“Instead of balanced coverage you’ve got somebody, a commentator, finding a way to reaffirm the beliefs of their viewers.”
That’s Foster Kamer of the Village Voice in his dire paint-by-numbers attack on Fox News and the American Right for the BBC’s Culture Show (h/t Oliver via David Preiser).
Kamer’s item is so clichéd, so typical of lazy left-wing conventional wisdom that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the BBC College of Journalism is already using it as an example of best practice.
It wouldn’t have occurred to the editor of the Culture Show to commission a conservative commentator (Klavan, Breitbart, Gutfeld?) to give a different perspective on the US media for once. No, that would risk alienating the target audience – pretentious Guardian-reading dickwads. Far better to play it safe and get a reliably on-message left-wing hack to serve up the usual BBC smug prejudiced toss about the US.
How do you suppose Kamer responded to NPR’s sacking of Juan Williams? By championing open debate and free speech? No, like this:
A nasty little left-wing bigot. Not unlike the Culture Show supremo Janet Lee, in fact, as the editor of GQ Dylan Jones can testify:
Last summer, even I was subjected to a volley of abuse from a BBC executive. Janet Lee, the editor of the BBC’s flagship arts programme, The Culture Show (and who I have known for over 25 years), came up to me at a party on the Thames and, after calling me a ‘Tory ****’ proceeded to disparage the Tory leader, using ‘Etonian’ as though it were the very worst word in her lexicon of obscenities. You could tell she couldn’t work out what was worse: becoming a Tory, or admitting it.
Impartiality is in their genes.
Update Oct 25. Janet Lee’s predecessor as Culture Show editor was Eddie Morgan:
After a spell working in strategy for Granada Media, Eddie joined the BBC to work as an output editor on Newsnight.
In 2002 he took time out from TV to work as Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party and then went to the communications firm Brunswick before returning to the BBC to help set up The Culture Show in 2004.