A Christian Eye on Politics
The BBC, the main governmentally-supported broadcasting authority which operates within Great Britain has recently been in the news. It has effectively been attacked by an authority, the BBC Trust, which was originally set up by the BBC itself.
Nicole Martin, Digital and Media Correspondent of Telegraph.co.uk, explains,
'The BBC's flagship news bulletins are failing licence-fee payers across the country by being too "London-centric," a hard-hitting report will claim. The strongly-worded study, commissioned by the BBC's governing body, will accuse the corporation's national news and current affairs programmes of ignoring events in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It will say that viewers outside of London are getting a second-class service because news bulletins such as the Six and Ten O' Clock News do not provide sufficient coverage of events outside of the South-East. "The thrust of the report is that the BBC has not adapted sufficiently radically to the changing face of the UK," a source close to the report told The Daily Telegraph.' (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2105111/BBC-news-too-London-centric,-says-report.html).
The report duly appeared and was quite scathing. The basic problem has been that the BBC National News should reflect the entire British Isles but has been heavily London-centric and southeast England-centric. This is not new - it has gone on for years. Now, of course, nobody denies that London is the capital, nevertheless the continual unstated assumption that what happens in London and the southeast is of primary importance and events which occur in places like Devon, Cornwall, Wales, northern England and Scotland are always peripheral at best can become quite annoying during many national news broadcasts. The Trust found that in a sample of 136 BBC news reports on health and education, not one mentioned the situation outside England. The BBC Trust also stated that,
(The BBC was) "...not meeting properly its core purpose to inform democracy."
However the problem of BBC bias is much bigger and broader than simply a regional bias. For many years the BBC has not reflected typical British political opinion, despite many hundreds of hours devoted to politics in the average year. For a long while liberals have controlled the BBC output and these people always uphold left-of-centre politics as being the 'middle ground' of British opinion when it never has been. Genuine right-wing views are either completely ignored or presented with a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek assumption that the holders of such opinions would have been supporters of Adolf Hitler! This manifests itself in several ways, and we can look at three examples:
1. For many years ex-conservative Prime Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher had to endure continual jibes and sarcastic comments from BBC News reporters when they should have simply accurately recorded events.
2. Leading Labour Party figure Tony Blair, of highly liberal views, was 'spotted' as the man of the future long before he became British premier and was lovingly courted by BBC liberal reporters and correspondents for many years after he became British premier until his support for the Iraq War caused him to abruptly fall from grace. Since that point, the frequently observed 'tongue in cheek' derision towards Blair leaves one in no doubt that certain highly liberal BBC pundits have wished to destroy his reputation (of course, it could argued that Mr, and Mrs, Blair have personally done quite sufficient to help destroy their own reputations).
3. The present US President, George W. Bush has been the subject of unceasing sarcastic and caustic reporting, BBC Washington Correspondent Matt Frei being very typical of this in his highly jaundiced anti-Republican 'White House' reports; His father had to endure much of the same, as did President Reagan in his day and a BBC preference for the American Democratic party in its American political reporting has been very evident for many years.
But surely the British people have every right to expect unbiased reporting from their own national broadcasting corporation, an organisation which is entirely supported by the people (through the annual BBC license fee, which every television viewer has to pay). If, for example, we compare 'BBC politics' with typical UK 'newspapers politics' we see that right-of-centre political opinions are well-represented in several newspapers, including the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and (especially) the Daily Express, yet the BBC carries on as though such opinion either does not exist or that it can be best compared to Nazism, therefore is best ignored. Is this not simply prejudicial arrogance on the part of BBC political reporters and correspondents?
As an American who recently spent two years living in the UK remarked to me,
"Watching only BBC news reports would give one the feeling that the Brits are nutty about 'climate change' issues, that they are generally left-wing and very distinctly anti-American, but having extensively travelled in your country I don't find that those are typical British opinions at all, you need to speak to typical Brits and you need to read your papers to get a better balance. When you do that, especially when speaking to the average people, you find that 'climate change' is probably the least important subject to most of them, but fears about mass immigration, concern about identity fraud, dislike of the European Community and anger that the government has failed to tackle the great surge in violent crime, especially among the young, are 'top agenda' matters. It is fair to say that most of the British media, and the BBC are typical here, continue to ignore these real public concerns because they have their own agenda."
The Christian Hawk,
June 20th, 2008.