The BBC's Ideological Drift

The open thread is looking lively. Disqus provides the flexibility that other systems lack! One negative response to - may I call it our reinvention (?) - was spotted  - not on this blog — but over on Biased-BBC.  I do hope the predicted invasion of trolls doesn’t materialise. But hey ho. You win some, you lose some. 

Anyway, there’s bound to be a certain amount of cross-pollination between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’ (one example) and on this occasion I’m borrowing from something I first saw on Biased-BBC. 

....and in more depth here.

"The Islamic prayer call states that everyone should submit to Islam and proclaims power over the area of the ​​prayer."

Church Militant (which also uses Disqus) is a site I’m not familiar with. It’s a Catholic organisation, and it could be something I might regret referring to or perhaps even mentioning, but from what I can see, as critics of the BBC, I assume we share the concerns expressed there.

The Lockdown has affected Europe, and the curtailment of mass prayers and the closure of Mosques has let to a temporary relaxation of the rules regarding loudspeaker-amplified calls to prayer.

"The Adhan being broadcast by loudspeaker is generally not allowed in Germany, except for special occasions," says Fahrettin Alptekin, a mosque representative in Essen.

It could be that the BBC’s newfound call-to-prayer policy is temporary; we’ll have to wait and see ( I won't be holding my breath.) The article concludes, quoting extensively from Robin Aitken's ‘The Noble Liar’

BBC's Ideological Drift 

"In its early years, the BBC "was consciously aligned with traditional Christian morality and conscious also of its obligation to be fair," Aitken writes in The Noble Liar: Why and How the BBC Distorts the News to Promote a Liberal Agenda.
From 1942–44, he observes, the BBC "saw fit to broadcast a series of talks about Christian apologetics [by C. S. Lewis] as if this was the most natural thing in the world." The talks were turned into the bestselling book Mere Christianity — "an example of the BBC directly abetting evangelism through the medium of its airwaves."

However, in recent years "the BBC has wholeheartedly thrown its lot in with the liberal reformers; there has been no 'impartiality' on any of the big moral issues of the past half-century. In every instance, the socially conservative argument has been depicted as callous, reactionary and dogmatic," writes Aitken, who spent 25 years as a BBC reporter and executive. 

Utley concurs. "Among my colleagues at the [BBC] World Service there was an unquestioning acceptance of western 'liberal' values on issues such as abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage," she says. "This blinded program editors and presenters to the fact that many of our millions of listeners across the world would be offended by the editorial position we were, in effect, adopting.”