1. Mention, just once, our campaign hashtag, #AbolishTheBBC, live on one of your shows, so that the BBC's own viewers and listeners can seek us out and decide for themselves about the BBC.
2. In addition, or in the alternative, we are happy to put forward one of our number for an interview on a live broadcast of yours - radio or television. On the simple condition that we can speak freely and mention our campaign, you can ask us whatever you like. All you need to do is e-mail us to make the necessary arrangements.
To the best of our knowledge, nobody at the BBC has taken us up on 1 above, and certainly the BBC has not taken us up on 2 above. This is puzzling - what could the BBC possibly have to fear by informing its own loyal viewers and listeners of our campaign? Ipso facto, viewers and listeners should be dutiful supporters of the BBC rather than us.
The Reithian Principles and the BBC’s own notional commitment to 'impartiality' require that all viewpoints are heard. Replying to us on social media (which several BBC personalities have done) is not enough, the BBC is a broadcaster. So we await contact from somebody at the BBC - either they mention our campaign hashtag or they invite us on air. They can contact us at any time.
We expect to be issuing this challenge to everybody we encounter from the BBC.
Whatever else we may say on this site, it is unlikely we
will ever suggest that the BBC is short of journalistic talent. The problems that the BBC embodies and causes
are mostly not due to a lack of capability, and the people who appear on the BBC’s television and radio programmes are generally
among the best anywhere in the world at what they do. The BBC’s sins are due to it being a state
broadcaster and having an institutional culture that is Leftist and
metropolitan and that is blind to, or ignores, provincial concerns. This is especially so when the concerns come
from the ethnic group that the BBC despises most of all, the white British, and
especially from the socio-economic group the BBC hates: the white working class.
Now and then, the BBC’s journalists will put their abilities
to good use.Some time ago, Newsnight
ran a series of short features on problems in northern England, and this turned
out to be among the best work that programme has ever produced.It left some of us feeling poignantly sad because
we wondered how this country might be different today – and better – if the
BBC, which styles itself as our ‘public service broadcaster’, had actually
sought to be just that, fulfil its public mission and report critically on this
country’s problems.
Here’s another good feature recently broadcast on Newsnight,
this time about problems in Sweden:
It’s painful to watch the people interviewed in that clip carefully
avoid the central issue. The reporter
does some of that as well, but at least he makes an attempt at some proper
journalism for a change. Should we
praise the BBC for this sort of work and undertake to abandon our campaign if
they promise to ‘reform’ and ‘change’ and turn over a new leaf, so to speak? Is it a case of ‘better late than never’?
We think not, and it’s to the above video clip that we
return to explain why.To credit the BBC
for this report would be akin to praising an arsonist for setting fire to a
building simply because he had the good manners to alert the fire
brigade.Imagine furthermore that our
hypothetical arsonist only does the right thing after waiting for the building
to be burnt out and reduced to a pathetic shell.That analogously describes what the BBC have helped
inflict on Britain.The journalist’s
work is good – we must give credit where it is due - but he has done nothing
that has not already been done by scores of independent media, while people
like him at the BBC were probably calling them racist and bigoted.He is not even playing catch-up.The BBC are just covering their backs, and
perhaps also strategising a retreat and ‘row-back’ from the obvious failure of the
Left’s grand social engineering project.
We are also struck by the fact that we have not seen the BBC
do anything remotely similar in their coverage of Britain.We can’t help but think that the reporter’s
decision to cover problems in Sweden is an analogue, a decision taken – perhaps
unconsciously – because he knows he could not portray an English town in the
same way.Britain has the same problems
as Sweden and the BBC knows this very well, and if the BBC had actually
fulfilled its public mission and sought to report on these issues when they
were coming to light and ordinary people were complaining, the relevant problems might
never have arisen in the first place.The role of journalists, after all, is to use their critical and
observational skills to alert society to problems.Whatever else may be said about them, the BBC’s
journalists are not lacking in skills or intellectual abilities: their problem
is that they are beholden to hothouse social dogmas and this colours and
influences their reporting.The
distortion is evident even in the above clip.
The poor policeman who appears early on obviously knew the
truth but dared not state it plainly, while the reporter was slyly goading him
and tried to make him look stupid.This
same reporter would call him racist and have him booted out of his job if he
actually told the truth.We wonder
whether this See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil tendency found among
ordinary people and petty officials like the police might have something to do
with organisations like the BBC and the bullies who work for it?The reporter then snidely concludes the
feature by implying that people with concerns about Sweden – it could be
equally be Britain, and that seems to be the import – are being lulled into a
fake narrative.We will certainly credit
the reporter for a degree of professionalism and for attempting to fulfil his
duties properly, but even he cannot entirely let go of Leftist social dogmas.
This is why we focus on the BBC.Broadcasting is not an esoteric issue, it is
a powerful tool and in the right hands can be used to do good.The misdeeds and indiscretions of the BBC go
to the root of the problems in this country.Imagine if the BBC had done its duty over the last few decades and had
reported on the problems of mass immigration and the lack of public consent for
it.Imagine if, back in the 1980s, the
BBC had started reporting on Pakistani Moslem grooming gangs.Imagine if back in 1992 the BBC had given
balanced coverage to the Maastricht negotiations and the issue of European
integration.Where were the BBC reports
about white displacement or the concerns of the white working class in areas of
east London, the West Midlands or parts of West Yorkshire?
Yes, we eventually heard from the BBC about these issues,
but only inadequately, only through the BBC’s own warped frame of values, and
only when the problems had developed into crises of such magnitude that even
the BBC couldn’t any longer hide them by omission.Likewise in Sweden.Suddenly a sole BBC journalist turns up and
interviews a few people, comes to a lot of sweeping conclusions, listens
sympathetically to a white working class Swedish man he would probably sneer at
and call racist in private, and we’re supposed to be impressed?We are
in little doubt that had the BBC done its job over the years, such reports
would be unnecessary.As it is, the BBC
is a veritable Curate’s egg: it has got to the stage that any ‘good’ it does
cannot compensate for the bad and even, as here, only serves to highlight the long-unaddressed
inadequacies and smouldering grievances and resentments of normal people who
look on in bewilderment and disgust at this organisation’s mendacity and hypocrisy.
That is not to exclusively blame the BBC for this country’s problems of
course - there are many villains in this tale - but it is to highlight the power and privileged position of a large
media organisation such as the BBC.The
BBC has let this country down and must now pay the price: it must be closed
down for good.Any shallow attempt now from
the BBC to appease genuine concerns from the public should be met with the
scorn and derision it deserves.Yet we
know that a large part of the public fall for this stuff.As an indication, look at the comments on
YouTube under the above video.The
praise demonstrates the power of the BBC brand and the enduring legacy of the
Reithian principles: it’s not that the public really think that the BBC stands
for impartiality and high journalistic principle, it’s that they think the BBC
should and can stand for these things and they seize enthusiastically on any
exceptional instance when, as here, the BBC does a halfway honest job.This is dangerous because the cold reality is
that the BBC no longer stands for these things, if it ever truly did, and it
can’t.It is a propaganda machine that
hides behind a favourable public perception to push its insidious narratives.
The BBC bias
argument is the proverbial fish in a barrel shoot.A five-year old could make the case and give
Jeremy Paxman a run for his money.We
could go on forever and ever and ever and ever with the examples.Every day, almost, brings a new outrage in
which some presenter or other flagrantly reveals that his own private political
and social biases would not be out of place at an editorial meeting of Pravda,
or paradoxically, at a board meeting of Dragons' Den.The bias is an eclectic mix of Leftism, cringy plastic commercialism and metropolitanism.
But the basic
problem with the ‘bias’ complaint is that it reflects a naïve trust in
institutions that is no longer warranted. It's a bit like a grown-up lodging an earnest complaint concerning boyhood lies about Santa Claus. It’s too late. We're not in the 1940s anymore. The cat is out of the
bag. It's clear that the BBC fails to be unbiased not because it wants to be biased, but because - in common with all other media organisations - it can't be any other. The BBC is just as partial and dishonest as everybody else. Thus, it’s not enough to complain about
so-called ‘BBC bias’. That's tilting at windmills. The BBC itself exists on the basis of a false prospectus, and reforming it will only make matters worse, even if the reforms are thought-through and well-intentioned. And anyway, reform has been tried before and whenever it has been tried, there have always been assurances that bias would be tackled and minimised and standards would improve. It never happens because it can't. The BBC must go.
Nevertheless, let's look more closely at the bias issue. It is an issue, and bias is at the
centre of our concerns, but our approach to the problem is distinct.We offer a more
subtle (and, we would like to think, more sophisticated) argument, which goes
like this:
1. First, the Platonic objective of impartiality is impossible. It is specified in the BBC's public mission, but it is idealistic and the BBC manifestly fails to achieve it. The BBC is not an elite media. It is biased and pervasively dishonest, like all media organisations are. Better to acknowledge this and deal with reality than carry on pretending that Britain can somehow have a noble broadcasting aristocracy that is above partiality and partisanship. We imagine even the Queen sometimes struggles to remain impartial, even though that is her duty. That she manages to give even just an appearance of impartiality at all is probably down to the fact that little is expected of her in terms of controversial decision-making. The BBC's very existence is predicated on its claim to impartiality, or at least a claim that it aspires to the ideal: it's a broadcasting ethic that runs through the entire organisation, yet it's a giant, bare-faced Big Lie. Enough! Arguments and complaints about bias are loved by the BBC because they divert attention to more useless reform and engagement with their complaints process, and away from the real solution: The inexorable logic is for abolition of the BBC.
2. A lot of what
people think is BBC bias actually strictly isn’t.First, there’s the simple Devil’s advocate
duty that every journalist arguably has. Related to this, it's perfectly legitimate for BBC journalists and broadcasters to want to hold the attention of viewers and listeners with a big amount of aggression and controversy. Jeremy Paxman's interviews were both illuminating and entertaining and he frequently played Devils' advocate in order to challenge his guests.
3. There’s also the need for functional biases in maintaining balance.For example, if a defender of the tobacco
industry goes on Newsnight to dispute the causes of lung cancer, you’d
expect the Newsnight interviewer to give him quite a hard time - not because the
Newsnight interviewer disagrees with him necessarily, but because of a need for balance in the debate and
to reflect wider concerns in society.
4. The problem however with functional biases is how you decide to be balanced,
which in turn is a subjective decision - and not always a conscious decision, sometimes more a result of an institutional culture. This is where we come to the root of what we think is the real problem with the BBC's so-called 'bias', which is mostly not a 'bias problem' at all, but more a problem of how the BBC institutionally decides to be 'balanced'. The BBC is still imbued in a Reithian paternalistic mindset. Its serious journalists believe that part of their duty is to "educate, inform..." the viewing and listening public. That's all well and good, but the problem is that a kindly, detached, cultured sort of paternalism can easily become a stifling, suffocating maternalism. Aunty knows best! Educating and informing the public can easily become "improving and indoctrinating" the public in whatever the BBC as an institutional culture thinks is the 'right' set of views, which in the case of the BBC and the wider Establishment will normally be whatever is politically-correct. This is a classic Actonite slippage: you start with the best of intentions, and before you know it, you end up with a Monster on your hands.
To amplify the point, let's see if we can find a recent example of 'BBC maternalism' in action:
"They were sieg heiling, they were unfurling pictures of Hitler. They were very professional in their imagery and what they produced."
Aunty Beeb, imbued with Leftists and an Aunty Knows Best attitude, assumes that the majority of the rest of the country are Leftists too, and thinks that 'balance' means presenting the 'right' sort of opinions: in this case, Hitler and [neo-]Nazism are 'evil'. That is not to deny that Newsnight features such as the above are the result of BBC bias in and of itself - they are - nor is it to deny that the bias is deliberate propaganda - it's that too - but we think the following comment from Twitter is closer to the mark in explaining the Left's motivations:
Hard to escape the conclusion that many in the Western left have declared a self-flattering war on neo-Nazism precisely as a distraction from the real problems facing Western society today, to which they have no answers, and are uncomfortable even with the questions - B O'Neil
Mr McOwan hits the nail on the head, so to speak: Newsnight, for instance, are well-aware of the problems in British society, especially in England, and have (we must say, to their credit) run a series of features on the social issues of northern England. These features are worth watching - they demonstrate poignantly the potential of the BBC when it gives the Leftist/PC agenda a rest - but it is too little too late. If Reithian paternalism has been corrupted into maternalism, this is only due to wider changes in society and a broader Establishment agenda. The BBC clearly has an overriding agenda against the white British. It is an enemy bureaucracy and must be stopped. 5. We think balance is a more realistic goal than impartiality, but the BBC can't even achieve this. This is partly because the goals of impartiality and balance are often in practical conflict and are sometimes paradoxical to each other. To achieve balance requires the state to get out of broadcasting, while assuring a minimalist regulatory framework within which a plural media can function. 6. An additional point is that the corruption of BBC paternalism into maternalism has affected and influenced the British media generally. As an example, consider the following clips from the commercial radio station, LBC, in which the caller raises understandable concerns about an alien minority in British society. The presenter, Tom Swarbrick, also works for the BBC. Swarbrick accuses the caller of Islamophobia and proceeds to lecture to him in the manner of a schoolmistress:
