The BBC’s new Director General, Tony Hall, thinks the BBC is not left of centre.
If that is the case then what is the explanation for the atrociously one sided reporting that floods out of the BBC providing neither context, history or genuine analysis of any depth or originality? Are its journalists just bad or incompetent then?
What we get from the BBC is all too often what might be considered the verbatim reading of Labour Party press releases…BBC presenter’s insisting on mentioning the ‘bedroom tax’….now known as, after being called out on this, the ‘so called bedroom tax’ or the ‘bedroom tax as Labour calls it’. And yet they won’t call the Israeli ‘security barrier’ by that name…though they will call the NI walls ‘peace walls’….and they won’t call a terrorist a terrorist so as not to upset Palestinians.
The BBC will attack Osborne for parking in a disabled bay…despite the fact he wasn’t driving and knew nothing of it.
The BBC attack Osborne for raising the subject of Philpott and his lifestyle, though he didn’t connect it to the deaths of the children.
All things in perfect alignment with Labour attacks on Osborne….never mind the sweeping BBC attacks on any reform of the welfare system against which the BBC can muster an army of ‘victims’ and lobby groups all of which are allowed, indeed are encouraged, to give voice to their deepest hatred of any cuts and to raise the level of rhetoric to an astonishing height nearing insanity…one disabled rights campaigner suggesting Osborne didn’t like seeing disabled people and would like to make them ‘disappear’. When someone starts slipping in suggestions that Osborne is some kind of Nazi, a comment that went unchallenged by the BBC presenter, you know the debate has long ago lost any basis in reality or rationality.
This attitude has been encouraged by the BBC which has presented these ‘voices’ as if they were the ‘factual baseline’ from which to start any debate rather than highly strung opinions of vested interests…whilst the ‘voices’ went unquestioned, the answers were rigorously torn into and challenged.
The whole premise of the BBC is that it provides what the commercial sector cannot or will not….programmes that may not command vast audience figures but examine otherwise neglected or ignored parts of society, art, science and politics. Most importantly it has to provide news that is impartial, balanced in its reporting, favouring no political party or ideology.
The fact that it utterly fails in this regard, however Tony Hall deludes himself, should be raising ever more urgent questions about the funding of the BBC and possibly its continued existence in its privileged and oblivious state.
If I want left of centre, biased reporting there is the Guardian or the Independent. Which kind of begs the question ‘What is the BBC for? What does it do that is unique? Does it fulfil its obligations?’
The BBC is almost worthless if you measure it by the obligations and duties imposed upon it…for it fails to fulfil those in any way that would seem, to an impartial observer, fit and proper.
The BBC is no longer ‘Fit for Purpose’.
If the BBC is not ‘fit for purpose’, if it no longer does anything that is unique, if it distorts the democratic system by favouring one party or ideology, then why should the Public be obliged by Law to fund this overpowerful, unaccountable and unrepresentative organisation?
The BBC has a contract with the Public…we pay our license fee and the BBC will entertain, inform and educate…impartially and with a depth only possible with a source of funding that is assured and abundant.
The BBC has broken that contract….the most obvious and sinister breach being its innate support for the Labour Party and ‘progressive’ policies. Sinister because the BBC has sought to close down debate and done so by demonising, vilifying or ridiculing those who oppose such policies….UKIP is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the BNP or the Nazis, Tories presented as the nasty, uncaring Party….and going so far as to declare climate sceptics in need of psychological treatment whilst dismissing their views outright.
If you or I fail to pay the license fee we will soon get a knock on the door and threats of police visits and court action.
If the BBC favours one political party, if it incites riots, if it supports terrorists, if its biased reporting encourages attacks on British troops or Jews, if it undermines national identity and unity….
….there is nothing you can do.
The BBC is to all intents and purposes unaccountable. It may lose the odd DG now and again but it sails on regardless in the same old way, if anything even more determined to cement its position and impose its will upon the world and prove itself ‘right’.
Its non-political output becomes ever more political with nary an opportunity missed to slip in a ‘message’ of some kind into the ‘entertainment’….that’s if it can be bothered to make original material more often than not just filling the airwaves with repeats or programmes about houses, antiques and gardening.
The ultimate question must be ‘does the BBC do more harm than good?’
The answer can only be one possible….that the BBC has an enormously negative impact upon British society and its way of life constantly attacking not just the politics or the Establishment but even the very identity of the native population, their beliefs and way of life.
A news provider in the form of the BBC as originally intended, impartial and objective, is essential for any democracy…the flow of information and ideas being the basis for all democratic ideas and decisions…but if it no longer provides that service what good is it?
If it cannot be reformed then you have to ask why should people be forced to pay for what is essentially the Labour Party’s mouthpiece and one which they may not watch at all given the proliferation of alternative news or entertainment material now available.
The BBC has long ago broken its contract with the Nation, betrayed a trust that it has inherited, neglected its responsibilities and duties…or rather not neglected but deliberately trampled under foot, as it seeks to impose its view of the world upon us and mould us into the kind of people that the BBC thinks acceptable…if you don’t conform to that view you suddenly become an ‘outsider’, a dangerous alien to be hunted down and silenced one way or another.
The BBC cannot be reformed, it cannot be made impartial, it is too set in its ways, its mindset organically bound to the Labour Party and the Left’s world view.
It no longer provides the unique service that would warrant the imposition of a license fee to fund it.
It is time to set the BBC free….to stand on its own two feet in the commercial world. If it acts as any other commercial organisation not just in the ‘market place’ but by adopting a particular political stance then it should not be given the enormous advantage of a constant and assured source of funds.
It is time to stop the license fee obligation and allow people the freedom to choose what they pay to watch knowing full well the politics of any publication or broadcaster rather than being forced to pay for what is essentially an extended Labour Party political broadcast.
The BBC is Political, it forces upon us its own world view, it fails to provide the original and experimental material that its funding system allows to ‘fail’ and try again, it does little that the Commercial Sector doesn’t provide or cannot provide.
It does nothing that merits its license fee.
The BBC believes that the license fee gives it license to do as it likes…..it is time that ‘license’ was revoked and order reimposed upon this organisation that has grown too big and become too powerful and too unaccountable for its actions.
When is a Poll Tax bad? When it’s from Maggie Thatcher!
When is a Poll Tax good? When it’s the BBC’s meal ticket for life.
Does anyone else remember when a post on B-BBC would involve facts, links and an argument? This is just a random brain fart.
Your memory failed you, then, Poster child?
“Does anyone else remember when a post on B-BBC would involve facts, links and an argument? This is just a random brain fart.”
And all said without a link or factual analysis to make the point.
Trolls ought not to be fed, but that had to be said, in the manner of a random brain fart.
1 likes
‘all said without a link or factual analysis to make the point.’
A new batch has been unleashed, it seems.
But the irony is not strong with them either.
(it’s still OK if I reply to you replying to one, right?)
Lol@ that!
Yes Poster, but which part of Alan’s post do you consider to be untrue?
Poster ‘This is just a random brain fart.’
Don’t put yourself down.
Alan an excellent summary of the position of the BBC and the reasons why it has to go. The evidence against it is plain for anyone who cares to look.
But how can anyone do anything to hasten its end? Whilst IDS certainly understands that the BBC is anti democratic from his recent article in the Mail , Cameron has praised the corporation in the Telegraph and said it was ones of the things that the UK can be proud of. So I am not hopeful of anyone from No 10 doing anything.
If politicians are not going to act then only a mass movement to refuse to pay the License Fee is left. But how do you mobilise the hundreds of thousands that are needed to make such a movement effective?
There seems to be little info on the internet about how NZ managed to get their TV licence abolished in the early 2000s. I read somewhere though that there were a ‘few thousand’ who refused to pay collectively and it was they who brought the system crashing down.
It may not need hundreds of thousands – just a few thousand to say no and say why……
Thanks. So perhaps a target of say 20000 would put the pressure on the BBC. Well if some twerp can get a petition signed by many thousands about IDS living on £53 per week I suppose it can be done. Any one know the next step?
Just found this link which gives an idea of what happened in NZ…..
http://www.lime-marmalade.net/wishart.html
See http://www.tvlicenceresistance.info
BAD or INCOMPETENT: Listen to Nicky 2:06 in 5Live breakfast. They talk about benefits reform, which has widespread support and then confuse it with a smaller sub section the disability allowance reform. They then get on a woman who is paranoid about the reforms but nothing has happened yet.
The interviewer also does not understand, that undiagnosed literally means that. So if the 55year old son has not been diagnosed in 55years, a diagnosis is not coming along soon.
No wonder the public get confused with presentations like that.
This is largely because the BBC have failed in their ‘duty to inform’.
Rather than provide a real understanding of the changes, the BBC would sooner have activists on their programmes, unnecessarily scaring the **** out of people, in real need, who will not lose their support. But it’s a useful tactic, in the process it paints a picture of an uncaring government supposedly removing benefits from those very people.
It’s all part of the BBC’s activism
The BBC use “duty to inform” in much the same way that Lenin used the phrase “education, education, education”. It is about inculcating correct thinking. They are keen to supply us with whatever interests (and serves the interests of) middle class Leftists i.e. the sort of people who buy The Guardian or The Independent and the New Statesman (all publications which minister to a minority of disordered souls deranged by hate) who are keen to lecture you about (the moral imperative of) redistributing wealth and power into the hands of Leftists such as themselves – the very same Leftists who have fucked up the education system, fucked up the economy, and who have contributed little to our cultural life except self-hatred and love of Stalinism.
The BBC is an intellectually bankrupt parasite sustained by nothing but greed and totalitarianism.
The litmus test of a free society is who decides – the BBC seeks to put its rivals out of business because they believe they know what is good for us – they certainly know what is good for themselves.
They view a free society as an evil – which is why they hate England so much because it is our greatest contribution to the civilisation of world – and why they do their best to destroy it.
The BBC lies, spins. and omits, and endlessly repeats the same Big Brother message, the virtues of a return to serfdom. They want to return us to a time when each and every one of us knew our place, and the tax farming elite did whatever they wanted.
Our ancestors fought Civil Wars for our liberties, and the Left flood the country with people from other cultures not to strengthen our civilisation (assimilation) but to destroy it (multiculturalism) – in short the BBC are traitors and should be treated as such. Thick, ignorant, greedy, gutless, totalitarian bastards.
One obvious fact in Alan’s piece is that the BBC TV schedules are full of repeats and a lot of dross that has no relation to the concept of “public service broadcasting”. There is obvious scope to cut the number of TV channels to 2 immediately – the schedules would still have a lot of dross and repeats.
Yes, there are very strong arguments for moving BBC funding to a subscription basis. It is the only logical method in the digital-encryption age.
But it might be felt by a weak-kneed Governmrent such as Cameron’s that this would be too extreme politically. I have long felt that an interim step would be to cut the licence fee by half at first, moving progressively to zero fee after, say, 5 years. That would give the BBC plenty of time to try to build its subscription revenue on a tapering basis.
But what is surely essential is for the public to be consulted properly before the next decisions on the licence fee. The alternative approaches should be spelled out fully – and the BBC should not be allowed to corral the arguments..
OK then Alan you say that it’s wrong for the BBC to talk about the ‘bedroom tax’ and to be fair to them they do now say ‘which some call the’ before it. So what are they supposed to call it? I’ve asked this question many times no one has an answer because no one knows what it’s supposed to be called.
What would you prefer then ‘the bedroom tax’ or a complete description of what it is? Perhaps the truth would suit you better?
Perhaps the BBC should announce it as a cut in benefits purporting to be a fair reduction for extra rooms, even if those rooms are for disabled use, and if there is no alternative accommodation for those affected to move to & thus avoid it? Yes perhaps that sums it up better!
Be careful what you wish for Alan you have no alternative to ‘the bedroom tax’ and you don’t like the truth I’ll be the first to criticise the BBC over their continued bias but using the phrase ‘bedroom tax’ is not evidence of bias!
Well it’s not a tax that’s for sure! Why is it OK to call it the ‘bedroom tax’ because it’s a nice snappy name? Do you really think a reduction in benefits is a tax?
Good question Rufus. I wonder if recent BBC intern “thoughtful” has an answer?
How about pointing it out as spin, which is what it is, rather than repeating dishonest partisan nonsense?
I expect the BBC to ramp up their anti Conservative rhetoric following John Whittingdale speaking as chairman of the CMS Select Committee last week.
He said that the whole funding model of the BBC will be reviewed prior to the renewal of the BBC Charter. Given the determination this govt has to reduce public spending there will be cold shivers down the spines of the BBC.
It might be useful to investigate what promises Labour have made in return for the pro-Left bias that continues unchecked. And Patten/Hall are fundamentally the wrong types to deal with this. Or the right types, depending on your point of view.
Is the BBC licence ‘fee’ still being ‘top sliced’ ?
I remember the ‘fee’ being increased to cover the cost of the digital switchover, but it has never come down again.
Does anyone have a list of the ‘extras’ we are being made to pay for at the present time?
I see R5’s favotite attack dog was on form this morning I swear Nolan has torrettes as he kept repeating the phrase “20 yards” as if he couldn’t help himself. Blatent Government bashing, putting fear into the minds of the “cough” disabled.
“20 yards” Maybe Nolan was on the phone to Subway ordering his lunch
If Tony Hall has flatly denied that the BBC is left-of-centre – then he is clearly totally the wrong man for the job.
The only reasonable response from those who do acknowledge BBC bias – and this includes politicians and the wider media – is to demand the break-up of the BBC.
Just hoping the BBC will solve it’s problems is not enough.
Just hoping that threats of cutting the licence fee will focus their minds is not enough.
Just hoping in raising these issues directly with the BBC Trust is merely whistling in a left-wing-wind.
A credible lethal threat to the BBC is the only way that this debate will even happen in public,. A lethal threat is the only way the BBC will ever be provoked into addressing their well documented issues.
It is becoming increasingly accepted that the BBC is failing. It is biased towards the Left in politics and philosphy. It is morally corrupt. It is no longer producing enough good programmes. It is a bloated bureaucracy financed to the total of £3-4 billion with a compulsory Licence fee, which everyone in the UK must pay in order to listen or to watch any broadcast media. It is self-serving. It is beyond internal reform.
Radical change is urgent, essential and unavoidable.
There are two reasons for this, the first I have described in the introduction, the second is the change in the UK’s political landscape, namely, devolution of government to three of the four individual nations. This has led to the creation of a BBC Wales, BBC Scotland, and BBC Northern Ireland. However there is no BBC England, merely regional divisions, and this deficit must be rectified. England is a single unity and requires the same recognition as the other nations. Each nation’s broadcaster will naturally and logically require to be autonomous. There will need to be name changes.
The BBC is of course news, and entertainment. These two arms should be separated. I will put aside the question of whether the State should be involved in broadcasting at all, but I cannot see any justification for the State being involved in producing entertainment programmes or covering sport. This side of the BBC should be sold off, it is already ‘packaged’ in a variety of ways through its brands, BBC3, 5Live and so on, or where there is no market for them, simply dissolved; other independent broadcasters we already have will take up any slack should they choose.
If each nation has its own national broadcaster, so long as the UK continues to exist, there remains a need for a ‘British/UK’ element. If BBC England were to be headquartered in Salford, this remaining part could remain in London, broadcasting British-wide and International news.
But what should happen to the Licence fee? I object strongly to needing the State’s permission to receive broadcast news, but the abolition of it may take some time to achieve. In the meantime and beyond any transitional stage during the changes it would be for each devolved government to decide how to arrange finance. Here there is a problem outside the broadcasting arena but which impacts it and is important to it nevertheless. England has no parliament of its own. Whilst this does no preclude change in England it does illustrate another level of imbalance between England and the rest of the UK, and it could also lead to claims that BBC England would not be true to its name.
Demands for radical reform of the BBC will not go away.
For £3-4 (or even £5 when everything’s factored in) billion I’d expect a hell of a lot more quality new programmes for that. How can the likes of Time Waner manage to create so much content with less available cash than this? Just where does it all go?
The conclusions you state for what should happen to the BBC are spot on Alan. I know most of us here look for any signs that this is likely to happen, but so far no light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we could devise some sort of nationwide quiz where each person could test themselves to see if they’re brainwashed, and to what extent. Perhaps that will raise the awareness of the general public in just how this is being perpetrated so they start looking objectively themselves.
Regarding, Hall, it’s worth noting his tactic from the outset to best judge what the BBC are up to at any given time. We’ve already seen him come up with statements like ‘trust is being restored…’ following the Savile/McAlpine scandals, when clearly there is nothing to show about what was done to restore this trust.
His logic seems to be based on ‘since Savile is dead he won’t be abusing children again, and we (the BBC) won’t be enabling him and then find the need later to cover it up.
That’s not trust.
In much the same way, though with a different tactic, Thompson declared a massive left-wing bias that had been going on at the BBC many years before, but couldn’t add in just what way it had been addressed. Clearly he thought that by acknowledging the bias ‘of the past’, the public would be lulled into a false sense of security that ‘this man has admitted to what we knew already, so things are likely to be different now’.
Thompson’s tactic was to admit it from the past; Hall’s is to deny it in the present, but neither can show any evidence to prove just how it has been dealt with.
Of the two, Thompson showed more imagination.
This article – from the April 2013 Commentary – pretty much says it all; and carries extra weight, given its non-British perspective.
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ADMIRED around the world, and nowhere more than in the upper reaches of the American media, the British Broadcasting Corporation has long enjoyed the unstinting support of Britain’s metropolitan media elite, whose views it both forms and reflects. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher considered it institutionally hostile to her person as well as to her agenda. Two decades later, Tony Blair went from being one of its favorites to its number-one target, largely though not exclusively because of the Iraq war, which the BBC opposed from the very first suggestion of military action against Saddam Hussein. By the time Blair came out in favor of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008, to the barely contained fury of the BBC’s news reporters and analysts, he had already become the despised outcast he is today in British metropolitan circles, spoken of by the BBC only in terms of opprobrium and bitter mockery.
In the last few months, however, the reputation of the BBC has been battered by a twin scandal involving pedophilia, cover-ups, and journalistic shoddiness. The scandal has, in turn, provoked widespread questions about the role and internal culture of the government-subsidized broadcasting behemoth as no previous controversies have done.
It began with the revelation that one of its biggest stars, Sir Jimmy Savile, for more than 30 years had exploited his youth-oriented programs to molest and, in some instances, rape children, often on BBC property. Savile, a peculiarly unattractive and charmless personality whose success was mysterious to foreigners and many Britons, was the longtime host of Top of the Pops, the UK’s equivalent of America’s Top 40, and of a program called Jim’ll Fix It in which children, often disadvantaged, would write and ask for a wish to be granted, such as meeting a famous person. Between the early 1960s and his death in 2011, Savile’s long white hair, chunky jewelry, and trademark Cuban cigars were inescapable on British TV, and his Northern-accented staccato voice was a staple in advertisements and public-service announcements.
The onetime miner, professional wrestler, and dance-hall disc-jockey had a face for radio and a voice for mime. He was not witty or smooth or charming. But in the mid-1960s, he had the advantage of being obviously working class at a time when the BBC establishment was painfully upper-middle-class and Oxbridge, and desperate to connect with youth culture and “the street.” It may well be that this background, and the BBC’s instinctive veneration for it, were among the things that made him so strangely untouchable even as rumors of his sexual predation accumulated. That he did so much charity work—in a country where charities and NGOs are nearly worshipped by the BBC and other media—also made him untouchable, while providing him with extraordinary opportunities for wrongdoing.
Savile raised at least $60 million for charity over the years. He was such a frequent visitor at children’s hospitals, care homes, and young offenders’ institutions that officials often provided him with places to stay or his own keys to their facilities.
There were persistent rumors about his sexual proclivities at these places and in the BBC. This was partly because he was an overtly creepy figure who lived with his mother until her death (he was a lifelong bachelor) and sported the mirthless grin of a horror-movie clown. But also he had been investigated by various UK police forces on several occasions as late as 2007 and inspired sporadic allegations of child abuse that never received much attention in the news media.
It seems, however, that he used a lupine cunning to intimidate officials who might have raised a flag. Not only was he a famous public man who skillfully exploited British worship of the nonprofit sector to foster his Teflon image of benevolence, he also had a sinister ability to get hold of confidential information about the staff in the hospitals and prisons he visited. A skillful bully, he apparently liked to remind anyone who seemed likely to ask awkward questions what good friends he was with senior police officers or members of the cabinet.
Shortly before Savile’s death in 2011, officials in the BBC’s senior management were alerted two times about new allegations of pedophilia against him. The BBC nevertheless went ahead with two celebratory programs about his career.
Later, the flagship current-events show Newsnight decided not to proceed with an investigative program about Savile and his alleged sex crimes, possibly because corporation executives feared they might spoil the tributes to him scheduled for Christmas 2011. Jeremy Pax-man, the formidable lead presenter on Newsnight (who described Savile’s predation as “common gossip” and the BBC management’s handling of the affair as “pathetic” and “contemptible”), apparently pressed his bosses to run the show, but to no avail.
The then director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson—now chief executive of the New York Times—denies that he ever heard rumors of Savile’s activities, or that he had any role in the cancellation of the Newsnight program. His denial has been contradicted by one of the organization’s top reporters.
Nine months after the BBC canceled the News-night investigation of Savile, a program on the competing private network ITV supplied a devastating account of the star’s pedophilia, which led to a police investigation by 14 forces across the country. So far, almost 500 alleged victims have contacted the authorities, and police have recorded 31 convincing allegations of rape and 199 other serious crimes, many of them committed on BBC property. As more and more people broke their silence and recounted the experiences at his hands, it came to light that Savile had even molested children at a hospice.
It is worth noting that at the beginning of the scandal, Savile’s apologists pointed out that when he began his career as the host of a pop-music show in the 1960s it was “normal” for rock musicians and people in the industry
to sleep with underage groupies. Well, perhaps, but Savile continued to pursue underage girls and, occasionally, boys for de- cades, and the victims he chose at places like juvenile detention centers or the Broad-moor, a high-security psychiatric facility, were particularly unlikely to be believed when they complained.
The second stage of the two-part scandal took place after the editor of Newsnight had already stepped down (after denying that he had been pressured to drop the Savile program) and as the police began to investigate other claims of rape and pedophilia by entertainers at the BBC. In what looked suspiciously like an effort to distract the public from the Savile debacle, Newsnight accused a senior, retired Conservative politician of similar crimes. The groundless accusation was based on flimsy evidence: the memory of a now middle-aged victim of care-home abuse, some of whose previous accusations had turned out to be false and had cost Private Eye magazine hefty libel damages.
This Newsnight investigation had been outsourced to a little-known journalist collective called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, run by a former BBC producer. No one in charge at the BBC checked the integrity of the investigation or even confirmed that the journalists had shown a photo of the politician to his accuser. Newsnight staff seem to operate under the same reflexive assumption that apparently governs the BBC’s drama producers—that villainy is mainly to be found among white, wealthy members of the old establishment. The fact that the politician in question, Lord McAlpine, had been a close associate of Margaret Thatcher’s— the BBC had never forgiven her for winning elections and changing the face of British politics, still less for forcing the resignation of its director general Alasdair Milne in 1987—presumably made Newsnight’s producers all the more likely to believe in his alleged proclivities.
There have been other BBC scandals in the last few years, though none—not even the 2003 Gilligan– Kelly affair, involving the suicide of a government scientist named as the source of a report claiming the government “sexed up” WMD evidence in advance of the Iraq war—has provoked the current level of soul-searching and external criticism.
In 2008, Panorama, an investigative journalism show, claimed that Indian subcontractors for the Primark department-store chain were using child labor. Primark complained that Panorama’s footage of boys in Bangalore sweatshops was fraudulent. An inquiry by the BBC Trust determined that it was indeed “more than likely” that the sweatshop scenes had been staged.
A year earlier, the BBC had been forced to apologize to Queen Elizabeth II after broadcasting a trailer that was deceptively edited to suggest she had stormed out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. That same year, an internal investigation discovered that a BBC6 radio show had repeatedly faked competitions featuring nonexistent prizes and in which callers were actually members or friends of the production team. This was only one of several instances of pretend call-in shows discovered during the last decade.
Last year Sir David Attenborough, the celebrated maker of nature series such as Life on Earth, was revealed to have faked footage for his Frozen Planet series: A sequence capturing two newborn polar bears had not been filmed “under the ice” in the Arctic with the rest of the documentary but in a carefully constructed phony den in a Dutch zoo with fake snow. The BBC’s PR machine responded to public outrage by saying that no deception had taken place because the true circumstances of the footage were admitted in an obscure corner of a BBC website. Much to the shock of those who had in the past marveled at the extraordinary footage in his films, Attenborough himself crossly responded that such measures were normal and justifiable; it subsequently came out that polar-bear footage in a previous program had also been shot in a zoo rather than in the wild. He recently got in more trouble for claiming in a new documentary that parts of Africa have become 3.5 degrees (Celsius) hotter in the last 20 years. When challenged, the BBC defended the assertion, citing reports by Oxfam and Christian Aid, but eventually admitted that it had no basis in fact.
Usually the BBC’s staff, PR unit, and supporters have successfully dismissed even the most deserved and well-founded criticism as politically motivated or threatening to the organization’s prized independence and objectivity. Accusations of endemic and consistent political bias have been particularly easy to bat away, largely because those making the accusations fail to understand that the organization’s very real biases—even those against Israel and America—are largely unconscious.
If the latest scandal carries so much more weight, it may be because of the cumulative effect of smaller scandals, some of which, like the contemptuous coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, have exposed the elitist attitudes of the corporation’s management. The BBC’s partisans—and it remains a much-beloved institution—fear that the Savile-McAlpine affair could end the system according to which the BBC draws much of its annual income from the UK’s television-license fee.
Everyone in the UK who owns a television set has to pay an annual license fee of £145.50 ($228). This adds up to some £3.5 billion ($5.5 billion). (Another £1.5 billion, or $2.4 billion, comes from BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s profitable commercial arm.) The leading conservative columnist Charles Moore has called this “the most regressive and ruthlessly collected of all government imposts.” It clearly weighs more heavily on the poor than on the rich. This seems all the more unfair given that the fee is generally justifi ed by the BBC’s defenders as funding the production of critically lauded drama and current-events programs that are watched by the upper-middle class.
In fact, the costume dramas so often bought by PBS and the current-events programs that were widely believed to be such fine examples of professional “objective” journalism account for a very small amount of the BBC’s product and budget. It actually spends much more public money trying to compete for audience share with lowest-common-denominator dreck like Hotter Than My Daughter, My Man Boobs and Me, and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents—a reality show in which teenagers were taken to the Mediterranean and encouraged to behave badly without knowing that the BBC had secretly brought their parents to watch. It was the BBC, not one of its commercial rivals, that fi rst imported the original junk-reality TV series Big Brother to the UK. It goes almost without saying that the free market has a proven ability to fund such programs.
There are institutional problems within the BBC almost as troubling as its failure to spot a pedophile in its midst, its ruthless cover-up of his activities, and its unjustified targeting of a Tory to distract the public from its shabby behavior.
The BBC’s broadcasts reach 97 percent of the British population and at least 224 million people abroad. It has extraordinary power over British political and cultural discourse, an influence even greater than that enjoyed by the New York Times in the United States. (It also exerts remarkable influence over elite American journalists, especially those who specialize in foreign affairs.) Those whom it anoints as important intellectual or cultural figures invariably become famous and influential; those whom it ignores have a hard time getting attention or traction.
Despite being notoriously poorly managed by an enormous, slow-moving, jargon-addicted bureaucracy, the corporation ruthlessly and successfully uses its political influence and its domination of TV, radio, and the Internet (the license fee allows it to put vast amounts of material on the Web) to prevent any potential competitor from developing a similar “cross-platform” media power. When the Murdoch media empire was bidding for full control of BSkyB (the country’s biggest satellite TV operator and the main challenger to BBC TV’s “freeview” service), the BBC joined the concerted, ultimately successful PR effort by the Guardian, the New York Times, and other organizations to influence the Ofcom regulator against News International. Before and after the hacking scandal, the BBC’s coverage of Murdoch and his papers was overtly disapproving or even hostile, contradicting the BBC’s statutory obligation to strive for objectivity and eschew bias.
Indeed, the BBC is such a power in the land that it could almost be another branch of government, albeit one without democratic legitimacy. It certainly can behave like a kind of permanent opposition to the country’s elected leaders. That could theoretically be a good thing, an additional check and balance on overweening state power, but there is an argument that in practice it has a subversive effect on British democracy and legitimacy. One of the striking aspects about its current-events coverage from a foreigner’s perspective is the overtly cynical, disrespectful attitude its interviewers display to politicians. And this is an attitude mirrored in the corporation’s dramas and comedies, which tend to portray politicians, almost uniformly, as liars and crooks every bit as evil as large corporations and business executives.
When one of the BBC’s grand inquisitors, such as the intimidating Jeremy Paxman, interviews a politician, his tone usually makes it clear that the former is a liar who deserves to be caught out. The presenters on the morning show Today—listened to by everyone within Britain’s equivalent of the Beltway—behave the same way: Politicians are down in the gutter with Americans, generals, Catholic priests, bankers, and, of course, Israeli spokespersons, as presumptive liars and scumbags. When challenged, people in the BBC justify this aggressive stance as a courageous speaking of truth to power, but it is more often an exercise of power without responsibility: After all, the interviewees are the elected representatives of the people; the interviewers are self-appointed, publicly funded tribunes representing the assumptions and prejudices of the new ruling class.
It only takes a few days of listening to BBC talk radio or watching the news to get a sense of its institutional biases. You will never, ever hear an interviewer suggest that maybe the state should play a smaller role in some aspect of national life, that unrestricted mass immigration might have adverse effects, or that Britain’s welfare benefits might have undesirable social consequences or be prone to exploitation. You will certainly never encounter any skepticism about the UN, foreign aid, and the European project. Anyone who is unconvinced by the attractions of a European superstate is treated as a bigot or dinosaur or deemed mysteriously blind to the obvious appeal of “Europe” as envisioned by the modern and the cultured.
In terms of domestic politics, the BBC has exhibited, at least since the days of Thatcher, an institutional contempt for the Tory Party: Just as you are unlikely to meet a New York Times editor who openly votes Republican, there are simply no open Tories at the BBC. This is not surprising in that as a matter of course the corporation places its job advertisements in the left-of-center Guardian.
Much airtime is taken up by campaign-like bulletins that presume the existence and dangers of anthropogenic global warming, and impartiality goes out of the window whenever subjects like solar power and green taxes come up. Multiculturalism, though increasingly discredited in the UK as a whole, is still official BBC policy internally (diversity workshops are a grim fact of BBC working life), and BBC reporters and interviewers remain among its most resolute proponents. Ironically, although one BBC director general, lifetime Labour Party activist Greg Dyke, accused the corporation of being “hideously white,” its staff already includes a higher number of ethnic minorities than the nation as a whole, and its newsreaders an almost comically high proportion of the same. (The latter are often popular because anchors of South Asian, African, or Caribbean background are not discriminated against for speaking in the traditional Oxbridge or “received pronunciation” BBC accent. Yet white hires must have strong regional or working-class accents that can be hard to understand.)
Commentary readers may well have some sense that the BBC’s news division—the largest news organization in the world—has an Israel problem, as it was widely reported in the United States that the BBC’s then Jerusalem correspondent Barbara Plett actually wept in 2004 while covering the fi nal illness of Yasir Arafat. (A BBC investigation responded to listener complaints by saying that her reporting met required standards of “fairness, accuracy, and balance.”) Plett, a Canadian, is now the BBC’s UN correspondent and remains obsessed with Israel. Another BBC correspondent in Israel, Irish journalist Orla Guerin, once produced a story about a curfew in Bethlehem titled “How the Israelis Stole Christmas.” But neither is as anti-Israel as some of the local BBC correspondents in Gaza, who in some cases are pro-Hamas activists in their spare time; their “balance” is nevertheless asserted by the organization.
Sometimes the corporation’s simplistic anti-Zionism gets its staff into trouble: It was almost certainly a factor in the kidnapping of its Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston in 2007 by gangsters with close connections to Hamas. Johnston, like many BBC reporters, was so close to Fatah that he was seen by some Gazans as essentially a Fatah agent. Palestinian Information Minister Mustafe Barghouti described him as “someone who has done a lot for our cause.”
Of all the reflexive political attitudes of BBC management and staff, the animus against Israel stands out for its obsessive and visceral qualities. The organization makes more documentaries about Israel and the Palestinians than about any other foreign subject. Again and again events in Israel and the Palestinian territories are the lead story on the BBC news website, even when world-shaking events are taking place in parts of the globe you might expect progressives to care about. The BBC’s Middle East “experts” were almost all taken by surprise by the Arab Spring, so focused were they on Israel, and so convinced were they that all the problems of the Middle East derive from the Zionist presence. An official internal report on anti-Israel bias by Malcolm Balen in 2004 has been suppressed by the BBC, presumably because it confirms the existence of the same; the corporation has spent almost $400,000 in legal fees defending the report against Freedom of Information Act requests seeking its release.
The institutional prejudices apparent in some of the BBC’s news and current-events coverage are often mirrored or even exaggerated in its entertainment output, a classic example being the successful spy series Spooks—which represents a world in which there is no Islamist terrorism and Islamist threats invariably turn out to be ruses created by evil Mossad agents and domestic right-wingers. The BBC’s serious dramas are often even worse. Every year the corporation funds heavy-handed agitprop TV films and series that are almost comical in their clunky earnestness, such as the recent consciousness-raising effort by Richard Curtis, The Girl in the Café, which starred Bill Nighy as a senior political adviser converted by Kelly Macdonald’s ingenue to the struggle against African poverty and Third World debt. Indeed, the corporation has fostered the careers of an entire cadre of hack dramatists such as Stephen Poliakoff, whose lifeless works do little but tick politically correct boxes.
The most important thing to understand about BBC bias is that, like its institutional obsessions with youth and celebrity, it is neither conscious nor in any way officially mandated. There are no orders from the top reminding journalists that Israel should be considered the greatest threat to peace, freedom, and justice, or that businessmen should generally be treated as crooks until proven innocent. That is just what everyone in the corporation believes in the same way that they know the world is round. Moreover, it is what they believe that everyone else—by which I mean everyone who is intelligent, educated, and of decent moral character—believes.
Given this perspective, it certainly should not have been a surprise to anyone that the Beeb fi xed on a Tory grandee to blunt the impact of a pedophilia accusation against it. After all, for the great majority of the BBC’s journalists, producers, and managers, conservatives with a big or small c are the “other”: freakish almost by definition, and presumptively motivated by unfathomable and unattractive urges. Some BBC spokespeople seemed genuinely stunned when Lord Alistair McAlpine (whose name was revealed on Twitter) turned out to be the victim of mistaken identity.
For anyone who knows people who work at the BBC, this makes perfect sense. Many of my university contemporaries joined the BBC; they were pretty much all of a type, as if they had belonged to the same clique in high school. They were middle-class, middle-ability kids with predictably “right-on” (i.e., conventionally left-liberal) views. They shared mildly bohemian ideas about culture as a progressive, transgressive enterprise and were prone to conform to mainstream intellectual fashion. (There were a couple of exceptions: a girl whose spectacular sex appeal and wild clothes masked skeptical views about Third World virtues, and a hard-line Communist of working-class background whose eccentric career trajectory eventually took him to the Washington Times.) Those with whom I am still in contact decades later tend to have the same assumptions and attitudes that they had back in the Thatcher years. Conservatives are heartless, greedy, socially snobbish, and probably sexually deviant in repressed and dangerous ways. The UN is good, aid organizations are good, peace activists are good, unions are good, and the EU is good.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that a certain self-regard and the smug sense of belonging to an organization of uniquely intelligent, educated, and cultured people is what lies at the root of the BBC’s institutional problems. Now the BBC has revealed itself as capable of the worst kind of bureaucratic malfeasance for such a trusted and exalted organization—trying to hide its role as an abettor of an evil man by slandering a good one. Some part of its reputation may never recover.
What a superb article !
I would like to see Dezi, Scotty, Albumen or Colditz respond to any of the points in there. Excellent.
Absolutely devastating.
It’s been revealed that in the contract for the new director general Tony Hall there is a clause that forbids him from making “any derogatory or unfavourable public remark or statement” about the BBC, either during his time in office or the two years afterwards.
He is also barred from writing or speaking about the BBC without its “prior written consent”, and from engaging in “any political activities”.
Now why does a media organisation need such an action? We are not talking about a highly secret security company or branch of the government. The BBC claim they revealed this contract in the interest of transparency. It shows their complete contempt as this transparency is only to show THAT THE PUBLIC WILL KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WHAT GOES ON WITHIN.
How long is the government going to allow these continual scenes from 1984 to continue? Doing so makes them just as guilty.
BBC puts gagging order on new director-general