Fan Mail 004

That’s it, I’m done - leaving the U.K. for the last time & heading south away from the coming shitstorm. My future is in the civilised EU not a small insignificant racist country like the U.K. pic.twitter.com/72zMBKVxOX

— Européen #FBPE EU Citizen (@rofden159) August 21, 2018

More On That Mythical Impartiality Thing

Like discussion of unicorns, discussion of ‘impartial media’ would make a good topic for a first-year undergraduate philosophy seminar.  We’re not sure what, if any, practical application it can have though.

On the subject of unicorns, LBC's James O'Brien doesn't want right-wingers appearing on the BBC:

"Left-wing radio commentator James O’Brien has slammed the BBC for hosting right-wingers like Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, equating it to giving a platform to people who believe in unicorns, whilst admitting “routinely” breaking BBC impartiality rules when working there."

Meanwhile, James Delingpole laments the bias of the BBC's flagship programme, Question Time:

"Just in case any right-wing questions slip through the net, host David Dimbleby is on hand to make sure that left-wing MP Diane Abbott gets her statutory 25 minutes half flirting with Dimbleby while explaining why it’s all the government’s fault, while Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg get five seconds between them to reply that actually it’s a bit more compli…"

And finally, we thought that the BBC was institutionally anti-Brexit, but Raymond Snoddy in the Radio Times thinks different, arguing that the BBC has not given enough space following the referendum to anti-Brexit arguments:

"Given Parliament has yet to take the formal decision to leave the EU, following the end of negotiations, Lord Adonis is making a strong point when, in his formal complaint, he accuses the BBC of breaching its Royal Charter, which governs everything the BBC does and says BBC news must show due impartiality. Already, he says, it has meant the BBC giving “scant” coverage to anti-Brexit marches.  

"Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger sees parallels with the BBC coverage of the Suez crisis in 1956 – when it was found afterwards that even Panorama had “skirted around” the fundamental issues.  

"Rusbridger argued in the New Statesman magazine recently that those who still believe that Brexit would be an economic and foreign policy disaster for the UK are being portrayed by the BBC as “undemocratic extremists”. They are, Rusbridger says, allowed a voice “only if repeatedly challenged, and balanced by fervent Brexit hardliners”.  

"I believe it is in everyone’s interest that, if the UK is going to leave the EU, it should be in the light of the best, most comprehensive and accurate information possible."

Which goes to show that you can't please everybody.

Why State Broadcasting Is Immoral

Top-down information diffusion from a central, state-owned bureaucracy is immoral and encourages lies and disinformation.  The spreading of official lies and disinformation is harmful.  At best, it leads to people taking actions based on false or wrong information; at worst, it amounts to creating an artificial world in which people live a lie.

To illuminate the point, let us consider one of the BBC's biggest-ever whoppers, which in the pre-digital era was used to prop-up the TV license fee system: the detector van, manned by enforcement officers who would, supposedly, be able to detect whether a television was being watched in a particular house and what was being watched.  

The detection technology was science fiction. Obviously equipment designed to detect radiated signals will pick up something, but the accuracy claimed in the video is totally non-existent.  Crucially, there is no record of evidence from detector vans having ever been used in court.  The purpose of these vans was clearly to support a Big Lie, and the purpose of the Big Lie was deterrent: to dissuade TV licence fee evasion and also perhaps to bluff and bully people into payment.

Unbelievably this Big Lie is still rolled-out today in a different form, though very many less people will be inclined to believe it.  Most of us laugh at this now and perhaps smugly wonder how people in the past could have been so naive as to believe in the Detector Van Lie.  It's a lie that harks back to a more innocent time in this country, when people accepted most of what they were told by authority.  We do want to restore some of this country's past innocence – but not all of it.  We think it is a good thing that the curtain has been lifted and we have discovered that those in authority have a tendency to lie, have a penchant for lying, and lie more than they tell the truth.  The cat is out the bag on that score – and a good thing too.

They lied about race and immigration, and they have lied and still lie about the behaviour of immigrants and non-whites in Britain.

They lied about the European Union.

They lied about the ERM.

They lied about the European Single Currency in an effort to get us to join it.

They lied about the intervention in Kosovo and Serbia.

They lied about Iraq.

They lied about Jimmy Savile.

There will be other things they have been lying about.

Official lies happen because information is controlled by the state and large corporate interests.

Abolishing the BBC is not a panacea for the evils of human nature, but removing the state from broadcasting, media and information would be a step in the right direction.  We don't pretend that a 'truthful society' can somehow be created.  People have vested interests and tell lies.  But what we do say is that in a plural society, there should be free choice about which sources of information we choose and implicit in this is that no media organisation should be privileged with a mandatory subsidy, extracted from us more or less at the point of a gun.