‘Impartiality lies at the heart of public service and is the core of the BBC’s commitment to its audiences . . . We must be inclusive, considering the broad perspective and ensuring the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected.’
BBC guidelines
BBC guidelines
FOR HOW MUCH LONGER are we expected to tolerate having to pay a tax for the singular privilege of watching our television sets. I know of no other country in world that forces such a financial burden on its people. It is an antiquated and uniquely British construct that reflects the paternalism of the British establishment circa 1927.
It was the kind of paternalism, one would have thought, that the corporation’s modern Leftist ethos would have abjured from ever copying. But no, the paternalism is still there, but operating under a different establishment…an establishment that its current Director General, Mark Thompson, has described as having a ‘massive Left-wing bias’.
Bias of any kind is something of course the BBC charter prohibits. It does so because in a country of such diverse opinions, where every citizen is taxed by the BBC on threat of imprisonment, bias of any kind cannot be tolerated. But in the modern BBC, impartiality has long since departed the airways and been replaced by ‘progressive’ types who are of a Left persuasion, and who seem to care very little that millions of licence fee payers do not share their bias.
It is no longer a speculative assertion that the BBC is bias toward the Left; when the Director General so readily admits it. But Mark Thompson receives support from many of his major performers in News and current affairs, including Michael Buerk and Peter Sissons.
Andrew Marr said, ‘ The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias’. Then, as if further confirmation were needed, it comes from the great man himself, ‘The idea of a tax on the ownership of television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil’. [1]This quote is taken from Jeremy Paxman’s 2007 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture.
In America Fox News has a Right-wing bias. But Rupert Murdock does not seek financial support from the American taxpayer. There is nothing wrong with a television company having a political bias, just as there is nothing wrong in a newspaper holding such a prejudice. But a television corporation being wholly funded from taxation is treading on dangerous (Orwellian) ground.
I think it was Peter Sissons who drew our attention to this cultural bias when he commented upon the many copies of the Guardian he found lying around on the desks within the BBC’s offices. Every part of the BBC establishment, from top to bottom, wears its liberal identity proudly.
It harvests the majority of its employees through advertising in the Guardian. Page after page of this papers’ job vacancies are for public sector jobs, including of course the BBC.
The Guardian is the corporation’s house magazine and, no doubt, accounts for much of its circulation and advertising revenue. The BBC behaves as if the licence fee is an entitlement, just as in the past, monarch’s believed all levied taxes were justifiable because of the institution of monarchy. The Divine Right of the BBC, it appears, has replaced that of kings.
THE VERY LATEST example of the BBC’s bias has been on display in their reporting of all things European and the European Union.
David Cameron, rightly, in my Right-wing view, vetoed the Merkozy in Britain’s national interests on Friday. But the BBC, it seems, could not stomach such an approach. So they piled their studios with Europhiles and used their journalists to pour scorn over Cameron’s vetoing of the Merkozy.
Cristina Odone is not a rampant eurosceptic, but even she could see the BBC bias at work. Writing in the Daily Telegraph (which, no doubt, incurs the wrath of the Guardianistas), she said, ‘Yet, even from where I stand, I can see the BBC bias in its coverage of the EU. From the outset, as the newscasters announced David Cameron's veto of the eurozone rescue plan, the Beeb took a hostile view of proceedings. The picture they painted, on telly and radio, was of a Britain humiliated, alone, marginalised’.
Over the past weekend two polls showed an overwhelming support for David Cameron’s position. Yet the tax ‘gifted’ BBC chose to adhere to its prejudices and paint a minority picture of the events unfolding in Brussels. They, as a Europhile institution paid for by a mainly Eurosceptic population, brandished its contempt for the vast majority of their paymasters.
IF THE BBC wishes to continue as a bias institution, then they must seek their revenues from private sources and not from the taxpayer. I cannot understand how the BBC has survived for so long with its present set-up.
I can only surmise that the corporation is still living off a sentimental attachment to the institution based upon the childhood experiences of many of its viewers.
The time, however, has come when we must be given a choice as to what we pay for, as happens throughout the rest of the economy. The BBC boasts its supremacy throughout the world. Well good for them. They will find no difficulty in accumulating, like Sky, enough subscribers to make the BBC a commercial success.
Under such circumstances they can be as biased as they like. But I resent having to subscribe to such an organisation. The money I would save from its privatisation would allow me to subscribe to a channel that suited my own individual tastes and requirements.
Sky television has surpassed the BBC in such theatres as news, drama, sport and current affairs. Sky has produced the quality programming the BBC once bragged of. When Rupert Murdock embarked upon his involvement with television, the BBC and their liberal acolytes cried out, dumbing down!
What they did not understand was that Murdock is first of all a business man out turn a profit. Which means that Sky Arts alone surpasses any of the BBC’s output. Sky’s many other channels reach out to all sections of the population, whatever their point of view or particular taste. For Murdock is not an Australian ignoramus, despite his ownership of the Sun; but a businessman who provides a profitable service. A service based upon profit can stretch far and wide as he has proved by his many channels.
THE BBC has a guaranteed income and does not need to compete. Unlike independent television, where advertising is fought over and jobs are continuously put on the line.
Mark Thompson is given the princely sum of £3 billion plus per annum to provide us with our entertainment. This is an extraordinary amount for a single broadcasting outlet, yet it is never enough.
The BBC now faces a government freeze on increases to its expenditure. This has lead to a few redundancies, ever more repeats, and talk of getting rid of a channel or two – none of which would be missed by myself at least.
I am not sure whether bonuses have been axed or reduced, but the amount of six figure salaries are set to continue. Such large salaries would never be an issue in the private sector, but where tax payers money is concerned, it becomes an issue.
THE BBC was Orwell’s’ archetypal ‘Big Brother’. For, until the arrival of independent radio and television, the corporation had the ear of the nation all to its self. Now, through its preening self-regard, it sees itself as as necessary to our culture as blood is to the human anatomy.
Yet even today it still meets George Orwell’s criteria. Its Left-wing bias has qualified it for inclusion. But what surely puts the icing on the cake is its adoption of the ideology of Multiculturalism and political correctness. Both these concepts are embraced and used throughout the BBC’s culture. From recruitment to programming, the Orwellian parallel holds true.
Minorities of all colours and gender specific; as well as sexual preference, have all been adopted into the BBC ‘Borg’. It is not only the Left bias of news and current affairs coverage that discourages people like myself from wanting to pay their licence fee; but also the ‘issue’ led soap operas like EastEnders; as well as the subliminal messages being sent out to every department within BBC’s news programming, that demand the presence of a black face whenever an outside broadcast is screened – whether it be a news event or any other that takes place.
This is crude and patronising. Does a West Indian, Asian or East European really care whether they are represented in a shot taken in a supermarket or on a naval vessel? It seems that the politically correct BBC demands that such a presence should be part of every situation covered, apart from rape and murder.
The institution that is the BBC has become the creature of a liberal-left establishment, which harvests its income from millions of people who have little regard for Left-wing dogma. Those of us who would describe ourselves as being of a centre Right persuasion, have no choice but to prop up such an institution on penalty of imprisonment.
It is about time we were given a choice, similar to any other commodity in the market place – and not be faced with the totalitarian option…I kid you not. For what else would you call a situation where the state demands the payment of a tax on television ownership.
The BBC, if it is serious in its boast of being the premier broadcasting outlet, should tell the government that they wish to go it alone without public subsidy. For such a boast deserves to be quantified within the private sector.
If Mark Thompson truly believes that the BBC is the finest broadcasting outlet in the world, then he can prove this by championing the BBC’s neutrality from the tax payer; and, like Sky and ITV, rely upon advertising instead of the highway robbery of the British taxpayer currently enjoyed.
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