Having been a subscriber to The Times for longer than I care to admit, I'm suddenly denied online computer access (maybe because of a recent decline in activity) so I had to copy this piece from another device (inexplicably with normal access) and email it to myself in order to post this.) All for your edification.
(Must get round to reading Robin Aitken sometime.)
To show that I'm still here, I give you a major chunk of Rod Liddle in today's Sunday Times. I've left out the introductory passage because it's about Dr Who. Here's the meaty bit:
"The liberal bias within the BBC increases, almost exponentially, with each week that passes. It managed to behave itself, just about, during the Brexit referendum, but now the gloves are off — as the “editorial director” of BBC News (what’s that?) Kamal Ahmed revealed in a leaked email: ram it home to those thick-as-mince leaver losers just how hellish their lives are going to be if we get out (I have paraphrased his email to staff). Every piece of good economic news prefaced with “In spite of Brexit . . .” and given caveats, every bad piece of news leading the bulletins.
Seventy MPs wrote to the BBC to complain about its bias on this issue; the Beeb told them to get stuffed. But then, the bias is just as bad on every other issue within the news, especially immigration, which is something to be incontestably welcomed and people who are a bit wary about it are knuckle-browed racists who require re-education. Not to mention foreign affairs, which consists of a perpetual sneer at Donald Trump and a good kicking for Israel whenever it dares to respond to a violent attack from Hamas (which will have gone unmentioned).
This kind of relentless, institutionalised bias in the news is dismally, but brilliantly, adumbrated in a new book by a chap called Robin Aitken, a BBC staffer for more than 25 years. Aitken, sick to the back teeth of the partisan nature of the corporation’s news coverage, concludes that the BBC has “whether through carelessness or hubris” given up any pretence of impartiality, preferring instead to promulgate its philosophically asinine world view. And with an unrelenting authoritarianism which, as he puts it, demands: “You will tolerate what I say must be tolerated and condemn what I say must be condemned, and if you do not you will be branded racist or misogynist or Islamophobe and be shamed off the public stage.”
The worrying thing is that Aitken is actually being kind to the BBC. His book, The Noble Liar, concentrates on its news programmes, which are at least compelled by statute to pay some sort of vague obeisance to impartiality.
It’s in the rest of the stuff that the BBC propaganda really goes to town, as we saw with Doctor Who. The comedy panel shows where every single joke is from the left; discussion forums on Radio 4 and BBC2, where only liberals are allowed to take part; dramas constructed simply to promulgate a liberal point of view; the cringeing tokenism of panel programmes where there must be a black or ethnic minority person no matter how thick or unfunny they are and despite the fact that we are still an 87% white country; even its food programmes, which are relentlessly anti-big business; its soaps; its light entertainment.
I beg to differ from Aitken — carelessness does not come into it. The BBC promulgates this idiotic world view because it thinks it is the only one that is true. And those of us who think different are simply, objectively, wrong."
