Oborne in the Telegraph lays into the BBC:
Television launched a direct, head-on attack on our traditional institutions (Parliament, monarchy, Army, Church), diminishing them, and then occupied the public space they were forced to vacate. Concepts such as truth, honour, duty, self-deprecation and service were mocked and replaced by a mixture of sensationalism and the cult of celebrity. Only a very few institutions, of which the most successful was probably the Armed Forces, managed to resist.
Earlier today I was listening to a couple of people with their finger on the pulse…..one being James Brown, one of the founders of Loaded magazine.
Sorry…on R4 somewhere today but can’t remember when.
Biggest load of tosh spoken for a long time.
Apparently the 90’s changed British politics forever…that was the era when politicians were sidelined and the new social and cultural movements made the running defining what politics would be….Tony Blair and New Labour not being politically influential or definitive in any way.
Presumably Brown has never heard of the Sixties and the cultural, social and political revolution that entailed…see Oborne above…nor indeed Punk, Rap, immigration or American movies, clothes and fast food, the Vietnam War etc etc etc….
Always fed up when we get these cultural commentators on…..always talk bilge interpreting history not as it happened but through their own personal prism….not just from their own perspective, their own place in the actual events, but reshaping memories and history to suit their beliefs and values.
Oborne still seems to believe reform is possible. That the BBC is somehow special and belongs to us all.
Serious delusions sadly. It is beyond reform and why would any one want to do so.?
Reform it into what ?
The BBC never belonged to us. It was always the voice of the rulers and the establishment. That these changed from a conservative into a liberal left world view is neither here nor there. It will always reflect the status quo. Abolition would help to liberate us especially as the internet and other media is just about getting going. The BBC is no longer needed. It is funded by extortion and seems to exist for the benefit of the staff.
It would be missed for a short while as the English can be sentimental at times but would be forgotten soon enough.
Why on Earth would the ruling elite do anything that would ‘liberate us’. The BBC will stay as it is until the ‘elite’ decide it needs to change.
From the link page, regarding the BBC –
“This combination of personal greed and liberal/Leftist credentials…..is also characteristic of the European Union bureaucracy, state-funded charities, the leadership of trade unions and many other public organisations. ”
Spot on.
The left-wing morons call it the “Third Way”.
It is also behind the lefty idea that the banks are to big to fail.
The Socialist morons think that if a company goes bust because it no longer serves the public with what the public wants, then that failure is a failure of Capitalism, but this also contradicts the Socialist idea that profit is bad, loss is good.
It can be explained by the fact that Socialists are motivated by selfish envy of profit, and pity for loss.
That is why Socialist societies always fail, they use taxpayers money to prop up failed companies by state encouraged lending, subsidy and nationalisation, all in the name of an ideology which has already failed, that failure is why they are doing it, encouraging lending so as to delay the inevitable collapse of the “Third Way” were the bankers can make a profit without the restraint of worrying about making losses, but the taxpayer will inevitably be unable to take the losses.
“Third Way”.Didn’t Mussolini coin that phrase?
I wondered why no one ever pointed that out to Miranda. But he at least made the trains run on time. Benny not Tony that is
You are right. What the BBC and the EU have in common are an overpaid, unelected elite who know what’s best for us, patronise us, ignore our wishes and take our money without asking. No wonder the BBC are so pro EU.
Anyone remember the programme “Euro File”? Was it impartial? Clue’s in the title I guess.
The quaint part is the that headline which gives away Mr. Oborne’s delusion, along with the rest of the politico-media estate.
Questions do indeed need to be answered, but the BBC has shown itself perfectly capable of blowing these off with ease.
They may regret this stance.
Because some sincere answering may have defused a few things and released the head of steam building.
But the bovine blanking of everything, all the time really just gets them nearer the abattoir.
I’m less than convinced by his piece.
The Monarchy was a rather moribund bunch and it was the arrival of Princess Diana who the media simply couldn’t get enough of, which changed the monarchy, along with their own PR advisors. I do not believe that the monarchy has been diminished, and far from being pushed out of a public space, it has actually grown into it.
There is a massive amount of public support for the monarchy and the main figures around it despite the best endeavours of the left.
The Church has destroyed itself from within – the Church of England that is. This has been well documented by people such as Peter Hitchins. The abolition of Hell is a phrase he uses to describe the way they have taken away the threat of not attending. New services which have done away with well known and loved ones whose words have echoed down the centuries. Language which was rich in sound & meaning, replaced with bland thinly written modern sentences which don’t hang together well.
Then there are the left wing prelates like previous Archbishop Rowan Williams (an Archbishop with a pagan Christian name?) who described himself first and foremost as a bearded leftie, showed us all from the top that left wing thinking was more important than God & his church.
The only prominent one holding the standards is the wonderful Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu, but then he was born in Uganda & did not experience the indoctrination of Communist teachers and far left propaganda from the BBC.
The BBC appoint a Muslim to head of religious programming and no one from the church stands up to object? Most people would call that active participation in their own demise. The church is now an irrelevance.
One of the points he note about truth, honour, duty, self-deprecation and service is part of a bigger issue with the left as they have attempted to turn everything which was bad into good, and everything which was good into bad.
So now Islam is good, having standards is bad, prostitution is good, heritage is bad.
I’m sure I don’t need to go on with this list which is self generating!
The worst part is the criminalisation of anyone who disagrees with these fascists. Section 5 of the public order act is one of the few pieces of lunatic left wing legislation the coalition have rolled back.
This part of the act is widely believed to be part of the introduction of Sharia law by the back door as it criminalised ‘insulting speech.’ So insult ‘the prophet’ and you could find yourself in prison.
The BBC is part of the left wing common vision it works towards commonly held goals. Although I believe it is openly massively biased, I don’t agree with the authors piece as lefties from so many other sources have had a damaging input.
Surely the point is that those who bring you the news and comment are fulfilling some of the functions of a leadership role and certainly have a great deal of influence. Once you see these people in your house on TV that quasi leadership position is strengthened. They may speak drivel but if they are surrounded by the trappings of authority and are on the TV often enough what they say carries influence. Any lie or theory repeated often enough becomes the truth.
If you then allow one organisation to dominate the airwaves , the BBC , and allow them to take a particular political position , almost inevitably given their funding a left of centre one , you get a powerful propaganda tool in the hands of the left. If they mock our institutions for years and years those institutions lose credibility in the eyes of many.
So although many left wingers have contributed to the mess that is Britain today, they have only been able to wield so much influence on the general population because they were aided and abetted by the BBC.
“surrounded by the trappings of authority”
Interesting angle. That must have at least some relation to the whole “national treasure, cultural icon” thing.
My comment, posted at The Telegraph website:
“It’s the left-wing bias at the BBC that truly grates. Nowadays, the BBC blithely (of course) dismisses any suggestion that it is not ‘impartial’ in political matters, nor indeed when it comes to issues such as CAGW (so-called ‘man-made climate change’) by invoking its ‘right’ to be ‘impartial’ as and when it wants to. I think the BBC has decided to call this ‘due impartiality’.
I think this reveals all we need to know about the supercilious, sneering types at the Corporation, busy putting out their daily pro-Europe, pro-CAGW, pro-Islam propaganda while, naturally, claiming they’re doing it all with ‘due impartiality’.
End the £3.5bn p.a. TV tax and send the BBC into the private sector – if they are anywhere near as ‘excellent’ as they continually claim to be I’m sure they’ll find an adequate subscription-paying audience.”
Holding the BBC to account: every little helps.
‘Holding the BBC to account: every little helps”,
Indeed.
Them facing the fact that they actually DO get held to account might be a small step before they face obliteration.
Watertight oversight on valid concerns simply sees the pressure build up and find another way round.
And for every legitimate critic they think they have suppressed by expediting, 10 more will spring up, even more determined.
If you’d don’t learn from history, it can prove a rude education when it repeats.
Holding the BBC to account would only be possible if the viewer was able to rebuke or reprimand the BBC by withholding payment, or transferring the beneficiary of the payment to another broadcasting organisation such as Mr Murdoch’s Sky TV.
As I have written here before, the problem is, sadly, far wider than the BBC alone. Indeed, one could argue that the BBC is as much a symptom as a cause – though it certainly plays a large causative role by, as the Americans put it, ‘making the weather’.
The root cause is that almost the entire British academic system has been usurped by the Left. Students who wish to graduate either soak-up Left wing beliefs and regurgitate them, or they fail. They certainly do not go on to academic careers.
Even in disciplines which should be impervious to bien pensant ideas, in the sciences, for example, the Left either invents ways of subverting the subject (‘Environmental studies’ ‘climate science’ etc) or uses its muscle as a social tool to squeeze out academics it doesn’t like.
Because the BBC drinks solely from the poisoned well of British universities, so it is itself duly poisoned.
If we want to change the BBC, first we need to sort-out education. Alternatively, we just close it down – and I must say that is probably the only sensible answer, because it cannot be reformed when it keeps refreshing itself from the same tainted source.
You are absolutely right but the relationship is symbiotic they (academia and the BBC) validate and elevate each other.
The BBC promotes both the deconstruction views of the bourgeois intelligentsia and the careers of those that construct them.
In return academia never fails to confirm the status of the BBC as ‘national treasure’
The BBC also provides a lucrative career path for those apparatchiks that come through the system as well as subsidising the ,already comfortable, life styles of those career academics of which they approve (could you imagine any one other than the BBC giving house space to Mary Beard? )
Resting education from the cadaverous grip of the liberal inquisition would be a herculean task, even Thatcher failed to do so, as they know full well, how important continued indoctrination of successive generations is to their survival
But annihilation of the BBC or at least its reduction to a public service broadcaster (2 TV and for 4 radio channels giving basic national news and weather forecasts for farmers) by abolishing the TV tax .would deal them (the bien-pensant patrician class) a sever, perhaps fatal blow.
I agree and I probably should have posted when I was less tired, because that was what I meant by ‘closing it down’. Tempting though it would be to reform the universities, it is too complex a task (where is Cromwell, now that we need him?) which leaves cutting the BBC down to size as at least an achievable goal.
The left-wing influence on Science in Universities is about Censorship and Subsidy.
For instance, right-wing, or more accurately, non-political Astronomers at Oxford have to be careful not to mention left-wing taboos such as “Henrik Svensmark” and reports such as that below.
“Kirkby has been ordered not to make any conclusions about his own work, for political reasons, possibly to avoid it being included in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. The official CERN and therefore IPCC accepted position is that cosmic rays have had a one percent effect on cloud cover which has contributed a warming of 0.002 Kelvin in the last fifty years, this seems to be caused by a politically induced mental block that only allows these scientists to see the effects of low energy Cosmic Rays when the fact is that only the higher energy Cosmic Rays unaffected by the Earths magnetic field are relevant. CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Kirkby not to interpret the cloud-chamber results, the official position is that the aim was not to prove that clouds are sensitive to cosmic rays, but only to see whether or not they could be. “
But otherwise the lefties do make horrendous errors such as those at Imperial who chose a useful idiot as Professor of Atmospheric Physics, her students would have to be careful that their curiosity and intelligence would not make them ask politically incorrect questions, but it does mean that she is the BBC’s most favoured Atmospheric Physicist.
Back at the BBC
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/bbc-science-approach-fallacy-135945779.html
From that link:
” A leading academic has taken the BBC to task for having less of a grip on science than its viewers and listeners.
Programme producers steeped in the humanities assume that members of the public are as ignorant as they are about scientific concepts…
…There was an ongoing polarising debate on what direction to take over energy – the “clean” wind farm route or nuclear power – she said.
Within scientific circles there had already been a shift towards a realisation that the only practical solution was nuclear. “
Someone should really tell the BBC, civil service and government.
Not that they would learn anything scientific, just that most of us are on to them so the continual and obviously stupid propaganda is pointless.
Boo hoo.
If you hate me so much, do something about it.
Keep paying lip service to me. x