Dame Jenni Murray on Emma Barnett's salary

 

Hell hath no fury like a Woman's Hour presenter scorned, as Dame Jenni Murray is proving.

 

She has been interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph's Louise Burke today and vents her spleen in fine fashion, coming close to sounding like a DEFUND THE BBC campaigner:

How does she feel about earning less than her replacement? ‘Well that really pisses me off,’ she says. ‘I was talking to an old colleague the other night and she was saying how horrified she is at what’s being paid now. We worked so hard and had high profiles, but we didn’t earn anything like [that]. It’s more than irritating. It’s infuriating actually. I don’t think, no matter how good they are, they are worth all that money. It’s a public broadcasting service. I’ll be hacked off when I still have to pay my licence in four years [after turning 75].’ She starts laughing.

Not that she's bitter of course, perish the thought:

So, dare I ask, does she still listen to the show? ‘I have long had a habit of getting up in the morning and putting the radio on and it’s always Radio 4,’ she humours me. ‘But I deliberately switch off just before 10 o’clock.’

It's not mentioned in the interview but I'm guessing Dame Jenni's secretary rang at that point saying, 'Sorry to interrupt, Dame Jenni, but there are several cats on the line wanting their meows back'. 

Cultural “keep out” signs at Broadcasting House

 

Trevor Phillips hit the nail firmly on the head this week, writing in The Times: 

Outrage at the BBC‘s Emma Barnett for the crime of asking a self-styled Muslim leader how many female imams there are in Britain — a query similar to that addressed to Catholic leaders for decades — displays the same exaggerated regard for cultural “keep out” signs. The apparent capitulation by her bosses to social media clamour betrays a lack of self-confidence in an elite that genuflects (these days, often literally) to diversity. They will do almost anything to avoid calling attention to their own uniformity of social class, ethnicity and political outlook. I don’t think it is true of the BBC’s new boss, Tim Davie, but often the mask of compassion hides simple cowardice.

Is he being too charitable to Tim Davie there though?  

Thoughts (without links) on the Emma Barnett/Woman's Hour/Muslim Council of Britain affair

 

One of the major BBC-related stories of the week has been the furore over Emma Barnett's Woman's Hour interview with the new female head of the Muslim Council of Britain Zara Mohammed - something you've already discussed in the comments.

It's a remarkable story. 

Emma has really hit the ground running when it comes to hitting the newspaper headlines since taking over at main host of Woman's Hour from Jane and Dame Jenni. 

She's become 'controversial'.

But here Emma Barnett only did what feminist BBC presenters have been doing for decades, albeit not towards Muslims.

She asked and pushed exactly the same kind of questions, in much the same kind of persistent way, that BBC Radio 4 presenters (among myriad BBC others) have pushed with no small amount of vigour for at least a couple of decades about the lack of Catholic women priests and senior Anglican women bishops: 'How many are they? Shouldn't there be more? Shouldn't you be doing more?'

It may or may not be silly to ask how many female imams there are (not-so-shock answer: zero), but it's basic BBC Radio 4 feminist questioning. 

Even Ed Stourton has been forever asking this very kind of question in this very kind of way, albeit more quietly-spoken, on Radio 4's Sunday programme year in and year out of Catholics and Anglicans for many, many years.

It is absolutely archetypical 'liberal' BBC Radio 4 questioning (towards non-Muslims). Even John Humphrys, in his Today days, was prone to taking this approach, in a knee-jerk drop of a hat fashion, whenever Anglicans and Catholics appeared to discuss certain topics.

This very rare venture into challenging Islam from a BBC feminist angle - and it wasn't even aggressive - looks as if it will be something of a flash-in-the-pan though given that the BBC panicked in the face of a furious backlash, and Tim Davie himself grovelled out a sort of apology about their being not enough Muslims at the diversity-focused BBC.

That disappointing response from Mr Davie came in response to an absurd hundred-strong letter of protest from the worst, densest and/or most disingenuous, Islamist-soft grievance-mongering Labour MPs and (of course, and inevitably) Conservative Baroness Warsi - plus all manner of like-minded fellow travellers.

The BBC should have defended Emma Barnett here. They let her down. The interview wasn't "strikingly hostile". (Should I invite her to join me and Sue here?)

The BBC are terrified of appearing 'Islamophobic' (despite that being the very last thing they are).

I wonder if Emma being Jewish might have seriously inflamed the Islamist-soft Corbynista mob, plus Islamic apologist grievance-mongerers like Tory Baroness Warsi, even more? The onslaught appears to have been peculiarly fierce and targeted.

Misinformation

 

Tuesday's Woman's Hour made a concerted attempt to dispel misinformation - and fears - about Covid vaccines harming women's fertility. 

Along the way, Emma Barnett interviewed vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi and singled out lockdown sceptic Dr Mike Yeadon for criticism: 

Dr Yeadon wasn't happy: 

Emma Barnett, Slander on Women’s Hour Podcast released Jan 12 2021

Dear Emma Barnett. 

I'm the person you traduced in your Women's Hour podcast, released today. Please provide the source of the "form of female sterilisation" remark which you accused me of making. 

I've spent my entire career in pharmaceutical R&D, was Chief Scientist for Respiratory at Pfizer until 2011 & have since been a successful biotech CEO & consultant to 30 start up companies, some now on NASDAQ. 

I do not appreciate the way you cast me & more importantly the statement you allege I've said is a lie. I've never said it. 

So I'm courteously giving your the opportunity to produce the authentic source of that alleged remark in the next 48h from this message, together with any relevant context.

I understand that not having contacted me beforehand means you have violated your code as a journalist. 

I have also texted this to your program website & emailed your BBC address.

Dr Mike Yeadon

Last night Dr Yeadon posted an update:

Update:

I’m pleased to report that the program editor acknowledges that they were wrong. The presenter did slander me. I’ve never said that which she alleged I’d said. They couldn’t provide an authentic source. I’ve received an apology & that segment has been deleted.

Furthermore, the editor accepts they breached the journalists’ code, which places an obligation on them to make reasonable efforts to contact me, for a right of reply. In fact, they made no effort to contact me. 

Life’s too short to waste any more time on this. Luckily for them. 

I've checked TV Eyes and compared it to the programme itself on the BBC iPlayer and, yes, some 24 words have been removed, including the bit where Emma Barnett says "and I'm naming him specifically".

I suppose the lesson for us all here is, if you're going to dispel misinformation it's probably best to get your own facts right first!

*******

Update: This interview was one that the BBC's specialist disinformation report Marianna Spring tweeted about on Tuesday, ironically praising it uncritically for tackling "unsubstantiated...claims":

Important segment on BBC Woman's Hour addressing concerns about vaccines.

From the reporting that I’m doing - lots of legitimate questions and concerns from young women, but also unsubstantiated, scary claims in antivaxx videos about sterilisation and fertility playing on these.

Two things that don't normally go together: 'Woman's Hour' and chuckles

 

I've never managed to form a fully-rounded opinion yet of Emma Barnett, the new presenter of Woman's Hour, but I chuckled at a few things in a laudatory report in The Times today about her debut yesterday. 

The first chuckle came on reading that that HM the Queen sent a congratulatory message to the programme on its 75th anniversary. Emma's first act yesterday was to read it out. 

The Queen professes herself a fan, and I bet the HRH the Duke of Edinburgh is a huge fan too. I can just imagine him being (like his eldest son) all ears for the very latest about gender bias in school books, sustainable fashion, student sex work policy, Extinction Rebellion, post-partum psychosis, female footballers and dementia, and the orgasm cult. 

The second chuckle came on reading that Emma's first interview - and Woman's Hour's opening interview - was with Sonia Khan, a woman "peremptorily sacked" by BBC bogeyman Dominic Cummings. 

How very BBC! - especially from someone who spent last year as a regular presenter on Newsnight, the BBC programme that went after Dom so hard and so personally. 

They're truly obsessed with him, aren't they?

The third chuckle came from reading that, apparently, this interview didn't work out well though for the BBC as Ms Khan said she was "not going into the detail" about it and that it was "not as dramatic as it sounds". No scoop then for Woman's Hour. (Ha ha! Classic Dom!)

The fourth chuckle concerned something that took me back before even reading it, having had a look at the BBC Radio 4 schedule prior to the programme being broadcast: There were two men listed as guests: Jeremy Hunt and Nazanin's husband Richard Ratcliffe. 

Men, on Woman's Hour?!? I thought Woman's Hour was a mans-exclusionary radical feminist (MERF) programme. 

Apparently though, "Before the show aired [Emma] Barnett had promised that she would have more men on it". 

At least the departed Dame Jenni and Jane, after copious consumption of smelling salts at that absolute outrage, can just about breathe a sigh of relief that the men in question weren't transwomen.

The Dame's Last Bow

Dame Jenni Murray has become the latest in an ever-lengthening line of BBC leavers to immediately follow their departure from the Corporation by launching an attack on it. 

Writing for the Daily Mail today, Dame Jenni makes it plain that her main reason for leaving the BBC was her resentment at being "cancelled" by her bosses over her views on (a) transgender and (b) Brexit. 

She feels they were unjustly censoring her, firstly, by banning her from conducting any interviews about transgender issues on Woman's Hour since she wrote an article in The Sunday Times from 2017 saying transwomen aren't "real women" and, secondly, by banning her from covering the 2019 general election after she wrote a pro-EU essay, also in 2017 (only months after her first rebuke over the Sunday Times article), in which she describes herself crying as the EU referendum result came in. 

She argues in the Daily Mail piece that it doesn't go against BBC impartiality for BBC journalists to have strong views and express them elsewhere just as long as they remain strictly impartial on air - which she says she always did. In other words, she says she hung her views up with her coat at the studio door.

This is fascinating. I'd assumed that the trans issue and the hostility surrounding her Sunday Times article played some role. There's always been a long strain of activism at Woman's Hour, with Dame Jenni at the forefront of it. This campaigning attitude, therefore, long pre-dates the present-day campaigning mood among younger 'woke' journalists at the BBC, so it strikes me as ironic that she found herself out-campaigned by the new crowd. But it's her BBC bosses, who rebuked her and stopped her interviewing on the subject for the last three years of her Woman's Hour career, who clearly irked her most. 

And I'd either forgotten or never spotted that she got into trouble for that pro-EU essay and wasn't allowed to cover the last election for the BBC. Like a blinkered campaigner, she still feels she did nothing wrong there.

What's so striking here is that the BBC did what they are surely supposed to do if a journalist publicly identifies themselves with a controversial position - not just reprimand them for breaching their impartiality rules but take appropriate, decisive action. 

Banning her from covering trans matters and the 2019 general election is unusually decisive action from the BBC. Over trans matters you could put it down to the BBC's terror of the often ferocious, extreme trans mob but the decision to stop her covering the general election because of her public views on Brexit is something different - and, to me, totally unexpected. 

Given that some many other BBC journalists could have been taken off the 2019 general election too for expressing similar views in the past (e.g. Mark Mardell) it does beg the question as to why she was singled out? 

The problem is that - contrary to what Dame Jenni seems to believe - BBC's guidelines have actually been pretty clear that expressing strong views elsewhere on matters of controversy is something BBC journalists should steer clear of - or, at least, tread very, very carefully. She fell foul of those guidelines and was punished. 

Incidentally, Jenni Murray undermined her clinching line that she was always strictly impartial on air, thus showing her total commitment to BBC impartiality, by signing off on her final edition of Woman's Hour with a little feminist speech and a song about what 'a woman' is, which most people interpreted as a two-fingered salute to her trans critics. I doubt she sees any irony in that.

And more irony to end...

Dame Jenni "defies anyone" to know her politics, but I think we can guess something of the views held by the team behind Woman's Hour at least because of the four guests invited to celebrate her BBC career on her final edition - Baroness Helena Kennedy, Harriet Harman MP, Jude Kelly and poet Jackie Kay. All are left-wing, two are Labour Party parliamentarians. That speaks volumes, doesn't it?

Anyhow, good luck to her in her retirement. If she is retiring.

Out with the old?

After 33 years, Dame Jenni Murray is now peering over her permanently-lowered glasses towards the exit door of the Woman's Hour studio. Her final programme will on October 1. 

Apparently it's her own choice, though, as an admiring Amanda Platell speculates in today's Daily Mail, maybe the whole trans controversy found herself embroiled in back in 2017 made her feel less at home at an increasingly 'woke' BBC. 

Her former Radio 4 colleague Libby Purves, writing in the Daily Telegraph, pays her handsome tribute, describing her as "a feminist, campaigner, humanist, confessionalist and sometimes a bit of a controversialist, but always above all a forensic, listening journalist: curious and self-possessed". 

The 'feminist campaigner' bit is the one that's always troubled me about her, and Woman's Hour more generally. I'm not sure that a campaigning feminist programme sits entirely comfortably within the BBC's concept of impartiality, but then I suppose it must do or it wouldn't have lasted so long. 

Incidentally, reading both pieces, it appears that neither Amanda nor Libby feel overly sisterly towards Dame Jenni's co-presenter Jane Garvey. Amanda says that Jane has "perfected the grating tone of the dentist’s drill", while Libby describes her as "excitably gabbling" and says she "seems to tell every interviewee that she is thrilled to meet them". Ouch!

Anyhow, so who will be the BBC's choice to replace Dame Jenni Murray? 

Are they rumours, or more than rumours, that the programme is heading inevitably for a 'diverse' choice? 

I'm presuming probably not a man - something that would be a hugely 'diverse' choice in terms of WH surely? - and I'm also guessing that Laura Perrins or Kathy Gyngell at The Conservative Woman aren't exactly what the BBC will be looking for. 

I assume it will be someone much younger than Dame Jenni, possibly BAME. 

Given the trouble the Dame found herself when she made old-fashioned feminist statements on transgender matters, would they go so far as to deliberately select a trans woman, or even a trans man? Who would entirely bet against it? 

On these kinds of occasions I usually trot out the name 'Samira Ahmed', so I'd better do so again. One day I might even be right.

John v Jane

Hard-done-by Jane Garvey

John Humphrys isn't letting go quite yet. Here he is giving Jane Garvey both barrels in his Daily Mail column today, beginning with the 'gender pay gap' business:

It still grates to hear presenters such as Garvey behave as though they are making a heroic sacrifice for humanity rather than enjoying a privileged job most people would sell their souls for. 

It's almost as annoying as hearing her on Woman's Hour this week stating as indisputable fact that men do not experience the joy of newborn babies as women do. How does she know?

This is what got John goat. It's from Monday's Woman's Hour:

But can I just go back to...I mean, this is emotive stuff...but to that compulsion to become a mother? You understand this because you enjoyed the process. There is... there's no high like it, Marilyn. You and I know that when you see your newborn child. No man will ever experience it. It's something off the scale of joy surely?

"Am I awake or still dreaming?"

Veteran ITN newsreader  Alastair Stewart tweeted the following yesterday:

I fell asleep in the car on the way back from Cheltenham Races only to wake to BBC Radio 4's Weekend Woman's Hour. They discuss the heteronormative, the de-colonising the curriculum, and seeing sex as you see your experience of chocolate croissants....Am I awake or still dreaming?

His Twitter friends soon gave him the answer:

• Dan Salt: Sadly awake. Demonstrates why the BBC is looking at having its license fee changed.
• Mark Challoner: Welcome to the world in a bubble that is the BBC.
• Claire Fox: I heard it too. Made my skin crawl.
• Iain Martin: Suspect BBC R4 is going to need a management meeting early in the new year for a rethink. 
• William Hogarth: It's a totally bonkers programme. The decolonising of the curriculum feature advocating teaching African number systems in maths was particularly hilarious. Either all the Woman's Hour producers are smoking crack, or else the BBC has completely lost it.
• Eric Morton: Absolutely correct. The de-colonising of the curriculum especially was beyond belief. Accepted without challenge, obviously. What has our country become with this anti British self loathing?
• Vince Phillips: It feels like the equivalent of the Japanese soldier refusing to accept the war is over and come out of the jungle in 1961. 
• Stuart Robertson: Bless the BBC. Fingers on the pulse of Workington Women. 
• Bill Rodgers: You should have watched last night's Question Time. It's still stuck on last Wednesday.

There is Nothin' Like a (Transgender) Dame

BBC Woman's Hour presenter Dame Jenni Murray - an impartial BBC feminist if ever there was one - has, for the past couple of years or so, been the target of furious (maybe testosterone-fuelled?) 'outrage' from transgender activists. 

Their latest no-platforming campaign against the famed feminist BBC dame has been to try and stop her speaking at the Leeds Literature Festival, where she intended to promote her latest (impartial) feminist book. 

The Leeds Literature Festival refused to ban her whilst being as grovelling as possible to the censorious trans activists as possible in their statement defending their decision. 

Meanwhile, here's a hot-off-the-presses Twitter photo of the mass protest against Dame Jenni of Woman's Hour today:

Woman's Hour team are given impartiality training after 'showing bias against US Supreme Court judge Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sex assault'

That's a headline from The Daily Mail. And this is the BBC ruling it refers to:

The presenter in question was Jane Garvey, who - during the programme - made comments like this:

What is horrifying – well, I suppose if you are a feminist it's horrifying – is the way that Kavanaugh's indignation, his outrage, his frankly peculiar almost hysterical demeanour... has been interpreted by some as entirely right. Exactly how a man would react in those circumstances.

Experiment

I thought I'd carry out a little experiment and listen to Woman's Hour's midterm election coverage this morning to see how balanced it was. The hypothesis I was testing was that it wouldn't be balanced. 

The results include the imbalance of guests. It wasn't, as you might have expected, one pro-Republican versus one pro-Democrat but one pro-Republican versus two pro-Democrats. 

And, secondly, guess which of the three was the only one to be on the receiving end of an interruption? Yes, the lone pro-Republican guest, who Dame Jenni Murray interrupted to repeat her aghast-sounding question about racism in the Republican campaign. 

So the conclusions of my experiment are that Woman's Hour had an anti-Republican bias. 

I'm now off into a nearby wood to monitor some bears. I'm researching claims that they go to the toilet in such tree-filled locations.

Turf Wars

A couple of links added by the Woman's Hour team to their website in relation to the above feature...

...prompted a strong backlash from several feminist authors and journalists. Here's a sample of their complaints:

Sarah Ditum: So irresponsible to give out links to Mermaids and All About Trans, without any resources for children who need differential diagnoses and critical support. Real life "gender identity" is not the simple stuff of heartwarming drama. There's no "just" about it.
AM Scanlon: A recent Victoria LIVE had a film about Mermaids & six GNC kids in the studio with no GC response. Zero balance.
Janice Turner: Mermaids is run by a woman who had her son surgically castrated in Thailand aged 16. An operation illegal here, now illegal in Thailand. It goes into schools promoting fallacy non conforming kids are in wrong bodies & need “fixing” with drugs. Yet BBC promotes as neutral charity. The BBC is supposed to uphold balance. The issue of transing children is hugely controversial with two sides. Why is the gender critical view not included? Especially given an epidemic of teenage girls believing themselves to be in “wrong bodies”.

Is the BBC uncritically pushing a single-perspective agenda on transgender issues?

"I'm one of them"

Interesting tweet from the official Radio 4 Woman's Hour Twitter feed just now:

Comments (so far) could definitely be going better:

• If you are there in a personal capacity, why use the BBC to propagate your personal views @BBCWomansHour? If on BBC duty should you not be impartial?
• BBC impartiality? I've no problem with your opinion as a named person; I've a huge one with expressing it on a blue tick BBC account.
• You're supposed to be impartial, you vile bunch of  w******s !
• Gosh, never saw that coming. It's almost as if you are just a bunch of entitled, self-satisfied, middle-class flibbetygibbets who like nothing more than getting together to sniff each other's artisanal farts of moral superiority. 
• And I’m one of 17.4 million sat at home watching the football.

Update (16:58) : And it's gone!! Woman's Hour has deleted it.

Further (Sunday): Coming late to it, a commenter at Biased BBC has just written, "So incredible I thought it must be a photoshop, but no no one called it fake, so it does seem it is genuine."

It was indeed genuine. I went to the Woman's Hour Twitter feed myself, as I wondered something similar, and found it there, large as life - hence my own screengrab directly from that feed yesterday afternoon. Wonder if the mystery BBC staffer who tweeted it got a telling-off?

Transforming the range of pundits on 'Match of the Day'

Lord Hall (to be sawn in half and stitched together with half of Fran Unsworth by April 2019)

Sophie Jarvis, Programmes Director & Head of the Female Founders Forum at the Entrepreneurs Network, isn't impressed with the BBC's latest initiative to have a 50:50 gender split on expert voices by this time next year:

• The BBC are introducing a 50:50 gender quota on the experts they have on their shows. How demeaning. I would never want to be asked on a show because of my gender. I want to be asked on because of my knowledge and ability to present ideas.
• We should strive for meritocracy not gynecocracy. We should also look at why there aren’t more female experts instead of imposing a quota.
• An unintended consequence is that it will be assumed that any woman that now appears on the BBC will only be on there because of her vagina not her brain. This is OPPOSITE of feminism.
• An interesting comparison is the caste quota imposed on doctors in India. It is assumed by many that those of a lower caste must be a sub-standard doctor because they only have their job due to their caste.
• And I’ll be discussing this on BBC World tomorrow at 13.30pm! Let’s hope I got asked on for the right reasons...

One of the replies she received asked an obvious question:

Does that include Woman's Hour every day on Radio 4?

Well, the BBC has already thought of that:

It also rules out programmes “which already have a focus on gender”, such as Woman’s Hour, which “would not be expected to achieve a 50:50 balance because of the very nature of the programme’s editorial remit”. 

*******

Of course, it could (and should) be argued that Lord Hall and Ms Unsworth are actually failing shamefully on the equality and diversity front here and are guilty of appalling transphobia. (Maybe they should both be no-platformed as a result)? 

Why not have a 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:10:10:10 split to ensure that transgender men, transgender women, bigender people, intersex people, genderfluid people, agender people, genderqueer people and other gender types not mentioned are featured as experts as well as just cisgender men and cisgender women? 

Yes, the obvious downside of that is that studios for programmes like Match of the Day would be absolutely heaving with opinionated (if experience-free) pundits of every gender (and non-gender) imaginable, but at least it would prove the BBC's seriousness when it comes to transforming (pun intended) the range of voices across the BBC. 

Perhaps rightly in some cases

Lucy Allan MP

As discussed on a previous thread, Woman's Hour, to their credit, gave almost a quarter of an hour to the Telford paedophile scandal yesterday and Jane Garvey herself raised the issue of BBC squeamishness, even conceding the possibility that the BBC's critics might have a point. 

I would note though that she herself stuck to using the "Asian" label, leaving it to her guest Lucy Allan MP to be more specific about the perpetrators' "Pakistani heritage" (with neither of them going anywhere near the 'Muslim' angle), and also that, being a feminist first-and-foremost, she initially tried to shift the conversation to make it about "men" in general:

Jane Garvey: Of course other people over the years, perhaps rightly in some cases, have accused people like the BBC being somewhat squeamish about being absolutely truthful about these sorts of events. From what I can gather, and you can correct me  Lucy, the organisation of these hideous crimes was largely done by Asian men, However, not all victims were white women, white girls, and certainly some of the perpetrators, other perpetrators, were white men and Chinese men, indeed Men - that was the only thing that distinguished them from the rest of the population. Is that fair?
Lucy Allan: I think the police always, in any crime, must do a profile of the perpetrator and a profile of the victim. In Telford there is no doubt that it is a crime committed by older men against young girls from a particular type of background. In my experience they are young white working class girls with multiple vulnerabilities. That is a common denominator. Yes, some of the perpetrators have been from Asian communities.
Jane Garvey: Well, the organisation of the whole ring, the paedophile ring that was running in Telford, that was done by Asian men. There's no getting away from that?
Lucy Allan: Yes, here were seven Asian men running a organised network across Telford and they were all from Pakistani heritage.

One who looks on and watches

My copy of The Spectator awaited me when I got home from work last night and, beginning at the beginning, it was interesting to note just how much 'BBC stuff' there is in it, starting with Justin Webb's 'Diary' in which Our Justin pays a handsome tribute to his friend John Humphrys, describes his (partial) fondness for his  regular Twitter critics - especially the astrology correspondent of The Lady - and talks about CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who (as you may recall) recently co-hosted Today. Our Justin deliberately let slip an interesting nugget about the CNN star: "When she guest-presented the Today programme recently, she came with a helper who carried her jacket to the studio". As Justin said, she's now "terribly grand".

Then came Charles Moore writing about Sunday evening's The Coronation on BBC One and how "it never explained or even mentioned that the ceremony in which the anointing and the putting on the crown were framed was the communion" and didn't tell viewers that the Queen's taking of communion during her coronation was considered "too sacred a moment for the cameras to film", thus meaning that "the shape of the service could not be understood". Why did the BBC omit those facts? Mr Moore speculates that one reason could be that "the wholly Christian (and specifically Anglican) nature of the entire thing" might have been "considered a slightly tricky subject" by the BBC - which, if true, would be quite something.

And then came Ross Clark registering some qualms about the possibly highly dire unexpected consequences of concerted action to tackle "the great plastic panic" - a 'panic' provoked by distressing scenes involving albatrosses and whales on Sir David Attenborough's landmark BBC One series Blue Planet II. If nothing else this demonstrates the remarkable power of a BBC programme to rouse certain sections of the public (including me via Springwatch) - and, even more so, politicians (following those sections of the public) - into a determination that 'something must be done' and that 'lots must be said' about doing it. 

And finally (so far, as I've not finished reading it yet) came Rod Liddle discussing BBC Women, via a brief review of a science fiction BBC drama called Hard Sun "where the head of MI5 is a Nigerian woman and everyone else in it lives in a mixed-race family". Rod says this is typical BBC "PC social engineering". Worse, it has an "imbecilic plot". He's not tempting me to watch it. As for those revolting BBC Women, he hasn't any kind words for them either, particularly for the way they tried to get John Humphrys sacked. 

Listen, very stupid BBC Women: simply because you believe something, it doesn’t make it the truth. Other people are still allowed opinions, even if they dare to counter your own. My view about people who work for a news organisation yet have a totalitarian approach to diverse opinions is that they should be sacked immediately. That probably includes one of the leading lights of BBC Women, Jane Garvey. It is fine for Ms Gravy to subject the nation to the outdated, boring, misandrist, middle-class moanfest of Woman’s Hour (which she does on those days when her domestic schedule allows), but heaven forefend if someone challenges the tendentious victimhood rot her show puts out every day. Sack him!

Isn't "the outdated, boring, misandrist, middle-class moanfest of Woman’s Hour" such a good way of describing it? 

"Good guy misogyny"

This is very Woman's Hour:

In other words (as Lord Kinnock might put it), "Should men who say they like overweight women being overweight still be condemned because, being men, they can never be right (even though obesity is famously a feminist issue)?"

There was lots of talk, via Jane Garvey, of "the social media gaze", of "objectifying", of things "not being fair", of "body positive" matters, and of "good guy misogyny", etc. Jane said, "Indeed", and everyone lived happily ever after. 

A Modest Proposal

Via Twitter, I've been watching (yes watching) quite a few snatches of LBC. It's a fascinating channel, with presenters ranging from Nigel Farage and Iain Dale on the Right to Maajid Nawaz and James O'Brien on the Left (though no Katie Hopkins any more of course). You know their views, and they aren't afraid to express them, but they also like engaging with listeners who disagree with them. It's open and healthy and democratic, and it feels like breath of fresh air in comparison to, say, BBC Radio 4 or Radio 5 Live.

Because of the range of views at LBC, and the undisguised nature of those views by the LBC presenters themselves, you don't find yourself repeatedly caught in the claustrophobic atmosphere of so many BBC talk shows where 'impartial' BBC presenters try to pretend that they have no views and yet can't stop them leaking out - a BBC problem made so much worse by the fact that, unlike LBC's presenters, most of the BBC's presenters seem to inhabit a narrow part of the political spectrum and to share a similar outlook on so many things.

Just imagine how much more interesting Radio 4's Woman's Hour would be, for example, if it (flexibly) alternated, presenter-wise, between days when Dame Jenni Murray, Jane Garvey and Emma Barnett were presenting and days when women with a very different point of view, say Kathy Gyngell, Laura Perrins and Jane Kelly of The Conservative Woman, were presenting. How much less stifling and agenda-driven it would feel if that kind of thing happened, and how much more interesting it would surely be. 

While we're waiting for that to happen (yeah, as if!), here's a bit of recent LBC broadcasting (h/t Biased BBC):

And for more on Maajid's theme and a very clear example of the BBC's stifling uniformity of view, just try yesterday's Sunday on Radio 4. 

By-and-large it consisted of lots and lots of talk of love and hope and interfaith harmony, and 'It's Nothing To Do With Islam', and the 'backlash', the 'backlash', the 'backlash', and everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, and (with one exception) the presenter (Martin Bashir) leading this congregation of like-minded people. It proved so unrelenting that I couldn't bring myself to re-listen to it in order to write about it yesterday.

And it was entirely typical, therefore, of Sunday to deal with the issue of Didsbury Mosque by talking to an outreach worker there, taking his every word on trust and sympathising with him about the 'backlash' the mosque has (allegedly) been facing - in other words, by taking the mosque's side. (Listen for yourselves). 

About Three Girls

If you heard Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour tiptoeing around the ‘Asian’ question when interviewing the actress Maxine Peake and the character she’s playing in the forthcoming “Three Girls” trilogy, Sara Rowbotham, you’d have noticed the care Garvey took to stress that white males were responsible for most of the cases of child sexual abuse before tentatively mentioning that in this particular instance the perpetrators were…. just happened to be……Asian.

It’s perfectly valid for the BBC to dramatise the authorities’ unforgivable and misguided attitude to the victims and their refusal to listen to the social workers who reported it, but if they fail to emphasise that the reason the powers that be behaved this way was their fear of being thought racist, then the writers and the BBC will look guilty of exactly the same thing.