Monthly Archives: June 2011

Sandy Toksvig, presenter of Radio 4’s so-called News Quiz – actually a propaganda fest for the presenter’s and panellists’ liberal prejudices – summarises all that I loathe about the BBC. She’s a lefty, smug, holier-than-thou, no-talent performer who thinks she’s very funny. Despite this, she’s carved out a career at the corporation and she is evidently adored by her bosses.

Miss Toksvig clearly thought it was hilarious in an edition of her show which -in keeping with the rest of the BBC output – mentioned government cuts. She declared: “It’s the Tories who put the ‘n’ into cuts”. Now I am not a prude, but the use of this word is still at the frontier of what is acceptable, and for women I know, is regarded as deeply offensive, especially if used gratuitously. But Ms Toksvig’s BBC boss at Radio 4, Paul Mayhew Archer, didn’t think so. He regarded her little joke as “delightful”, and he authorised the head of complaints to say:

“I want you to know that I thought very hard about whether to allow Sandi’s joke to be broadcast.I knew it might offend some listeners, and if my job was simply not to risk offending any listeners I could have cut it instantly. But that is not my job.My job here was to balance the offence it might cause some listeners against the delight it might give other listeners. I say delight because I thought it was a good joke and I knew that a huge number of fans of the programme would love it.”

And for the Mail on Sunday, which has splashed with the story, a spokesman defended this further. He defined the language only as ‘robust’ and therefore acceptable.

My question for Mr Mayhew Archer and his censor-hating BBC colleagues is this. If a right-wing guest (pretending for a second they exist on the BBC) had in the course of the quiz mentioned the ‘n’ word about blacks, what would his reaction have been? My guess is he would have been insulted for his use of nasty language by everyone from the director general downwards and barred for life from ever appearing on the BBC again.

Irrespective of the broader debate about the ‘c’ word, this episode underlines the blatant, unpleasant hypocrisy of the BBC. They are forever pushing back boundaries of taste – but only when it suits their liberal agenda.

The BBC – in its venomous hatred of fossil fuels – was very quick this week to link attempts to extract shale gas with earthquakes and to emphasise the danger that such efforts would alarmingly cause tap water to ignite because aquifers could become impregnated with methane. Dramatic pictures of these flaming taps (from a US propaganda film, it now transpires, although this was not made clear in the bulletins) dominated news reports, and were obviously included to heighten the alarmist nature of the story. The intent by the BBC was to plant firmly in people’s minds that shale gas was a nasty new excrescence.

Now we learn that the film showing the said flaming taps was deliberately misleading. The director – a greenie activist – knew that the phenomena had existed and had been a puzzle for decades, since long before fracking extraction existed. He chose not to include this fact in his propaganda exercise because he decided it was “not relevant”. How very convenient.

So, too, did the BBC. In its haste to terrify people about fossil fuels, it did not properly check its facts or its sources – par for the course in its greenie crusade.

Update: In the same way, Richard Black this week trumpeted new “research” about clownfish which purported to show that they were at risk from ocean “acidification”. Anthony Watts posted this item overnight which takes apart the claim and shows that the experiment was totally flawed. Chances of a retraction/explanation? Zero.