The BBC should actively seek to redress its “innate liberal bias”, says the Conservatives’ spokesman for culture.
Jeremy Hunt quoted the phrase applied to the BBC by its former political editor Andrew Marr in 2007.
Mr Marr has also described the BBC as “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large”.
The BBC has been frequently accused of a bias against Christians and Christian values.
In June this year, the Church of England challenged the broadcaster over claims it treats Christianity like a ‘freak show’.
In the same month, former Radio 2 host Don Maclean said the BBC was supportive of Islam while taking a consistently negative angle on Christianity.
The broadcaster came under fire recently when it received complaints about a drama that portrayed a British extremist Christian beheading a moderate Muslim.
The offending episode of “Bonekickers” was aired in July last year and sparked renewed accusations of anti-Christian bias at the BBC.
Daily Telegraph writer, Damian Thompson, said: “We are deep into the realms of BBC bias and ignorance here.
“Only a BBC drama series would, to quote the complainant, ‘transfer the practice of terrorist beheadings from Islamist radicals to a fantasised group of fundamentalist Christians’.”
In January the beeb sparked outrage when a BBC One drama portrayed pro-life campaigners as murderous terrorists.
In the same month a BBC presenter, Jeremy Vine, said he believed that Christ is who he said he was, but doesn’t think he would be allowed to say so on air.
He told Reform Magazine that it has become “almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God”.
Last year the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson, admitted his view that Islam should be treated more sensitively than Christianity because Muslims are less integrated and more of a minority group.
In October last year, the conductor of the BBC Philharmonic orchestra spoke of an ‘ignorant’ secular liberal minority in the media seeking to drive religion from the public sphere.
And in 2006 the Archbishop of York said that Christians took “more knocks” in BBC programmes than other faiths.
He added: “They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims. We are fair game because they can get away with it.”