cont
"The omertà on discussion led to the absurdity of the UK closing down the North Sea oil and gas industry, endangering tens of thousands of jobs, just so we could import the oil and gas we still need from abroad. The dogmatic rejection of “unnatural” pesticides and herbicides ignored the reality that productive agriculture is impossible without them. The promotion of “clean energy” ignored the fact that it isn’t actually all that clean and that constructing wind farms and the paraphernalia of renewable energy brings its own problems not least unaffordable electricity bills which have left a third of the country in fuel poverty. Green is not always good.
The “no debate” idea quickly spread from climate change to other issues. Transgender people insisted that there should be no debate about their existence any more than there should be debate about global warming. The BBC adopted this uncritically from around 2015. There is a famous discussion with Victoria Derbyshire and a group of four transgender advocates where Susie Green of Mermaids remarks that her own daughter “told her when she was four that God had made a mistake and she should have been a girl.” The academic and feminist, Germaine Greer, was summarily cancelled after she said that “just cutting off your dick doesn’t make you a woman”. The BBC installed an LGBTQ correspondent who became a kind of witch-finder general damning heresy against the transgender ideology, as the leaked report from the former BBC editorial adviser Michael Prescott exposed. Male sex offenders were referred to as women. Drag queens became ubiquitous. Gender transitioners were invariably celebrated for their “courage”. It took the Supreme Court and the Cass Review in 2024 to make the BBC question the gospel according to Stonewall.
Then of course we had Black Lives Matter and the UK media collectively took the knee after a black man died in police custody in Minneapolis. Militant demonstrators, who took to the streets during Covid lockdown, causing injuries to 27 police officers, were generally regarded as virtuous opponents of racism.
Donald Trump opposed climate change, critical race theory and transgender ideology so he was clearly an agent of the devil. Statements from Trump invariably included references to his “lack of evidence” and “unfounded” complaints. Many of his remarks were indeed outrageous and his claims unfounded. But so are the remarks of most politicians.
Trump became quarantined as a kind of moral infection. The objection to his policies became a kind of knee-jerk reaction to politicians of the right like Nigel Farage who, along with the Daily Mail, became the butt of endless unfunny jokes on Have I Got News for You. The comedienne, Jo Brand, famously said that she wished the Reform leader had been pelted pelted “with battery acid” instead of milkshakes.
Comedy was the one area where the BBC felt it could be unashamedly left-wing because if anyone criticised it they could be accused of lacking a sense of humour or being a supporter of the far right. This became so ubiquitous on shows like the News Quiz, Dead Ringers and even the formerly hilarious Now Show that they became all but unlistenable even to people of the left like me.
So we are where we are now which is the worst crisis the BBC has faced over, yes, Donald Trump, race, and transgenderism. The BBC has responded to criticism of editorial standards by its own adviser, Michael Prescott, by attacking the same Robbie Gibb, now a BBC governor, of leading a “right-wing coup” in league with the Tory press. The Today programme turned into a party political broadcast on behalf of its right-thinking employees thus inadvertently exposing the reality of political bias. It should have reported the crisis dispassionately and analysed the content of the Prescott Report into BBC bias rather than trying to deflect attention from it. The thin skein of BBC impartiality was finally ripped apart.
Perhaps it is impossible for the BBC to continue after this split. As critical friends like the former BBC politics presenter Andrew Marr and the former defence correspondent, Mark Urban,have pointed out, there is now a generation of activist-minded graduates running BBC programmes who think that they should, like broadcasters in wartime, be taking sides. They think the BBC should be promoting social justice, opposing environmental catastrophe and depriving anti-immigrant populists of the oxygen of publicity. Only they cannot do this and still be the BBC proper. Now that Reform is leading the opinion polls the BBC cannot exclude Nigel Farage or sack Robbie Gibb. The “coup” theory only points up the fact that there are many members of the BBC Board of Governors like Muriel Gray ex of The Tube, who could not exactly be called Tories.
The howls of anguish from the legions of BBC supporters on X only exposes the reality that the BBC now is biased as it always has been - but it has unfortunately stopped realising that it is."
https://iainmacwhirter.substack.com/p/the-bbc-my-part-in-its-downfall
Forum
Pages: 1
BBC - Pushback by a leftist (Read 69 times)
