Among the topics in this interesting and enjoyable 45-minute discussion are:
Mrs [and Denis] Thatcher's attitudes towards the BBC, the BBC and Donald Trump, Lord Moore's difficult experiences guest-editing Today, the ''most biased'' BBC reporter Roger Harrabin,
how Lord Moore hasn't been invited back on Question Time after embarrassing the BBC by pointing out to Fiona Bruce that he was the only one on the 6-person panel to have voted for Brexit, the BBC and Brexit,
Tim Davie, the Bashir scandal, the feasibility or otherwise of BBC reform, the BBC's self-declared 'bravery', the BBC'S 'hesitancy' towards Islam and Islamism and their 'racist' reporting of the subject, the BBC's 'unilluminating and biased' attitude to BLM, religious illiteracy at the BBC, and what impact GB News might have on the BBC.
Robin Aitken gives a fine 10-minute talk on this New Culture Forum video (posted below).
A former BBC man himself, he describes how the BBC used to have two distinct divisions: BBC News and BBC Current Affairs.
BBC News reporters of his vintage, he says, had "something of a cult of impartiality". For them, "news was something strictly defined".
When colleagues wrote a news bulletin piece it was all fact, no comment. Even adjectives were suspect. It was very much a matter of reporting who, what, where, when. We left the task of explaining the why to the current affairs people. This probably made for rather dull news bulletins", he concedes, because "none of the sexy speculative stuff was included in our pieces. However they were factual and reliable.
So what went wrong? Well, enter The Lord Birt (then plain John Birt). He combined BBC News and BBC Current Affairs into BBC News and Current Affairs and the distinction between, say, News at Six and Newsnight got blurred. That's when "the rot set in", according to Robin:
Before we knew it the age of the inhouse pundit had arrived. BBC news bulletins today have become part news and part comment, and impartial commentary is almost a contradiction in terms. A comment always expresses an opinion. This wouldn't matter much in their was an equal balance of opinions within the corporation, if there was one Eurosceptic reporter for every pro-European, but alas it is not so.
An excellent example of what Robin Aitken is talking about there is afforded by last night's BBC One News at Ten. This was certainly part news, part comment. And, yes, it wasn't impartiality commentary. It merits a transcription.
(Look out along the way for Jon Sopel playing it for laughs ("Rudy Giuliani was clearly having a bad hair dye") and then saying "It would be easy to play this news conference for laughs, but..." before delivering his sombre verdict about the damage Donald Trump and his lawyers are doing to American democracy:
Newsreader: Donald Trump's legal team have been explaining why they think this month's presidential election was a fraud, setting out a range of theories, some of them far-fetched, without producing any hard evidence. Our North America Editor Jon Sopel reports.
Jon Sopel: This news conference was billed as the moment the Trump legal team would present its evidence of electoral fraud, fraud so great that the result of the 2020 election should be overturned. Instead, it was a repetition of some outlandish allegations from a number of court cases that have already been dropped.
Rudy Giuliani: I know crimes, I can smell them. You don't have to smell this one, I can prove it to 18 different ways. I can prove to you that he won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes. Michigan by probably 50,000 votes.
Jon Sopel:Part of the focus was on a vote counting machine used in some states that it was alleged had been fixed to damage the President. The web of the conspiracy stretched wide.
Sidney Powell: What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.
Jon Sopel:As questions became heated, Rudy Giuliani was clearly having a bad hair dye. A reporter demanded to know what evidence there was. "You don't understand the legal process if you are "asking for evidence," one lawyer fired back. But even some fierce Republican combatants are saying enough is enough.
Karl Rove: These accusations have been made and Mr Giuliani and Miss Powell, either on behalf of themselves or on behalf of the President's campaign, have an obligation to the American people now to either prove these allegations or withdraw them. You cannot leave this kind of stuff out there at the aftermath of an election.
Jon Sopel:And the President-elect isn't very impressed either.
Joe Biden: He will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history. It's... It's just not even within the norm at all.
Jon Sopel:At the White House, they are getting ready for the inauguration in January and Donald Trump is fighting by any means possible to ensure it's his. He's invited Michigan Republican legislators here tomorrow to try to persuade them not to certify that state's results. American democracy is being tested. It would be easy to play this news conference for laughs. Certainly at times, it was bizarre. But this is a serious and ongoing attempt to overcome overturn the result of the election. And the man who was in charge of keeping that election safe at the Department of Homeland Security, who has now left, has said it was the most dangerous one hour, 45 minutes of television in history. It may not change the result but it is sowing doubt in the worthwhileness of going to vote.
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.
"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.”
Peter Whittle's So What You're Saying Is interviews are reliably good, and this week's is excellent. It involves Robin Aitken, the former BBC man responsible for three books about BBC bias: Can We Trust the BBC?, Can We Still Trust the BBC? and The Noble Liar.
The one bit I'll highlight in advance concerns the aftermath of Robin's recent appearance on The Moral Maze. Having listened to it and heard his complaints about the lack of diversity of opinion in the BBC's output as a whole, a woman who works on one of the BBC's longest-running drama staples - he didn't name which, so I'll guess EastEnders or Casualty - got in contact with him. She was asking for his help. The problem is that everyone who writes for the show shares the same socially liberal, left-of-centre outlook, and she couldn't think how to help them start creating sympathetic conservative characters or write convincing expressions of a conservative points of view. She hoped Robin would come to talk to them for her.
It's promising that someone of influence in BBC drama sees there's a problem and wants to do something about it, but it reveals how far the BBC has to go to bring in fresh thinking and burst the BBC bubble.
"However the main item on the charge-sheet is his failure to tackle the obvious bias in the Corporation’s news output. Brexit is the issue that everyone talks about in this context but it is by no means the only one; from Trump, to climate change, to transgenderism, the BBC has nailed its colours firmly to the liberal mast. That is unfortunate when, by dint of December’s general election, it now faces a strong Tory government in a position, and possibly a mood, to settle old scores.
For all his good points Lord Hall never showed the least interest in tackling this problem; there was no attempt to achieve any kind of political diversity among staff. Some voices, my own included, have been warning for years that unless the BBC tried harder to realise its fabled ‘impartiality’ there would one day be a reckoning. "
Why should Boris kowtow to biased BBC presenters who say that he's a 'dictator'?
That, of course, refers specifically to Nick Robinson, who said on Sunday of Boris Facebook 'People's PMQs', "And they say that’s democracy. It ain’t democracy. It is a form of propaganda used by dictators down the ages."
The Telegraph piece by Robin Aitken puts Nick's "jibe" down to "pique":
Johnson has found a way to communicate with voters without subjecting himself to interrogation by the likes of Robinson and his ilk and they can't stand it.
He continues:
If Mr Johnson had agreed to all the interview requests the BBC has made in recent weeks what would have been achieved? Would any of us be much clearer about the government's intentions? Would the country be any more united behind what the government is proposing? I think I can confidently answer all those questions in the negative.
What we would have been treated to would have been a series of hostile interviews in which Robinson – or some other tribune of the people – would have tried to embarrass the Prime Minister and trip him up. He would have been pressed over and over with questions impossible to answer.
A few weeks ago, for instance, Today presenters repeatedly challenged government ministers by saying that the EU had ruled out any possibility of re-opening negotiations on the terms of our departure, therefore why was the government proposing changes? The EU's position was stated as an unchallengeable matter of fact to which there could be no adequate answer. Ministers facing this question sounded either evasive or stupid, and yet, here we are a few weeks later, having that very renegotiation.
“Don’t knock Stacey Dooley” says Robin Aitken. in a new piece in "Unherd". I agree. She’s - what can I say? - Let’s try ‘a breath of fresh air’.
“Stacey’s apotheosis was when she won Strictly Come Dancing in 2018. I thought at the time that that might be the moment her journalistic career fell away beneath her like a spent booster rocket as she continued into the higher reaches of Celebristan. But that didn’t happen, and Stacey has remained true to her calling. Bravo then for Stacey and bravo too for the BBC which spotted, then nurtured and now supports her distinctive brand of citizen journalism.
But this appraisal of her work seems to have omitted her most eye-opening and, for some of us, her most affecting documentary. My Home Town, filmed in 2012. So, for your information, here it is again.
A head of steam is building up and critics of the BBC are on the warpath. The Conservative Woman’s David Keighley, an ex-BBC man, has raised enough money to fund a legal challenge. The idea is to sue the BBC for breach of the crucial impartiality obligations within its charter. Lawyers have been hired to build the case.
Aitken believes the left-wing consensus is so ingrained in the confirmation-bias-prone media bubble that the inhabitants of such an insular environment just don’t see it.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us /To see oursels as ithers see us!
This video was made in January 2019. In conversation with Peter Whittle, Robin Aitken articulates the collective mindset within the Beeb. He alludes to a deliberate strategy of social engineering which entails sanitising and normalising ‘Muslimness’, (a condition with a bespoke word of its own).
“Our view of the world is this. Muslims are always victims, they are victimised and Islamophobia is rife in the country and that’s the story we want to tell. Do we want to tell a story about Muslims behaving badly? Attacking Jews, or attacking women? No, we don’t want to really. We don’t want to tell those stories. That’s why, for instance, it took so long, and it took some brave journalism by The Times newspaper to bring that whole thing about the Pakistani rape-gangs into the open.”
If the aim is to aid social cohesion, it’s a big fail. You can’t hide things from the public forever, and once people realise they’re being manipulated they’ll resist. Only the BBC itself supports its own ham-fisted attempts at social engineering.
If you listened to today’s Sunday Programme you will have heard that the findings of a ‘com res poll’ show that nearly half of the UK believe that Islam is incompatible with British values
(if the specific time-link doesn’t work for you, scroll to 10:20)
The MCB’s Miqdaad Versi thinks that (presumably because Jews argue that they should be allowed to define antisemitism) Muslims should equally be allowed to define Islamophobia. The existing definition, which has been accepted by several organisations but not the Conservative Party, includes the invented terminology ‘expressions of Muslimness’ which, in practice amounts to the introduction of blasphemy law by stealth. So no wonder the Conservative Party is reluctant to accept it.
Sadly, portentous attempts to equate everything ‘Muslim’ with everything ‘Jewish’ have succeeded in toxifying specific Jewish religious practices that had been rubbing along quite peacefully in British society for years, and with one fell swoop has driven an expedient Israel-bound mini-exodus of British Jews.(£)
“With the rapid rise in size and political importance of the Muslim community in the UK, there is also a feeling that Israel is being singled out for opprobrium and that the balance has swung decisively against the Zionist cause. For those whose biggest fear is Corbyn, many are waiting to see if Labour wins a general election before deciding whether or not to make aliyah.”
“I think the air has already changed, regardless of Corbyn. Some 730 years since King Edward I expelled the small mercantile Jewish community from England, the Jews are leaving again. This time not through the decree of an absolute tyrant, but as the consequence of a subtler, stealthier tyranny. There seems to be nobody left, over here or in continental Europe, who will fight the Jews’ corner, so electorally insignificant have their numbers become. That it is primarily the left that is driving them out is something they surely could not have foreseen or imagined. But here it is.”
David Keighley’s current criticisms of the BBC principally concern the BBC’s demonstrable anti-Brexit bias, the long-term effect of which, he believes, will prove disastrous for the country.
However, I think the long-term consequences of the BBC’s pernicious, interminable hostility to Israel and Jews will have equally serious and perhaps even longer-lasting ramifications.
A decades-long history of ‘half-a-story' reporting, a Middle East editor with a built-in grudge, and contrary to the allegations of Miqdaad Versi and others, the BBC’s institutionally pro-Muslim outlook including the ever-presence of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian talking heads on panels and political broadcasts has produced an ill-informed consensus. Public opinion appears to be perfectly content to exchange 250,000 loyal British Jewish citizens for over 4million incompatible or not necessarily loyal British / Pakistani / Middle Eastern/ African Muslims.
The antisemitism in the Labour Party is just the beginning. The leadership’s inability to deal with it is a great shame, but the BBC’s biased reporting makes rectifying the situation impossible.
BBC Watch constantly researches, writes and posts several articles per day in an effort to keep abreast of endless unreported examples of Muslims behaving badly. Shamefully, the BBC still refuses to report almost all of it; at least, not until Israel retaliates. Day after day aggression against Israel is ignored. “The BBC is only interested when Israel fights back” is a saying that is becoming more tired and worn every time it’s uttered. Repetition might make that saying ineffectual, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
Nor has the antisemitism from the right gone away. For once Yasmin Alibhai Brown had a point when she mentioned that on Sky recently.
That too is tacitly reinforced by the BBC’s failure to fill in crucial gaps in what ought to be general historical knowledge. Right-wing antisemites often cite the infamous bombing of the King David Hotel to reinforce their theory that Israel was founded on terrorism, a stance that conveniently ignores the fact that at the time the King David Hotel was more of an army HQ than a tourist destination and more importantly, it disregards the fact that Britain’s post-war government’s hostile, antisemitic, pro-Arab political policies denied sanctuary to many desperate Holocaust survivors, an important factor in understanding why certain (arguably renegade) Jews fought against the British at that time. You have to seek that information out, and who nowadays can be bothered.
So I think the BBC’s bias against Israel and Zionism will inevitably lead to a major Jewish exodus and a predominantly Muslim Britain. A great loss to this country.
If it’s indeed true that this important aspect of the BBC’s bias has taken a back seat in this particular crowd-funded and well-intentioned litigation project, then I’m sorry and disappointed.
Before you go, I’ll just explain that it’s about the BBC, impartiality and interviewing strategies.
It explores the recent car-crash interviews from which the two Andys emerged, moderately bruised, to fight another day. Remember Andrew Neil’s quote which appeared towards the end of
my previous post?
“It’s part of my contract that I don’t join any political party in their campaigns… it’s also part of my contract that I don’t have to be in favour of antisemitism. But I don’t get involved in your campaign. My job is to test your campaign.”
The general principle is:
‘I am here to ask questions and get answers and I have no politics of my own’,
but, and it’s a big but, them thar politics always show through.
Off you trot. Do come back when you’ve finished, and tell us all about it. It’s just up your street.
(I think I've been temporarily taken over by Joyce Grenfell) Not now, Sidney!
Update:
Look out! I dozed off during Question Time (who were those people?) But I awoke, refreshed, to see Andrew Neil. Blimey!
You’d almost think someone had been coaching Portillo’s sidekick (Who was that person?) No, not Sandra Oh! but Melanie Onn! (So confusing, a kind of Oh No!) Andrew Neil is obviously bruised. You’d almost suspect that Melanie Onn had been coached by “the team” to feed Andrew Neil by alluding to the US abortion issue as a ‘dark ages’ type of a thing, just so that Andrew Neil could bring up his Ben Shapiro ‘demolition jobbie’ all over again, but this time do so in that dismissive, ‘laughin’ at myself’ manner, as in ‘I haven’t a care in the world’ to show that.... he. ain't. bovvered.
But I think he’s rattled. Because they even dragged in Galloway to opine about the state of broadcasting and the art of interviewing. Admittedly they hung it on the hook of the death of Brian Walden, but to me, it looked like damage limitation. By the BBC, and by Andrew Neil. And wasn’t he welcoming to the point of smarmy to Galloway? (Whom I have to concede, on this occasion, spoke sense.) I do hope we don’t have to see much more of him and his hat in future. (Obsessive attachments to wearing hats and big overcoats indoors signals deep insecurity verging on mental illness) While they were at it they also had a go at Andrew Marr.
And wasn’t Ian Austin good? He didn’t get nearly such a warm reception as GG, but his despair at Corbyn’s leadership and at his former colleagues’ spineless acquiescence was heartfelt and long-awaited.
If This Week is past your bedtime and you didn’t see it, do catch it on your Listen Again facility.
(Do stop doing that, Sidney!)
He describes Andrew Marr's "apology" for interviewing Marine le Pen as "the journalistic equivalent of: 'The programme you are about to see contains images of graphic violence which some viewers might find distressing…'", additionally calling it:
A prophylactic apology to any viewer who might feel that Le Pen’s views were a breach of the BBC’s obligation to ensure its airwaves are a “safe space”.
He goes on to say that Andrew Marr "should not need to apologise for doing the public service of giving Ms Le Pen the opportunity to tell us what she thinks".
The BBC has an obligation to let us hear all legitimate viewpoints. To ban explicit racial abuse is one thing; but reasoned critique of multiculturalism and Islam should be heard more often. In discriminating between what is allowed to be heard and what is excluded, BBC editors too often seem to view their airwaves as intellectual game reserves where liberal herbivores can safely graze.
Seconds out. Round Four....or should that be 'It's war!'?
The Telegraph's assault on BBC bias continues apace.
Former long-term BBC reporter Robin Aitken has become one of the corporation's sharpest critics in recent years and wrote a book a while back called Can We Trust the BBC? It looks as if he's now published a sequel called Can We Still Trust the BBC?, and that's also the title of a piece of his published in the Telegraph today:
He says that "life within the BBC’s newsrooms can feel hermetically sealed and insulated from reality." The first part of his essay examines how he believes this situation has come about.
One of the reasons, he says, is that most BBC's journalists have jobs for life, "stable careers and little incentive to go elsewhere" - a "stasis" which makes the BBC "a very self-referential institution".
Also, the corporation is protected from its commercial rivals by the licence fee ["£5 billion a year buys a very substantial comfort blanket."] As regards TV, Sky's news presence is "puny", and ITN is no longer a worthy competitor because of "straitened financial circumstances". Moreover, Robin believes that Radio 4 is "the single most influential media entity in the country."
What this means is that the BBC can pretty much dictate terms when it comes to the national debate – and it’s a power it exercises in full measure.
"The so-called Right-wing press is the “other” against which the BBC defines itself," he continues. BBC editors steer away from their agenda and, though they occasional heed the Guardian and the Independent, "what emerges from the loudspeaker is the BBC’s own agenda. That’s why the news priorities in BBC bulletins are so markedly different from the newspapers."
Robin then echoes a point we've made several times at Is the BBC biased?:
This underlines a truth not sufficiently acknowledged – that all journalism is a matter of selection. The running order of the BBC’s main bulletins is not ordained by some higher authority; instead, it is merely the preference of BBC editors.
The BBC selection boards tend to choose people "in their own image and likeness" and, thus, "the system becomes self-reinforcing."
Aspiring young BBC journalists know that they will be expected to show an interest in a particular type of story. So an internal culture is constructed, recruit by recruit, which reinforces an established world view.
Another thing we've occasionally remarked on at Is the BBC biased? [and that people at Biased BBC have observed for years]:
The way the day is structured in the BBC’s main news centre encourages an insidious orthodoxy. Each morning, the senior editors meet to discuss the day’s agenda. A consensus emerges, and because the corporation is fiercely hierarchical, the juniors – nurturing their promising careers – take their cue from their elders and betters. Which is why from morning to midnight, from Today to the Ten O’Clock News and right on down the chain to local radio, the same stories lead the bulletins.
It does indeed.
This amplification effect is what gives BBC news output such enormous clout. More than 90 per cent of us listen or watch the BBC every week. For many people, the BBC is their constant companion – from dawn to dusk it is the background soundtrack in the lives of millions. That is why, uniquely among media organisations, the BBC performs the role of gatekeeper to the national debate. If the BBC doesn’t run with a story then, arguably, it isn’t a story at all.
Robin's essay then expands on some specific examples of how the BBC has handled some recent stories and lists a few of the main subject areas where BBC bias seemed to him to be most glaring.
He ends, however, by noting something which opinion polls are also showing at the moment:
I had first-hand evidence of this recently at the Ilkley Literature Festival. The convenor took a straw poll of the audience I was addressing. Who trusts the BBC, he asked, and who doesn’t? To my surprise, the split was more or less 50/50. OK, it was a self-selected group, but warning bells should be ringing in New Broadcasting House. The BBC used to inspire near-universal trust: it can no longer take that for granted.
