There's a good piece by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph today about that James Naughtie interview with Bernard Jenkin MP. I particularly liked his concise way of describing JN's 'ways':
As Jenkin calmly proceeded, Naughtie began making those familiar impatient little noises, with interjections of “oh” and “look”, which show that an interview is not going the way he wants.
His conclusions from the affair are:
The real point, as I have observed here before, is that, on a whole range of issues, from the EU to climate change, the BBC is so lost in its own groupthink that it simply does not recognise just how biased it is. And the point about people who have become caught up in groupthink is that, whenever anyone dares question it, they can only respond with a flood of angry intolerance – as Mr Naughtie again so neatly demonstrated last week.
However, the paragraph that especially struck me was the following one:
I recalled the time back in 2000 when I presented the BBC with five fully-documented examples of how it had led the news with claims that some major international company, such as Nissan or Toyota, had threatened that, unless we joined the euro, they would pull out of Britain. In each case, the company trenchantly denied that it had said anything of the kind. But when I asked the BBC why it had not reported any of these denials, it merely replied that “BBC News is not biased. Our coverage of the euro-debate is balanced, fair and accurate”, while ignoring my question.
That certainly sounds like the BBC we all know and love!
The real point, as I have observed here before, is that, on a whole range of issues, from the EU to climate change, the BBC is so lost in its own groupthink that it simply does not recognise just how biased it is. And the point about people who have become caught up in groupthink is that, whenever anyone dares question it, they can only respond with a flood of angry intolerance...
ReplyDeleteThat's really it, isn't it? We've got evidence going back well over a decade of admissions from the top that they have this problem, even on the specific issues Booker mentions. Yet nothing changes. Nothing is fixed. If anything, they're getting even more biased, and more angry when questioned, especially because of all the other internal pressures going on right now. It's made worse by the occasional editorial directive to conform on a narrative.
This will be their undoing.