By the Observer’s Nick Cohen may be of interest.
Although it is impossible to generalise about such a vast organisation, the bias charge has enough truth in it to stick. If you doubt me, research one opinion outside the liberal consensus. Read up on the arguments for making Britain a fairer country by giving trade unionists more rights, for instance, or saying that abortion is murder or that Tony Blair’s foreign policy is correct in its essentials.
You don’t have to believe it, you just have to convince yourself that serious people can hold it for good reasons. You will then notice something disconcerting about most BBC presenters. Although they subject opponents of, say, abortion to rigorous cross-examination, their lust for ferocious questioning deserts them when supporters of abortion come on air. Far from being tested, they treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth.
The way out for the BBC is not to swing to the right – it is not an advance to replace soft interviews for Menzies Campbell with soft interviews for John Reid – but make a tactical withdrawal from the opinion business. Less airtime should be given to talking heads and celebrity interviewers in London studios and more to reporters who leave Television Centre to find out what is happening in the world.
Couldn’t agree more.
Me too. If I want opinion then I go to the commentary pages or to blogs. It’s precisely the over-emphasis on an appropriate ‘angle’ or ‘take’ on an issue that I no-longer rely on the BBC as a news service.
I perhaps also ought to add that despite the vast amount of money spent on its services, it’s news output on the internet is actually very low quality. A summary at best of what’s meant to be going on. The Times can muster two or three pages of detailed news on an issue. With the BBC at most it’s 400 words. X said this, Y said that. No fact, just bounced opinions.
Articles like this are a perfect example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6031697.stm
The BBC has been gushing over this plan all day. Note the classic tactic of 90% of the article being in support of the motion, with the opposition being relegated to the bottom of the page.
Comments on Cohen’s column at the Observer website show, as usual, that the critics of Cohen/supporters of the BBC come from the left (including the Israeli/Jewish haters).
The comment by SamuelH supports Cohen & expands on the comment as news theme –
Today, even in supposed news broadcasts, even from the mighty BBC, the spinning of often very tenuous opinions, frequently laced with a juvenile cynicism about everything and everyone, regularly replaces the factual narrative we need if we are to make up our own minds. The news turns into comment, and the comment becomes the news.
I particularly liked
The cynical trivialising smirk of Nick Robinson appearing nightly in what are supposed to be BBC news broadcasts says it all
I have just returned from a week where the only English speaking channel was CNN International. That channel is BBC with knobs on. Who follows who? The CNN desk person found it necessary to conclude each interview (always with Bush &/or West bashers, NGO spokespersons etc) with their own opinionated summary of the topic.
From the Observer article:
While Randall was at the BBC, two producers tried to stop him wearing his hijab: a pair of Union Jack cufflinks. ‘They said they were a symbol of the BNP and I couldn’t wear them,’ he recalled. He had to explain with some force why they were mistaken.
Disgusted, but not shocked.
For the benefit of the Guardian/Observer commentors I felt duty bound to add a comment pointing out that despite his name Nick Cohen isn’t Jewish:
http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=13
But is there any ‘news’ content left at the BBC ? Think about Orla Moron wandering through the ‘completely destroyed’ town, the magic ambulance-destroying rockets, or for that matter the non-reporting of events in Windsor.
Mind you, Bin Laden getting a tough interview from a BBC reporter ? Now that’s fanatsy.
More airtime to reporters who leave Television Centre to find out what is happening in the world? Are you suggesting that the opinions of Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen, and Barbara Plett should be given MORE weight? God help us all.
Note that Cohen’s solution is merely ‘a tactical withdrawal from the opinion business’, i.e., straight from Lenin’s playbook.
Personally, I’d rather go for total strategic defeat of the BBC, complete with scorched earth and fields sown with salt. A few show trials wouldn’t be out of place, either.
A good start might be merciless hounding of all the wise men of the left who led your nation down the paths of multiculti righteouness.
As always, failure is an orphan, so the amnesia’s already set in. Will they be allowed to walk away again?
Given the benighted mess that Britain now is, probably. As usual, you get what you deserve.
As others have said, the flaw in Nick Cohen’s prescription is that the BBC’s reporting standards are so low that any extension of its coverage is to be deplored.
Only at a slight tangent (by way of an example) has anyone any idea what happened in Windsor yesterday? I’m damned if I’ve heard a word about events there on the BBC.
So sorry, Mr Cohen: it just won’t work.
It’s not going to happen. The BBC news staff derive a great deal of their job satisfaction and self-importance from giving us what they call ‘analysis’.
Grimer | 08.10.06 – 4:54 pm | #
what do you think the bbc take on flag waving (probably only of old glory or the union jack) would be?
This is OT but in reporting some tragic news
Al-BBC can’t help letting their bias show..
“A two-year-old boy has died in hospital after being hit by a 4X4 while playing on the pavement outside his home.”
Pandering to their leftie-liberal core audience and their dislike of SUVs and 4×4 , Al-Beeb take the unusual step of mentioning the type of automobile involved in the accident. Would they have done this if the car involved had been a Volvo estate or a Mini ?
This opinion business is now British stock in trade and is what makes us a laughing stock. The term ‘British newspaper’, for example, is a tautology — if it’s British it can’t be a NEWSpaper. What we actually have ended up with are a bunch of opinion sheets and tabloid entertainment publications. As for al-beeb, listen to Justin Webb slagging off America, or Orla G. tongue-lashing Israel! And we have to pay a fee for that rubbish! At least with the publications we can keep our cash in our pockets.
There’s sufficient quality UK news reporting and information out there to come to your own informed opinion if you have the inclination and intelligence to look for and digest it. Unfortunately most of the great British public are so dim these days they’d rather pop their blinkers on, read only the crap they’re comfortable with and parrot the opinions of which of the universally abysmal ‘columnists’ they’ve chosen to adopt as an infallible purveyor of truth.
At one point the BBC provided something of a counterweight to this. No longer.
Education education education.
Cockney
There’s sufficient quality UK news reporting and information out there to come to your own informed opinion if you have the inclination and intelligence to look for and digest it.
One thing I have learned since nosing about the interweb these last few years is how poor the MSM is. If you want to not only find in-depth information on news/current affairs, if you want to know even that you have the truth or something close to it, you simply cannot rely on any branch of the MSM. It’s not just the biases which pervade them all, I’m continually surprised at the shallowness of reporting from what are supposedly respected organisations employing professional journalists. On just about any issue or event you’ll find more depth in a puddle.
Pete_London,
I’ve come to exactly the same conclusion. If your a specialist in a subject (say IT) and you see a report by an MSM journo you tend to think “that was awful, but they must be better in other areas”… unfortunatly they are not.
http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/10/bbc-incontestable-truths.html#links
Wouldn’t one partial solution to the prison overcrowding question be to stop imprisoning people for non-payment of the BBC’s poll tax?
Yorkie | 09.10.06 – 4:50 pm | #
does anyone have any numbers as to the number of cases brought annually, number imprisoned, etc?
just curious
can’t believe that in 2006 people could be sent to prison for an offence of that nature, considering how many crimes of violence do not end in imprisonment
For fine summary, see
‘The Windsor disturbances’,
http://www.melaniephillips.com (8 Oct.)
Big Mouth | 09.10.06 – 8:06 am | #
‘The term ‘British newspaper’, for example, is a tautology — if it’s British it can’t be a NEWSpaper.’
Time to look up ‘tautology’ in the dictionary, Big Mouth.
Nick Cohen’s remark “The issue is whether the liberal left is as keen on universal principles as it pretends” is disingenuous. When has the left ever been keen on “universal principles”?