Well, who’d have thunk it ? A BBC report admits that, actually, they are kind of biased after all. It’s our very own Berlin Wall moment.
Yes, that is a joke, but it’s not so far from the truth. Just like the East German Government, the BBC’s biggest asset has been its aura of immovability as though its existence was a fact of life: bad weather, disease, Liberals taking your money to call you a Nazi. Now, suddenly there is the first crack of daylight. To use a phrase appropriate to one of this month’s anniversaries: this might just be the end of the beginning.
Indeed, no issue exemplifies BBC bias like BBC bias. Critics of the BBC are derided as self-evidently insane. For years the BBC has been abusing its privileged position to push its own agenda, secure in the knowledge that it could crush any opposition - to use Lenin’s term, they controlled the telegraph stations. Suddenly, we can talk back and now we have BBC staff talking in terms that sound like the editors of B-BBC have beaten a confession out of them.
Above all else though, we must acknowledge how much the Tories have done to bring all this about. Or rather, we must acknowledge the nothing the Tories have done to bring this about. True, there has been the odd skirmish about isolated incidents, but the Tories have consistently recoiled from addressing the systemic bias of the BBC. Au contrair, when the Hutton Report came out, the Tories lined up behind the BBC’s absurd version of ‘fake but accurate’. As for the Cameron era, well, enough said.
Bottom line: if for the first time in its history the BBC is being forced to deal seriously with charges of bias, then that owes nothing to Cameron’s alleged elite. But don’t think this just shows how irrelevant the Tories are. No, there’s more to it than that. Cameron’s whole strategy is predicated on the idea that the Right can’t win in Britain. Instead, the Tory Party must accept its own version of managed decline, they’ve got to ‘go along to get along’. But suddenly here’s one of the Left’s key institutions having to give ground in the face of a bunch of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers from towns where you probably can’t even get a decent latte.
While Opus Dave have been trading away the family silver for a favourable profile in the Guardian, a grass roots campaign that’s the antithesis of everything Cameron stands for has made real progress. Draw your own conclusions.
Yes, that is a joke, but it’s not so far from the truth. Just like the East German Government, the BBC’s biggest asset has been its aura of immovability as though its existence was a fact of life: bad weather, disease, Liberals taking your money to call you a Nazi. Now, suddenly there is the first crack of daylight. To use a phrase appropriate to one of this month’s anniversaries: this might just be the end of the beginning.
Indeed, no issue exemplifies BBC bias like BBC bias. Critics of the BBC are derided as self-evidently insane. For years the BBC has been abusing its privileged position to push its own agenda, secure in the knowledge that it could crush any opposition - to use Lenin’s term, they controlled the telegraph stations. Suddenly, we can talk back and now we have BBC staff talking in terms that sound like the editors of B-BBC have beaten a confession out of them.
Above all else though, we must acknowledge how much the Tories have done to bring all this about. Or rather, we must acknowledge the nothing the Tories have done to bring this about. True, there has been the odd skirmish about isolated incidents, but the Tories have consistently recoiled from addressing the systemic bias of the BBC. Au contrair, when the Hutton Report came out, the Tories lined up behind the BBC’s absurd version of ‘fake but accurate’. As for the Cameron era, well, enough said.
Bottom line: if for the first time in its history the BBC is being forced to deal seriously with charges of bias, then that owes nothing to Cameron’s alleged elite. But don’t think this just shows how irrelevant the Tories are. No, there’s more to it than that. Cameron’s whole strategy is predicated on the idea that the Right can’t win in Britain. Instead, the Tory Party must accept its own version of managed decline, they’ve got to ‘go along to get along’. But suddenly here’s one of the Left’s key institutions having to give ground in the face of a bunch of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers from towns where you probably can’t even get a decent latte.
While Opus Dave have been trading away the family silver for a favourable profile in the Guardian, a grass roots campaign that’s the antithesis of everything Cameron stands for has made real progress. Draw your own conclusions.
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