it is used more than its competitors by a mile; 94% of the UK adult population per month, and on average 15 hours a week each. It is still the most trusted news brand out there.