An alternative Thought for the Day

, courtesy of Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, as published in the esteemed Northern Echo last year:

Aunties’s bias is showing

I sometimes worry for the sanity of the BBC. Let me say at the start, I’m a totally unreformed addict of Radio Four and I come over all sulky when we go abroad and I have to make do with satellite TV in the hotel bedroom.

The beauty is that you can have the radio with you wherever you go and you don’t have to stop everything you’re doing and gawp at it. There’s a regular ritual in our household. Sometime around seven o’clock, I get up and make the tea and carry a cup up to my wife. She has The Today Programme on while she’s dressing, and I listen to the one downstairs in the kitchen. We are both very much provoked into answering the programme back – not always in the most delicate phraseology. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many a morning it’s a toss up which one of us threatens to chuck the wireless into the street first.

It’s the inbuilt outlandish bias that gets through to us. I say “inbuilt” because I’m convinced they don’t know they’re doing it. The BBC bias is something learned by journalists as soon as they start to work for the Corporation. They are nice sincere, honest people and I believe they really do think they are merely presenting us with the balanced and objective truth. But this is not so. There is a BBC agenda which has a view on every aspect of public life and art, domestic and foreign affairs.
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Everything is divided neatly into good and bad, light and dark. Here is a sample of the good and approved things: the United Nations, the EU, socialism, the establishment view on global warming, foreign aid, ethnic minorities and non-Christian religions.

And here are some of the dark, bad things always disapproved: America, private education, elitism (that is the notion that we can actually distinguish between quality and rubbish), big business, foxhunting, smoking, Tories, the army, the police, stiff prison sentences, traditional Christianity.

There is one particular aspect of BBC bias which puzzles me – because I think it involves a contradiction and a confusion of thought. This is the anti-Americanism rife all over the network. For this bias is selective. The BBC hates what it always describes as “American imperialism” and indeed all American military operations. You wonder where these BBC producers and presenters learnt their history. Twice in the last century, in the First and Second World Wars, the timely military interventions of the US armed forces saved Europe from tyranny. America then fought to defeat the evil totalitarian expansionism of the Soviets. It was American military might which saved us from becoming part of the gulag. You would think the BBC types would be grateful. Far from it.

But here’s the anomaly: while despising America for all the good she has done, they worship her for the trash she creates. Those same BBC news and documentary departments that loathe wholesome American power, grovel before the worst and most trivial aspects of American culture. They send countless staff on freebies to the Oscars. They import trashy American sitcoms and even trashier children’s television shows. They even adopt the language and syntax of America – “kinda”; “math”; “elevator”; “sidewalk” and the barbarous “miss out on”.

It’s all very puzzling. I don’t mind bias. I’m biased myself about many things – but at least I know I am. With the BBC, there is only a blissful ignorance.

The Beeboids insist that the BBC is impartial and unbiased. Can all of the BBC’s many critics really be wrong?