Former Radio Four ‘Today’ editor

Rod Liddle lays into his former employers for their left-wing bias in this Sunday Times piece, which was inspired by the BBC’s affectionate look at what their senior people used to get up to thirty years ago. Read the whole thing.

In fairness it must be said that Liddle himself was a paragon of political correctness during his time at the BBC.

An example of the sort of thing Liddle means is this 2002 edition of the Radio Four series ‘Crossing Continents’, about Italy. Although the website features Mussolini, the first half of the programme (RealAudio) is taken up with a discussion of “how the radical left is responding to the Berlusconi government“, in which a succession of far-lefties are given an incredibly easy, even supportive ride by reporter Rosie Goldsmith.

Two things stand out about this section. The obvious one is that it’s almost impossible to imagine a BBC programme on how, say, the “radical right” in the UK were responding to the Blair administration. Any such programme on the “right” could only be couched in terms of “threat” or “the ominous rise of …”.

The second is an almost unbelievable omission. One of the responses of the “radical left” to the Berlusconi government was the murder of a government adviser, Marco Biagi, by the Red Brigades. Incredibly, the murder does not get a mention.

Just say that a couple of years into the Blair administration, some neo-Nazi group like Combat 18 had shot a Blair adviser. Can you imagine the BBC running a programme on the response of the “radical right” which passed the killing by? I can’t either.