The BBC comes under attack

To the delight of the many who loathe it and the dismay of its numerous admirers, the British Broadcasting Corporation has got itself into deep trouble. After an internal memo listing some of its sins – beginning with a “mistake” that offended the irascible and chronically litigious US president Donald Trump – was leaked to The Daily Telegraph, the director general Tim Davie and the head of news Deborah Turness both handed in their resignations. According to some of their supporters, they were only the initial victims of a dastardly “right-wing coup.”

Davie and Turness must have known that something bad was coming their way, For several months, those of us who regularly tune in to the BBC have had to listen to its top luminaries assuring us that they are wonderfully devoted to telling the truth, to dutifully fact-checking everything they report and then going on to brag about their utter lack of bias, thereby making it clear that they were well aware that their pretentions were not shared by everyone.  

The fiercest blow came from the other side of the Atlantic. Trump wants the BBC to hand him a cool billion dollars for having cost him some votes in last year’s presidential elections with what was supposed to be a Panorama documentary in which a speech he delivered just before a MAGA mob burst into the US Capitol back in January 2021 was deliberately manipulated in order to make it look as though he had encouraged his supporters to ransack the building and beat up the politicians lurking in it.

Thanks to Trump’s involvement, that unedifying episode has dominated the headlines, but the BBC faces many other charges. Most of these have to do with the political and social prejudices of the top brass and a large proportion of their underlings. By and large, they are seen as arrogant representatives of an increasingly unpopular minority that is getting blamed for the dangerous mess their country is currently in.

According to the BBC’s critics, almost all members of the staff are hostile not only towards Israel but also towards the United Kingdom as such and, needless to say, to the United States despite the evident fact that many of their more outlandish political views originated there. They are also accused of showing an excessive fondness for transsexuals who favour having children operated on and fed drugs designed to speed up their “transitions,” and of being strangely enthusiastic about the antics of drag queens. In addition to irritating viewers by posing as cultural warriors, many give them the impression that they would like to see the native population of their islands replaced by imports from the Middle East and Africa.

None of this would rile overmuch those who feel the BBC has taken a wrong turning if it were a private business enterprise such as its ideological soulmate, The Guardian newspaper, but it happens to be a curious hybrid; though it is not managed by the State, it gets its enormous income from a fairly stiff licence fee all owners of television sets in the UK are legally obliged to pay. This means that it should not be allowed to get completely out of sync with public opinion, as it has done on a continually lengthening list of issues.

These include mass immigration with illegal entrants getting put up in expensive hotels and, apparently, receiving free smart phones, the appalling harm that over the years was done to British girls from troubled homes by predominantly Pakistani rape gangs which, in effect, enjoyed police protection because clamping down on them would have upset community relations, militant Islamism, the war between Israel and Hamas which has led to huge demonstrations in most cities with Muslim enclaves, the black lives matter chaos, multiculturalism, the alleged persistence of “systemic racism” in a country that has shown itself to be exceptionally tolerant of “minorities,” the respect that is due to former generations of Britons, especially those whose deeds are commemorated in war memorials, and much else besides.

The BBC approach to most social and political problems is very different from that of the majority of Britons, but perhaps something like this was always bound to happen. Like many other large organisations, the BBC has developed its own house culture which leans left and puts it at odds with conservatives, whether they are in government or not. For many years it recruited its employees from among university graduates of a leftist disposition who found it easy to fit in and were prone to weed out those who were reluctant to do so.

As a result, large numbers of people feel that the national broadcaster has morphed into a purveyor of “woke” propaganda that does its best to indoctrinate those it thinks are foolishly clinging to outmoded ways of thinking. In addition to presenting in what some insist is a very dishonest fashion the news stories that are beamed out on the international service, critics complain that the BBC has got into the habit of using entertainment programmes as vehicles for the ideological messages it is determined to ram into the heads of the populace; in these, the villains are invariably natives and the upholders of all things decent are usually of immigrant origin.

Can a non-State but nonetheless publicly-funded broadcaster the size of the BBC be meaningfully neutral in today’s fractious world?  Probably not; from top to bottom, those working for it will have their own opinions and preferences about what is going on and, no matter how hard they try to be even-handed, they will seek to promote them. This is why some compare the BBC to an echo-chamber whose inmates are completely unaware that respectable outsiders could find their viewpoints objectionable.

To get back in touch with a large majority of the people who provide it with the money it needs, the BBC would have to persuade them that it is not a mouthpiece for a London-based, self-satisfied and supposedly progressive elite whose members despise most of their fellow countrymen, regarding them as bloody-minded yokels yearning to go on a racist rampage who need to be disciplined by their betters. Unless it manages to do something like this, it could be deprived of its income from licence fees which, in some people’s view, do not make much sense now that so many other sources of information and entertainment are available. Much of what such alternatives churn out may be every bit as biased as the stuff coming from the BBC or even more so, but at least most of it is free.