Better a half-blind victim of bullying than a Blue Sky
It’s the last day of the year, and the BBCNews channel has been looking back over it during the last few days. It did so from the viewpoint of a nursery teacher of Special Needs kids. It’s cringeworthy, patronising and generally depressing stuff. But the cause of it isn’t hard to discern.
Well, hah – I say that, but for the activist Beleeeverrrs out there, it’s all about disgusting bias….Leftie pc, and toadying to the Towrees. If you can follow that, which personally I can’t.
My view is infinitely more simple. Since Greg Dyke left, the BBC has been scared and gutless, but with odd flashes of estuary pc poking through the fog every now and again. You and I may not like it, but it’s neverthelss a very good reflection of Big Britain out there. In Reithian terms, it should be more than that, but it could be much worse.
The BBC is not, however, a bowl of bland custard for three year-olds because of institutional inanity. It’s like that because it has been continously bullied, threatened, punished, and criticised for 35 years by a herd of politicians and money men like Margaret Thatcher, Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Peter Mandelson, David Cameron, Theresa May, Michael Fallon, Michael Gove, Ed Miliband, Lord Ashcroft, Nigel Farage, Lord McAlpine, George Osborne, and all the activists in the UKip, Labour and Conservative Parties.
Now the views of this pirate crew are disparate and often antithetical, but they do all have two things in common: they all believe that the Beeb is biased against them, and they all approve of Rupert Murdoch.
Now clearly the BBC can’t be biased against the entire spectrum of British politics, but the other I think more likely extrapolation is that Auntie neither likes nor trusts any of the buggers. If the Corporation does hold that Weltanschauung, then clearly their discernment is firing on all cylinders, and it is thus A Good Thing.
The main thing the BBC as an employer isn’t is Newscorp. For that absence alone I could forgive them almost anything, but it can’t end there. The inspiration and education dimensions have gone, erased by external and internal forces who are and always will be the big buyers of white paint. For the BBC also has its beleeeveers – Andrew Marr is one for sure, as are Dara O Briain and the late(ish) Jeremy Clarkson – and they are all very clearly biased. Further, the last two years of incessant attack on ‘perversion’ in BBC history were blatantly fomented and then orchestrated by a loose group stretching from Brooks to McAlpine via Number Ten and on into Rupert’s three love-triplets Gove, Hunt and Johnson.
Positively, what I’m arguing is that the BBC’s problem is a growing demand for the BBC to do exactly what all the politicians, trade unionists, occupiers and corporacrats want.
The BBC has become Britain’s Alexis Tsipras, and what it needs is a Troika.
This would be mine: Jeremy Paxman running news, Ian Hislop running entertainment, with Andrew Neill in charge of political investigation and depoliticised education.
They’d need an equally fearless Chairman to keep their aggregate egos in check, and for that there can only be one option – the reinstallation of Greg Dyke, alongside the abolition of the Governors.
The Slog 