Thought for the Day

Christine Morgan, head of religion for BBC radio, was on today's Feedback to talk about Thought for the Day. This was how her brief discussion with Uncle Roger went:

Roger Bolton: Christine, I've often talked to you on this programme...so often defending it...let me ask, basically: Any plans to change it? 

Christine Morgan: Not as far as I'm aware, Roger. No. 

Roger Bolton: No? No requests from the Today programme to drop it?  

Christine Morgan: No. 

Roger Bolton: And any possibility of non-believers and atheists presenting Thought for the Day? 

Christine Morgan: Well, I have to start in a different place because what is important about understanding Thought for the Day is that it is in the middle of the Today programme, so obviously I understand the profile of it. But it is a topical reflection through the prism of faith. You know, 'Sport' deals with sport, and 'Business' deals with business and it's no unreasonable to stick to the purpose of the slot. It is a religious reflection. And I think in the three hours of the Today programme that two minutes 45 is actually offering the listeners a really valuable take on what's going on in the world from a different perspective. And it is distinctive. I was really encouraged when the Green Paper was published actually and the national conversation started about the purpose of the BBC and this word "distinctive" came up and I have been using "distinctive" in connection with Thought for the Day for as long as I've been coming on your programme. Roger... 

Roger Bolton (interrupting): Well, and we'll try and use it for Feedback as well. Everybody will be clinging onto that particular life raft (laughing), won't we, in the future?

Christine Morgan: It was music to my ears! I think people like Giles Fraser, who a couple of weeks ago talked about the different theological traditions of Germany and Greece in the middle of all that plethora of coverage of the Greek debt crisis, and we had loads of people writing to say it was so interesting to hear such a different take on it.

Now, it would be easy to make a nit-picking Bertrand Russell-type debating point that, yes, 'Sport'=sport and 'Business'=business but Thought for the Day doesn't necessarily mean A Religious Thought for the Day, but it's pretty clear what she means and it's not an unreasonable point.

And TFTD certainly is "distinctive". It wouldn't arouse so many parody sites (blogs and Twitter feeds) if it wasn't so "distinctive". The platitudes, the forced analogues, the tacked-on topicality, the blandly left-leaning political points (with the occasional hard-left rant from Giles or Iona's John Bell chucked in for good measure), the overwhelmingly liberal religious beliefs (from whatever faith community), the inevitable shoe-horning-in of God towards the end....these all make it "distinctive". 

That little list of mine, however, points to its main flaw. It embodies the spirit of what might be called 'BBC religion' - safe and generally liberal (in the modern sense of 'progressive', 'socially liberal' and 'left-leaning' rather than in the classical sense of the word). 

And as the feature is meant to be topical and often refers to major political issues of the day (including terrorism, mass immigration and the economy), having people who overwhelmingly all sing from the same, cosy BBC consensus on such highly contentious issues (i.e. mass immigration is good, Islamic terrorism is in no way connected with Islam, global capitalism is a problem) results in a seriously unbalanced hub of bias right at the heart of the Today programme.

Well, that's my biased take on it anyway.

*****

P.S If you were wondering, the Giles Fraser talk Christine Morgan was praising there can be summarised as follows: "The Greek debt crisis can be explained by Greeks and Germans belonging to differing versions of Christianity."

P.P.S. Did you notice Roger Bolton slipping in a little bit of 'Woe is the BBC!' shroud-waving there?

More followed at the end of the programme as Roger gave another of his loaded commentaries, making pretty clear his own belief that the BBC was forced into the deal with the government, and repeatedly stressing the cuts, the cuts, the cuts. Two listeners were quoted - one defending the BBC against the government, the other attacking the BBC for being a Tory tool. Roger mentioned in passing (about four seconds!) that some wanted the BBC to be given a good going-over but we didn't hear from any of them here.

It's the last Feedback on the run so Roger's shroud-waving is now on hold for a couple of months. He'll be back though, shroud in hand.

"Part of it is explaining this fantastic multi-faith, multi-cultural society that we have back to Britain"

Christine Morgan, BBC 

This week's Feedback on Radio 4 was a 'religion special'.

Some listeners felt that Radio 4 is "too Christian" and that "more religions should be represented", and in was their concerns which formed the starting point for the programme's main discussion.

The three people included in that discussion were all senior BBC figures:

• Caroline Wyatt, BBC religious affairs correspondent 
• Ashley Peatfield, BBC editor, religion and ethics
• Christine Morgan, BBC head of radio, religion and ethics

Christine Morgan, the most senior of the three, made the following statement, explaining that one of the main purposes of the BBC's coverage of religion is to promote multiculturalism to the British people:

Part of it is helping people to articulate what they want to do, part of it is explaining this fantastic multi-faith, multi-cultural society that we have back to Britain, if you like...

To those people who think the BBC still has a missionary zeal to show us all how "fantastic" multiculturalism is, well, here's pretty clear evidence that they do.

Ashley Peatfield added:

It's equally important for people in non-diverse areas to hear about people they don't rub shoulders with day to day.

A Feedback report shadowing BBC Radio Sheffield's recent (positive) reporting from the largest mosque in that part of Yorkshire followed, doubtless aimed at those very people.

Caroline Wyatt, characteristically, went somewhat against the BBC grain at one point though (thus reinforcing me and Sue's occasional past praise for her):

Television news...sometimes there is, amongst individual editors, a certain resistance to seeing things within a religious context, and I think partly because of fears of giving offence. 

So if you are, for example, covering Islamist extremism, a lot of the time people say, "Ah, yes, but it's nothing to do with Islam". You say, "Well, actually, if you look at the theology, there is a theology there that we should be examining." 

And I think that is something where sometimes people get nervous and they worry about giving offence, they worry about pigeon-holing. 

And some of those worries are coming from a good place, but I think there is a realisation increasingly that to understand how we live together, how we identify ourselves, that people now realise they do need to know. 

The rest of this edition of Feedback was taken up with a puff-like piece for Radio 4's Sunday and more on the Tim Farron-John Humphrys interview about the former's Christian faith (criticising the latter's lack of sensitivity). [Does Roger Bolton have it in for John Humphrys? Humph-bashing has become quite a regular feature of Feedback recently, as we've observed before - see here and here].