Dame Jenni Murray on Amol Rajan

   

Dame Jenni Murray, writing in in The Daily Mail, finds herself troubled by “the BBC’s new golden boy Amol Rajan”, who she says “has already broken the number one rule for journalists: ‘Don’t become the story’” over his controversial The Princes And The Press.

And she troubled by the behaviour of BBC bosses too, asking “Where is the impartiality in a journalist who is a self-confessed republican being asked to make programmes about the Royal Family’s nightmare of recent years?” 

She obviously feels hard done by, and that a double standard is operating on how the BBC applies its guidelines on impartiality. After all, she says, the BBC banned her from doing anything related to transgender matters after she made some cautious comments on the matter from a traditional feminist standpoint away from the BBC, and they also took her off Woman's Hour for six whole weeks in the run-up to the 2019 general election after she made some pro-EU membership remarks in the wake of the vote for Brexit, again away from the BBC.

As for Amol, her piece begins: 

A year ago, many people would have struggled to place Amol Rajan. As the BBC’s media editor, he was a solid middle-ranker rather than broadcasting A-List.  

Now it’s hard to miss him.

You can say that again!

Amol Rajan - ''Rude and immature''

I've written so many quizzes over the years for friends and family, but I've never asked this bog-standard quiz question before: ''Rita Coolidge's All Time High was the theme to which Bond film?''

 

The title of the song rather than the song itself was in my head because I was thinking of the phrase 'all time low' in connection to the Royal Family's present relations with the BBC - or at least that part of the Royal Family not associated by title with the county of Sussex.

What surprises me about all this is [a] is how quickly the BBC has been allowed to move on from the Martin Bashir scandal and [b] how many missteps - or deliberate provocations - the BBC has made towards the Royal Family since the Dyson report into that scandal.

And I wonder how is this going down with the public, especially in the light of Amol Rajan's The Princes and the Press? Is it stoking more anger than usual towards the BBC?

Meanwhile, and talking of Amol Rajan...

His anti-monarchist Independent articles and rude tweets repeating chucking bricks at particular members of the Royal Family and the institution in general resulted in the usual apology this week:

1/ In reference to very reasonable questions about some foolish commentary from a former life, I want to say I deeply regret it. I wrote things that were rude and immature and I look back on them now with real embarrassment, and ask myself what I was thinking, frankly… (cont’d) 

2/ … I would like to say sorry for any offence they caused then or now. I’m completely committed to impartiality and hope our recent programmes can be judged on their merits.

That “former life” is just 9 years ago and Amol was nearly 30 at the time. Doesn't that make him a bit too old to play the 'immaturity' card?

Anyhow, someone responded, “Has Amol Rajan been cancelled yet? Isn't that what the Wokies do when distasteful, hateful old tweets emerge?”, but I'm guessing that as Amol isn't just some easily disposable white cricketer like Ollie Robinson that he's safe and will sail on, full speed ahead, onwards and upwards, at the BBC.

BBC navel-gazing and metropolitan elitism

Here's a little Tuesday morning reading from the newspapers, starting with Anita Singh in the Daily Telegraph:

There is navel-gazing, and then there is the sight in The Princes and the Press (BBC Two) of BBC presenter Amol Rajan reporting on media editor Amol Rajan reporting on the Royal family criticising the BBC. Absurd doesn’t cover it.

After the second and final episode of a series that has caused so much controversy, what have we learned? That there was rivalry between the Royal households. That Harry hates the press, and Meghan got terrible headlines. That Palace sources, whose job it is to secure favourable press coverage for their royals, may have briefed certain journalists in the hope of doing exactly that. Any and all of this information has been available to read in the newspapers for several years. Recycling it for television has achieved nothing, except to sour relations between the BBC and the Royal family.

And David Blunkett is back on the subject of 'woke' BBC Radio 4, this time writing a piece for the Daily Mail. He says:

Radio 4 has become so determined to address multicultural diversity, gender issues and identity politics that it forgets about all-embracing inclusion. People who live outside a narrow class of well-off professionals with rigidly right-on opinions, almost all of them in London, no longer feel included by the station. If you’re not part of the self-proclaimed metropolitan elite, you are unlikely to hear your views reflected. The BBC seems to ignore the obvious fact that ‘B’ stands for British — and its remit is to broadcast to the whole country, not just a few fashionable streets around Islington.

Meanwhile, The Times has a piece by Jawad Iqbal headlined The BBC has a blind spot over the bias of its Covid expert Susan Michie. It begins...and ends:

The BBC is guilty of a grave disservice to its audiences in continuing to give prominent airtime to a communist-supporting scientist as one of its go-to experts on pandemic restrictions, without any real attempt to contextualise or counterbalance her criticisms. Professor Susan Michie, of University College London, a super-rich longstanding member of the Communist Party of Britain, was lined up as a main expert to pass judgment on the prime minister’s announcement of measures to tackle the new Omicron variant....Michie’s revolutionary views — she is said to be dedicated to establishing a socialist order in the UK — are surely relevant when evaluating her critique of pandemic policies. The BBC, which prattles on endlessly about the importance of impartiality and objectivity, seems to have a blind spot when it comes to Michie. Its first duty must be to its audiences, who have a right to be told much more about the experts given valuable airtime.  

On which theme, by the way, I noted down the names of the first four interviewees on the BBC News Channel immediately following Boris's press conference the other day. All were what might be called 'lockdown hawks'. In order of appearance they were: Professor Susan Michie, University College London; Alex Norris MP, Shadow Health Minister; Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh; and Dr Sarah Pitt, University of Brighton.

''Amol The Righteous''

I think it's safe to say that the Daily Mail's Amanda Platell isn't pleased with the BBC. Her Saturday column this week is headlined How the BBC's golden boy Amol Rajan conned me into royal hatchet job.

As well as calling the first part of his documentary The Princes and the Press “a hatchet job on the Palace and the Press...and a hagiography of Harry and Meghan”, she says she “submitted” herself to “at least two hours of filmed conversation with Rajan” but found it “reduced to less than two minutes of selective quotes”. She says she “felt utterly conned”, and feels even more sorry for the Royal Family.

 

It has to be said that The New Statesman's Rachel Cooke isn't overly sympathetic towards Amanda's plight, writing:

These [royal] correspondents have all walked straight into Rajan’s trap. He was the editor of the Independent, they must have thought, he’ll understand, he’ll listen, he’ll take me seriously.

She suspects him of “laughing at them inwardly” [e.g. “at Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail trying to sound cute rather than just plain bitchy”].

But she continues, pondering...:

...how on Earth to explain Rajan’s own, no less comical mode? 

He seems to doubt anyone watching could have even the vaguest grasp not only of the basics of journalism, but of the English language itself. “She is a COLUMNIST,” he says, of Platell. “Which means she provides OPINION.” Hammy pauses, disappointed sighs, patronising explanations: he is very good on Today on BBC Radio 4, but here he sounds ridiculous, half-Hercule Poirot and half-Richard Madeley.

Former BBC presenter Libby Purves enjoyed Rachel's piece, tweeting:

Hilarious. And has Amol The Righteous bang to rights as well!!!

Tropes

 

In response to claims that Amol Rajan's republicanism might contaminate his controversial Royal Family documentary, the BBC repeated their mantra that journalists like Amol leave their personal views at the door when they join the BBC. 

If Anita Singh's review in The Telegraph is anything to go by though, he appears to have let at least some of those views slip through the door, take their shoes off and plonk their feet on his desk:

That’s not to say that Rajan didn’t share his own opinions. It is clear, he concluded, that “in some tabloid quarters, racially charged tropes were evoked and gave a xenophobic whiff” to coverage of Meghan.

And also on the 'racism' theme: 

...he allowed Meghan’s cheerleader-in-chief Omid Scobie to paint himself as the “only” mixed-race royal correspondent. Technically true, but it ignores the fact that a non-white royal correspondent appeared in this very programme (Roya Nikkhah of the Sunday Times), while the Press Association’s royal correspondent is black. A small fact but - as Prince Harry would say in his fight against fake news - truth matters.

Ms Singh makes a reasonable point, surely?