Spectacles

Talking of Andrew Neil, The Spectator has a couple of fine pieces about BBC bias, albeit by the usual suspects - Mr Liddle and Mr Delingpole. 

Rod's piece concentrates on the BBC's deep-seated bias towards social liberalism as reflected in its many outlets (from Today to the Victoria Derbyshire show) firing on all cylinders after Mrs May's resignation honours list included Geoffrey Boycott, who was once convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. Why did the BBC go heavily on that when they could have majored on the stinking "cronyism" of many of Mrs May's other choices - most of her former senior aides and advisers, plus Conservative donors - and the reek of hypocrisy and corruption they might be said to reveal so clearly? Now, I must say that I think the BBC could have concentrated on both stories, but Rod - from my researches - is right that it was the abusive cricketer who dominated the corporation's field of vision. 

James's piece looks at a couple of BBC documentaries and finds them guilty of bias - The Rise of the Nazis and Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind? 

Except for watching the Ask Sarkar bits (which I ferreted out like truffles and which I agree with James turned out to be "harmless to the point of irrelevance"), The Rise of the Nazis isn't a series I've watched (yet). Of it he writes: 

Back in the day, the BBC might have been content to strive for an objective take on the subject, perhaps with a voiceover by Samuel West and lots of period footage. But the danger of that approach, the BBC has since realised, is that it runs the risk of viewers making up their own minds what to think. Some of them might not be aware, for example, of the obvious parallels between Hitler, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Brexit and, to a lesser extent, Michael Gove. 

But I did watch the George Soros programme (you'll doubtless be pleased to hear). It was a straightforward debunking exercise aimed at right-wing conspiracy theorists which focused mainly on the loudest, nastiest figures of the fringe and the wilder, nastier conspiracy theories. But the relentlessness of its defence of Mr Soros struck many online commenters as constituting a whitewash. It also left me deeply uneasy on that count. Is every accusation false? Has he done nothing wrong? Is he such a good guy? Is everyone accusing him bad?

Here, for example, is the programme's (very) brief take on his campaign to prevent Brexit:

George Soros has made no secret of his views on Brexit, publicly contributing £1.7 million to the Remain campaign. Now, talk of a secret Soros plot is spreading to the UK.

This was followed by a clip of Nigel Farage sounding like a conspiracy theorist. 

And that was that. 

A lot more detail on what he has done - e.g. his £400,000 to find Gina Miller & Co. since the referendum - wouldn't have gone amiss. And what is the role (if any) of his Open Society foundation in, say, funding OpenDemocracy in the UK, with the latter's admitted links to the likes of Carole Cadwalladr? 

Anyhow, here's James's less charitable take on the programme:

But the documentary it did on George Soros — Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind? (BBC2, Sunday) — was worse, much worse. Soros is an intriguing and influential character, well worth a detailed investigation. Apart from the time he famously broke the Bank of England in 1992 when he caused sterling to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, there’s the vexed issue of what the BBC calls his ‘philanthropy’, but which some of us might consider more akin to bankrolling the destruction of Western civilisation. 

Soros has given away $32 billion to ‘liberal’ causes, ranging from his promotion of the global-warming scare to his campaigning for open borders which involves hefty donations to a number of unsavoury and sometimes violent hard-left activist groups. The documentary’s considered take on all this: Soros gives generously to ‘education, health, human rights and democracy projects’. People who think it’s any more sinister than that are mainly tattooed, racist, far-right conspiracy theorists — and Trump fans, if there’s any difference — whose hatred stems mainly from the fact that Soros is Jewish. I think it’s time the BBC gave up trying to pretend it’s a voice of impartial authority, don’t you?

Don't you?