The BBC has become the new priesthood according to Ed West.
Here Ed West, the deputy editor of the Catholic Herald and commentator in the Telegraph, tell us he believes the BBC is biased against the Church and why the power of the BBC is damaging to Society (via Is the BBC biased? )
I love the BBC, I grew up with it. I love its comedy, its documentary making and all those great programmes. It’s a great British institution.
I feel it’s very much part of our culture and forms our national culture.
My problem with it and why I say it’s not a friend of the Church is simply that it does have a liberal bias, I don’t think most people there would even deny that.
But the main problem is the size of it, the power it has over British society.
It’s not just that it might view the Church sceptically, although it does, but that it’s almost a Church in itself.
It has the same moral authority that the Church once would have had, it’s almost setting the moral agenda in the way that the Church of England once did and once again people with personal views are considered outside of communion with Society.
The BBC supports equality and diversity, these sort of views that good liberal people are supposed to have.
The BBC considers it is intrinsically good to mock and be hostile to the Catholic Church but also to suburban, middle class people, Ulster Unionists, Israelis and various other groups, but there are other groups that automatically can’t be mocked such as the NHS or the UN for example and the Church very much falls into the former category.
It matters because the BBC has such an influence on wider society.
The general view amongst the British population who are asked what comes to mind when they think of the Catholic Church mostly have ideas based on sexuality.
The BBC is very effective at spreading certain ideas such as the Catholic Church is culpable for spreading HIV …..the BBC is a particularly powerful disseminator of this sort of idea of religion.
Well I think this very adequately sums up the reasons why this forum exists and the concerns of those who post on it.
I find it interesting that Ed West states that it “forms our national culture”.
Perhaps “reforms” would be better. Like so much of the progressive elite it seeks to change the old by undermining and thence destroying it to create something new.
Old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.
Now I’m sure I heard that once before……….
I think a better description of the BBC is that it ‘attempts to manipulate our national culture’ to suit how it has decided it ought to be.
It’s one thing to promote secularism, as an atheist I would in fact be on board with that. It’s quite another to blatantly treat one religion differently from another, either because the BBC consensus on Islam is incredibly selective and naive or because they’re intimidated into refusing to acknowledge Islam’s failings. When you think something is bullshit, the answer is not more bullshit.
Modern Secularism is a concept and social policy invented by Christians, to stop interference by a powerful state on the doctrine and practice of Christian faith. The popular notion is the opposite.
One of the dangers of secularism arising from its divorce from its roots, is that it has come to see itself as having no bounds to its power. Thus secular governments, particularly extremist secular governments of the Atheistic kind, such as communist USSR and China, had no fear of an Almighty, and thus felt no bound to murder hundreds of millions of their own people.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.
http://www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm
“John Reith, was the youngest, by ten years, of the seven children of the Revd Dr George Reith”
Obviously he did not spend too much time watching the BBC.
The Jews getting you down again, Malcolm? With you and GTRman, this blog just keeps moving from strength to strength.
Why the obbession with jews on this site?
It’s a couple of left-wingers, outed as false flags, who keep trying to push the old “Jewish World Domination” myth. A new BBC ploy to discredit this site it would appear.
Simon
This is the secxond time GTRMan has appeared here – he is anti-semitic, last time his posts were deleted. Ignore him.
The BBC are the biggest butch of Jew-haters alive.
There hating Israel is just PC way of being anti-semitic.
‘It has the same moral authority that the Church once would have had, it’s almost setting the moral agenda in the way that the Church of England once did and once again people with personal views are considered outside of communion with Society.’
What a powerful statement, and so true.
“My problem with it and why I say it’s not a friend of the Church is simply that it does have a liberal bias, I don’t think most people there would even deny that.”
Well Tony Hall the director general did, and to prove it he appointed Labour ex senior Labourite James Purnell as his Strategy Director.
“The BBC considers it is intrinsically good to mock and be hostile to the Catholic Church but also to suburban, middle class people, Ulster Unionists, Israelis and various other groups, but there are other groups that automatically can’t be mocked such as the NHS or the UN for example and the Church very much falls into the former category.”
Well it does deflect attention away from their own paedophile presenters !
We do know that this is in fact true because Mark Thompson told us it was in his interview for the Daily Telegraph way titled:
“BBC director general admits Christianity gets tougher treatment
The BBC director general Mark Thompson has claimed that Christianity is treated with less sensitivity than other religions because it is “pretty broad shoulders”.
The same interview in which he said the BBC went light on Islam because they’re terrified of it.
The main question I have though is what took them to long to realise ?
Welcome to the club, but what are you going to do about it?
The most important principle of a liberal leftist is that of total equality and non -discrimination. The BBC can never, by its nature of leftist liberalism, recognize any ideology or belief, as being better to any other.
In practice, this means that the thousands of murders each year by the followers of Islam for instance, will be minimised or not reported, but one murder or child abuse by a Catholic priest will be exaggerated. This gives the impression to the viewer, that all religions are bad, which is what one finds among many commentators, even in the Daily Mail.
Because the flawed ‘equality’ construct actually means that equality can never be achieved. A constant search for victim status requires each minority interest group to constantly search for reasons why it is being discriminated against, even if that ‘discrimination’ is imagined.
To fail to find any good reasons results in a loss of power and influence, although some favourites will have discrimination found for them by others if they fail.
Equality can never be achieved by this model – it’s like chasing the gold at the end of the rainbow !
All very true yet this obvious liberal bias will be it’s undoing.
There is always a reaction to an orthodoxy particularly when it excludes contrary viewpoints and becomes oppressive.
The BBC has weakened itself by the very nature of it’s all pervasive liberal bias. Conservative voices are not heard and do not work for it. Maybe a token one or two.
Reform is impossible and unnecessary. As society turns inevitably conservative it will be marginalised. When is difficult to know but it will happen.
This is the extraordinary thing about events. Very difficult to see a pattern at the time and almost always a surprise to the ruling elites.
Change comes quickly
I hope what you predict comes about Dave s but I dont see how at the moment.
The BBC is interested in one thing, and one thing only, controlling the thoughts and minds of others in its bid to gain ever more greater power.
ANYTHING that competes with this, be it Murdoch, Religion, Traditional Conservative Values, or whatever, will be demonized.
The only reason Islam is given an easy ride is because the BBC is terrified of it on the one hand, and since over 60 nations around the world are predominantly Muslim, not to be seen as their friend would then limit the BBC sphere of influence.
The Wholly Beeble replacing the Holy Bible!
While I am by no means unequivocally praising the Quakers for their beliefs on every issue, I would commend their resoluteness in telling the religious authorities of their time, i.e., during the Protectorate, that they believed what they believed, and it wasn’t negotiable. They were not looking to pick a fight with Oliver Cromwell, and he wouldn’t get one from them. So long as he left them alone and did not persecute them, he need not have feared any trouble from them. Cromwell, for his part, agreed that the Quakers were not internal enemies, and told George Fox so. So far as OC was concerned, they were harmless to him and not worthy of his concern, so long as they did not mock the Puritans.
Of course, this sort of religious-live-and-let-live has, since the days of the removal of disabilities on RC’s and Jews, been a hallmark of British society, notwithstanding the fact of an Established Church of which the monarch is head. It is that live-and-let-live which allows a virulent hateful version of a religion which has historically converted via the sword anyway to exist unchecked in British society– a religious faith which mocks others.
But for a large institution which is, by its charter, supposed to represent the British people, to engage in the same sort of mockery, however muted (“good cop” to the Islamic “bad cop”) is simply not OK, especially when its treatment of people of faith is hardly even-handed. All right, so maybe a goodly number of the British public are non-observant of ANY creed, and some are avowedly anti-creed of any kind– they are all encompassed in any fair treatment of any coverage and/or programming on BBC or any outlet, or would be, if fair WAS fair in the coverage of the current state of religious belief in society, if they could deign even to cover it.
For the record, I am not a believer in any creed, and I strongly oppose any attempts to force one on me or any person of conscience. I adhere to live-and-let-live where faith is concerned and ask only to have reciprocal treatment, much as did George Fox.
The irony is that left-wing ideology has at its core a Christian creationist statement from the bible told by a southern Baptist minister worshiped by the BBC.
The Christian Creationist southern Baptist minister was, the Reverent Martin Luther King.
The Christian Creationist statement was “All Men are CREATED equal”
Far be it for me to disagree with a “favoured contributor”:
“Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence. It was thereafter quoted or incorporated into speeches by a wide array of substantial figures in American political and social life in the United States. The final form of the phrase was stylized by Benjamin Franklin”
The phrase, as such, is not used anywhere in the Bible.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin cannot possible be blamed, everyone was a creationist before the publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” in 1859.
So creationism comes from the Book of Genesis but equality does not, well that means Martin Luther King got it wrong then, I always thought only identical twins where equal, the Bible got that right then.