The task isn't a difficult one. Let's just listen to the BBC's U.S. correspondent Justin Webb, writing on the network's Web site: "America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible [sic] bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based on knowledge."
"I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture," he confesses, "and that picture is in many respects a true one."
And
...But there is little doubt that, as Mr. Aitken puts it, a center-left groupthink dominates at the BBC and colors its entire output. It's not deliberate. It's worse. The producers just can't imagine that someone could possibly oppose European integration or any of the other left-wing causes because to them, and their friends, these are self-evident truths. It simply doesn't even occur to them that reasonable people could disagree with them.
The influence of this groupthink goes far beyond the BBC and now permeates the cliquish world of British broadcasting in general. Almost everyone in the television business has worked for the BBC at some point, sipped the Kool-Aid, and now carries the torch of institutional leftism. With few exceptions, every newscast in the country looks and sounds like a knockoff of the Ten O'Clock News, and the nation is not better for it.
Mr. Aitken is said to be the first BBC insider ever to come out of the conservative closet, and he is now putting his opinions into book form. He says that he tried to convince his bosses at the BBC of the problem, going to the trouble of documenting the bias for its Board of Governors, but none of them could be bothered.
And we pay for the privilege.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment