Impartiality

Here's proper impartiality for you: two pieces from Standpoint magazine - one bashing the BBC, the other bashing people who bash the BBC:

Time For A Leaner BBC To Pay Its Way, by Stephen Glover

Predictable Pot-Shots At Auntie, by Nick Cohen

Here's a sample from each of them:

Stephen Glover

If the Tories can reasonably consider themselves hard done by during the election, UKIP is entitled to think it was taken to the cleaners by the Corporation. Despite Ofcom’s decree that it should be treated as a “major party” on the same basis as Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, it was regularly tacked on to the end of BBC political reports, and sometimes entirely ignored. In one television debate Nigel Farage was barracked by a BBC-selected audience that appeared predominantly anti-UKIP. When grilled by Newsnight’s Evan Davis Mr Farage was treated as though he was batty or an extremist or both, though when Mr Davis came to interview the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, he was full of smiles and reassurance. 

By way of further supporting evidence, let me point out that the editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz, is a former deputy editor of the Guardian, its political editor hails from the same newspaper, and its economics editor was previously an economist at the TUC. Ask yourself whether it is imaginable for the editor and political editor of the most important current affairs programme to have worked for the Daily Telegraph, or for its economics editor to have cut his teeth at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The answer is obviously “No” — as it is equally inconceivable that an ex-Tory cabinet minister would be appointed as the £300,000-a-year “director of strategy and digital”, as the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell was in 2013. The same point can be made about the centre-Left participants who monopolise the Beeb’s satirical and culture shows. Sometimes it seems as though Tony Hall, director-general, as well as its head of news, James Harding, are ’avin’ a larf. 

I don’t doubt there are many fine journalists working for Auntie who strive to be neutral and objective, and often succeed in being so. But with a few exceptions they are what they are — metropolitan, conventional members of the slightly left-wing cultural elite, wary of Tories and their strange antediluvian beliefs. Appointing right-wing BBC chairmen or director-generals won’t affect the direction of travel, as Margaret Thatcher discovered in the 1980s. It is surely instructive that almost every BBC journalist to whom one talks is convinced that the organisation is even-handed.

Nick Cohen

You have to read the right-wing press to see how unrelenting the assault on the BBC is in England. You have to read Bella Caledonia or one of the other SNP blogs to see how Scottish nationalists ape English Tories. It’s not that the BBC deserves to escape scrutiny for its biases and faults, or for the many follies of its managers. Rather, you need to look at the cultish refusal to allow one good word to be said about the corporation, and at how this stifling uniformity reveals the emptiness of nationalist and Tory myths.

Conservative intellectuals are fond of Jonathan Haidt’s argument in The Righteous Mind that liberals do not understand tradition and therefore cannot tolerate conservatives. Haidt’s thesis is highly dubious — the American and European liberal-Left are suffused with traditions of their own. But when conservatives go on to say that the Right is more broadminded than the Left, they reduce Haidt to absurdity.

A glance at the conservative press shows you that dissent not only on the BBC but also on the EU is simply not allowed to exist. Even civilised conservatives, who deplore the dumbing-down of British culture, can never discuss in public what would happen to that culture if their allies succeeded in abolishing Radios Three and Four. Scottish nationalists boast that theirs is a warm and cuddly “civic” nationalism, yet they demand the sacking of BBC journalists who fail to show proper deference to their leaders.

The easy explanation for the group-think is that many journalists act like prostitutes, whoring out their integrity to whoever pays them. It is certainly the case that you cannot defend the BBC in most right-wing newspapers without running into trouble.