The reputation of the BBC — at least outside Britain — is exemplary.
That is particularly so in matters which require a certain impartiality,
like political questions. But, like so many things in British public life,
this is changing, and not for the better. Indeed, it is so much worse now
that we can use an old French phrase to describe it: trahison des
clercs — a kind of treasonable betrayal by the intellectuals.
I have noted before that this has been true of Britain’s so-called
“chattering classes” (radical chic) for more than a generation, envenomed by
bitterness at the disintegration of the post-war welfare state in the 1970s
and 80s. But even during the worst of this period journalism at the BBC,
despite an overwhelming inclination to the left among staff, retained at
least pockets of impartiality.
The same was true of Britain’s commercial television — until the
election of New Labor. Since that decisive moment, leading programs like
Channel 4 News cover contentious issues (Federalizing Europe and the Euro,
Ulster, asylum-seekers and would-be immigrants and the astonishing mendacity
of Tony Blair’s New Labor Government) in a way that suggests (to say the
least) the undue influence of Tony Blair’s spin-doctor-in-chief Alastair
Campbell. Opponents of Blair’s policies on these matters, above all
Conservative leader William Hague, have been repeatedly mocked by presenters
and reporters and treated as xenophobic, not to say racist fools, while
those supporting Blair are given consistently sympathetic treatment as
serious spokesmen and politicians. This anti-Tory and left-wing lock-march
was not confined to domestic issues. One rather typical recent item had Jon
Snow, the chief presenter of Channel 4 haranguing an American spokesman
about the culpable failure of the United States to come to terms with Cuba,
“this small offshore island” and its heroic leader, Fidel Castro.
Of course Channel 4 and Snow — a committed supporter of Labor — have
never shown much impartiality in such matters. The BBC was supposed to be
different. Its wartime reputation for integrity in reporting and presenting
the truth has remained strong over a generation. Except on the far right,
that trust, mainly founded during the wartime years, altered little through
the political vicissitudes of the sixties and seventies.
There were straws in the wind, however. During the 80s BBC drama
consistently commissioned new work from writers on the far left, who were
happy to deconstruct the history of the First and Second World Wars and
re-present a selective and occasionally blatantly untrue version of events
like “The Monocled Mutineer,” a version of a First World War incident in
which certain British troops defied their officers, presented in a manner
which evoked a class war; it recalled the Soviet manner of treating history.
Several plays presented the Falklands war as no more than a cynical maneuver
by Mrs. Thatcher to stir up electoral support — in effect accusing her of
mass murder for domestic political reasons. The only play that contradicted
this view — The Falklands Play by Ian Curteis, was suppressed in
mid-production by the BBC, which then used its contractual rights to stop
the play being presented by another company. The reason, openly stated in
the British press at the time: the play gave too favorable a portrait of
Mrs. Thatcher and her motives.
During the late ’80s and ’90s this approach grew less apologetic and
flagrantly party-political. “The Archers,” the most popular and long-running
radio soap on BBC Radio, sparked an uproar when it inserted fulsome praise of
a Tony Blair speech into its dialogue, just after the speech was made. The
BBC has now commissioned a new television drama about the rise of Tony Blair
to Leader of Labor and his election victory — all this to be broadcast in
the run-up to next year’s general election. A smirking BBC executive
remarked, “The Conservatives will kick up hell over this one.”‘
A similar, more openly anti-Tory approach has infected BBC documentaries.
During the 80s the news feature program “Panorama” broadcast a heavily
slanted report accusing Conservative MPS of neo-Fascism. The MPS sued the
BBC for libel and won. What some have called a Guardian culture (The
Guardian is the most left-wing of the British broadsheet newspapers) has
been long rooted in the BBC. The BBC’s reporting of the bombing of Libya was
nastily anti-American, and incorporated Libyan propaganda footage as news. A
documentary series, Cold War was, to say the least, complaisant about Soviet
horrors, mentioning these only in passing; effectively it blamed the Cold
War conflict on an unreasonable American attitude toward communism in
general and the Soviet Union in particular. The BBC’s “Timewatch” series has
returned again and again, almost obsessively, to the madness of McCarthyism
and the witch hunt period of the ’40s and ’50s, suggesting a moral
equivalence between this and communist repression and banishment of
dissidents to labor camps.
By the end of the ’90s certain high-profile BBC presenters — Jonathan
Dimbleby and Jeremy Paxman in particular — began to color their interviews
in a certain way. Supporters of Blairite policies were given a somewhat pro
forma confrontation but let off rather easily; opponents were bullied with a
sneering tendency to caricature, implicitly accused of quasi-fascist or
racist views on the problem of phony asylum-seekers, and repeatedly had
words put into their mouths. Until this year this tendency to support New
Labor was the property of certain individuals. Then the post of
Director-General at the BBC was given to Greg Dyke, who has been an active
supporter of New Labor (he has contributed £55,000 to the cause since 1994,
when he backed Tony Blair for leader of the Labor Party).
The popular TV program “Question Time” became another vehicle for the
anti-Tory approach. The normal format had speakers from across the political
spectrum fielding public-issue questions from the audience. One of Dyke’s
first spectacular gestures was to ban the Tories from the program during the
recent local elections. It has emerged that “Panorama,” not having learned
its lesson from the anti-Tory libel fiasco of the ’80s, recently attempted
just before the local election campaign to repeat its smear of Conservative
candidates as right-wing extremists and supporters of neo-Nazism. Unable to
find any solid evidence of this they then began ferreting away for sexual
and financial scandal to hang on the Conservative. This, too, came to
nothing, and the suddenly unsexy project was abandoned. Anti-royalist
sentiment at the BBC — there for a generation but never as brutal as it is
now — has recently resulted in Dyke’s refusal to broadcast the public
celebration of the Queen mother’s centenary.
Dyke’s latest coup has been to dismiss the BBC’s political editor —
Robin Oakley, universally acknowledged as an excellent journalist in what
were the best traditions of the BBC — and replace him with a New Laborite
columnist, Andrew Marr. What makes this appointment rather odd is that
Oakley had a contract that was due to run until after the next election. By
dismissing him before the end of that contract, Dyke has made sure that Marr
is in place as political editor during the next election.
Of course the BBC press office continues to deny — in the face of
massive evidence — any slant in its approach to politics. Noting a close
identification of the BBC with the chattering class of intellectuals, is
this the latest chapter in a long-running British trahison des
clercs? Has this once great organization — funded by a license fee
normally independent of government — traditionally dedicated to impartial
journalism and public service broadcasting of the highest quality, speaking
to and for the whole nation, become warped into a megaphone for Tony Blair’s
New Labor government? Certainly, judging from the flavor and texture of
much news and current affairs broadcasting at the BBC — not to mention ITV
(Commercial television, where things are even more blatant) — the BBC, led
by New Labor’s financial backer Greg Dyke, is doing what it can to ensure
that the next election will see Blair and his cohorts still firmly in place,
and set to remain there for the foreseeable future.
Should this matter? Many Americans, who tend to identify the United
Kingdom as just another democracy like ours, have long been used to a
liberal bias in the media. But most of them are unaware of a vital
difference in the United Kingdom’s power structure. Unlike the dominant
party in the American congress, the party leader who holds a heavy majority
in the British Parliament can exercise a form of absolute power. There are
no constitutional restraints on legislation. Parliament (under the last
Conservative government) passed an ex-post-facto law to deal with World War
II criminals; and Tony Blair has shown on more than one occasion that he is
as willing to exercise what is in effect the power of an absolute Monarch.
He has openly rigged local elections in London and in Wales, and is now
negotiating with the Liberal Democrats to alter the electoral system in
Britain in a way that will keep the Tories out of power for at least a
generation and hopefully, longer. With a large majority in Parliament, such
a maneuver is neither illegal nor difficult in the United Kingdom.
Would democratic tradition and moral scruples prevent it? A hint to the
answer can be seen in New Labor’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy. Blair and his
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook are quite willing to rub shoulders with — not
to say occupy the same bed with — the most unsavory organizations and
governments regardless of the most hideous human rights abuses, e.g. in
countries like Pakistan and Zimbabwe. On the domestic front, Blair’s
spin-meister Alastair Campbell becomes ever more ferocious and ruthless in
his efforts to keep the press and television on message. The evidence is
that he is succeeding in the media, and above all in the BBC, to an alarming
degree. The most sinister aspect of this is that no overt compulsion is
involved. The support for Blair and New Labor in the BBC and ITV is not
forced or drilled out by threats. It is voluntary. There is a word for
where all this is going, and that word is not democracy, not by any stretch
of the imagination.
Herb Greer is an American writer residing in Great Britain. He is
a frequent contributor to the Sunday Telegraph.
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