Friday, October 31, 2008

Speaking Truth To No Power!

There's already been plenty of good comment on the Brand/Ross situation, so I'll just add two things:

In so far as our national broadcaster now apparently defines itself in opposition to the nation's most popular newspaper, can the much despised Daily Mail readers finally get an opt out from the licence fee? True, there are other public services people might not necessarily use, but at least the NHS doesn't spend its time denouncing the healthy as Nazi vampires.

Point two is this: do not in any way shape or form allow the BBC and its groupies to convince you that this is just a side-issue or a proxy. It goes to the heart of what's wrong with the BBC.

As Evan Sayet would point out, there's no underlying comedic or satirical value to making obscene phones to elderly people. They weren't taking on the powerful 'Fawlty Towers Lobby'. They were victimising an elderly man simply to demonstrate their contempt for those pesky 'social mores'. This was just an extreme example of the BBC doing what it does pretty much 24-7: tear down the concepts of civilised behaviour and promote dysfunctional sleazitude.

They're still doing it right now, every time they try and defend themselves by caricaturing the critics as as semi-senile lemon suckers who aren't down wid da kids, as though objecting to obscene phone calls to elderly gentlemen was some wacky olde worlde eccentricity. In the bonkers world of the modern left the equation is simple: right is wrong and wrong is right, and once you work that out, everything they do makes much more sense.

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