I am not quite old enough to have been a full-blooded Cold War Warrior but I can imagine what it must have been like poring over the speeches and statements that emanated from the Kremlin, searching out all those coded mendacities and gussied-up ideological postures.
The closest we come to that kind of excitement these days is by listening to someone like the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke:
BBC director general Greg Dyke has warned of the risks of crossing the line between patriotism and objective journalism.
Not remotely a risk for the BBC where there is not even a hint of either patriotism or objective journalism.
In a speech to a journalism conference in London, Mr Dyke denounced the “gung-ho patriotism” of one US network covering the Iraq war and said it should not be allowed to happen in the BBC.
Oh that vulgar word again! Such a rank obscenity for a member of the defeatist, vacuous, ethically crippled ruling elite.
“This is happening in the United States and if it continues will undermine the credibility of the US electronic news media.”
Credibility in whose eyes?
“And we must never allow political influences to colour our reporting or cloud our judgement.”
This, from the head of a broadcasting organisation whose chief recruitment ground is the jobs page of the Guardian.
“Commercial pressures may tempt others to follow the Fox News formula of gung-ho patriotism but for the BBC this would be a terrible mistake.”
For those of you unfamiliar with British public-sector-speak, allow me to interpret: “We must oppose a free market in information and ideas as this would severely threaten our role as paternalistic gatekeepers of public opinion”.
“If, over time, we lost the trust of our audiences, there is no point to the BBC.”
I think you ought to have a word with the crew of the Ark Royal, Mr.Dyke.
The BBC has yet to undergo ‘perestroika’.
>In a speech to a journalism conference in
>London, Mr Dyke denounced the “gung-ho >patriotism” of one US network covering the
>Iraq war and said it should not be allowed
>to happen in the BBC.
He denounced it? That seems pretty strong to me. I think it is just fine. I wouldn’t want it to be the only news channel available to it, but I want to have access to it. I don’t want “balance and objectivity”, I certainly don’t want someone at the BBC telling me what it all means because the nomenklatura of the BBC think I am too stupid to figure it all out for myself. What I want is choice. I can think of good things and bad things to say about Rupert Murdoch. (Just so I will be balanced, one of the worst things is his willingness to suck up to the thugs who run China). However, when he has found media markets where he was unable to buy existing companies, or where the existing companies were ideologically too far from where he wanted to be himself, he has consistently responded by starting up new companies to compete with them. As a consequence of this, Australia has one (very good) national newspaper it would not otherwise have, America has the Fox TV network (and hence The Simpsons), Britain has the best run satellite TV business in the world (and also Sky News) and America has Fox News.
The BBC has been helped over many decades by British governments. The licence fee is part of this, but even worse is a regulatory structure for the rest of television that has made it actively difficult for anyone else to compete with the BBC. (Until about five years ago, there was only one privately owned TV network, and this was required to be owned by different country and or on different days of the week and/or time of day. Plus the licence was only issued for a few years, and if the government didn’t like the owner of a particular part of it, the licence could be taken away on spurious “quality” grounds).
The trouble with TV in Britain is that it was created by people who believed that it was a low quality medium that would turn into trash if properly educated people like us were not given control of it. This means that it is dominated by an organisation that a lot of the time has contempt for its audience, and that believes that any competition to it is automatically morally worse than it is. Therefore people should be taxed to pay for the morally better option, and the morally worse option – private television – should both be restricted in what it can do, and sneared at at any available opportunity.
(Most people who run businesses and want protection from competition can produce arguments like this if you ask them to. The BBC are experts, however).
Michael.
If the Baghdad Broadcasting Corp. is attacking FOX, something’s happened.
Ark Royal must have hurt, eh?
“The masses” are actually daring to speak up against their betters?
Although Fox came “top o’ the heap” with Dykes, he also tried to lump in all the rest of those pesky commercial channels. Apparently none of them come close enough to that 90-degree ’tilt to the left’ that he considers the “One True Way”. One must be lying down prone in abject obeiance to be acceptable to him and his fiefdom.
There is a section missing in my comment above. In the middle where I say and this was required to be owned by different country and or on different days of the week and/or time of day what I meant to say is this.
and this was required to be owned by different companies in different parts of the country and/or on different days of the week and/or times of day.
What this means is that if you watched ITV in the UK, most of the programs were the same in different parts of the country, but the country was cut up into lots of small regions, and the ITV affiliate had to be owned by different companies in each. In the larger markets, different companies controlled ITV on the weekend to the ones that controlled it during the week, and television in the morning was controlled by different companies to television in the afternoon. This meant that it was impossible for anyone to assert any sort of central control over the network. (And in the event that anyone actually did, they would probably lose their licence at the next review).
Things are not now as bad. There is another privately owned television station (Channel 5) which is owned by the same company throughout the country. Plus the rules on ITV ownership have been relaxed, and there are now only two companies that matter (Grenada and Carlton) and they will shortly be allowed to merge so that a single company will control ITV. (The ITV companies are presently weak due to having participated in some ill fated tech boom ventures, but this will eventually go away). Plus of course there is lots of competition from cable and satellite stations.
This is all why the BBC is so paranoid now. Although it still has its licence fee, its monopoly is essentially gone. And it is now obvious that the emperor has no clothes.
There is a section missing in my comment above. In the middle where I say and this was required to be owned by different country and or on different days of the week and/or time of day what I meant to say is this.
and this was required to be owned by different companies in different parts of the country and/or on different days of the week and/or times of day.
What this means is that if you watched ITV in the UK, most of the programs were the same in different parts of the country, but the country was cut up into lots of small regions, and the ITV affiliate had to be owned by different companies in each. In the larger markets, different companies controlled ITV on the weekend to the ones that controlled it during the week, and television in the morning was controlled by different companies to television in the afternoon. This meant that it was impossible for anyone to assert any sort of central control over the network. (And in the event that anyone actually did, they would probably lose their licence at the next review).
Things are not now as bad. There is another privately owned television station (Channel 5) which is owned by the same company throughout the country. Plus the rules on ITV ownership have been relaxed, and there are now only two companies that matter (Grenada and Carlton) and they will shortly be allowed to merge so that a single company will control ITV. (The ITV companies are presently weak due to having participated in some ill fated tech boom ventures, but this will eventually go away). Plus of course there is lots of competition from cable and satellite stations.
This is all why the BBC is so paranoid now. Although it still has its licence fee, its monopoly is essentially gone. And it is now obvious that the emperor has no clothes.
BBC may be State sponsored boorishness and discriminatory elitism but it is not alone among the coalition. We in the US have the British equivalent in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from the ubiquicuous National Public Radio to PBS’s attempts at “fair and balanced” (if you are as pink as gin). The problem for some of us is that we like to listen to classic music while driving and except for certain stations in major metro areas, most classic music stations are members of PBS or NPR and therefore you become captive to the most left-wing views since Nancy Pelosi was a mere congresswoman from San Francisco. Just think, my British friends, things could be worse – you could live in some small American college town and have a choice – NPR or top 40!!
I can take the extraordinary left slant of the BBC –
it’s the noses pointed skyward that wears me down.
As a post-colonial subject here across the pond I’m shocked that you would claim to have a free press with mandated subjugation to the BBC.
Here in the US our risk seems to be leftist ideology and the resultant bias but the cure, the rise of FOX in the ratings wars, seems possible if glacial.
But until you break up the BBC you really don’t have freedom of the press and pay the price of substantial damage to your freedom of speech.
From the man who brought us Roland Rat (lest we forget) we finally get a word of sense:
“If, over time, we lost the trust of our audiences, there is no point to the BBC.”
I’m with you there, Greg. Lost my trust a long time ago. There is no real point to the BBC. As far as I can see it, the only reason the whole edifice survives at all, is because of:
What could you do right now with £113 quid?
David, you aren’t the only one who noticed Dyke’s sour grapes. May I point interested readers in the direction of this “Biased BBC” post by Niall Kilmartin and this one by me.
(If the dratted Blogger permalinks are taking you to the wrong post, go here.)
Sour grapes seem to go all around here.
The last I knew, the people of Britain do have a choice of newschannels… Noone is forcing you to watch BBC (I do it because I like it). And if you don’t like its programming you can vote on a government that changes its statutes or programming… Something that you cannot do with a private news company the last time I looked.
Joao Branco writes:
“Noone is forcing you to watch BBC (I do it because I like it). ”
Ah, the usual non sequitur of the cornered BBC supporter. It’s a pity that one still needs to point out the glaringly obvious as this has been done so often, but as it is obviously necessary, here we go again.
The difference is that the BBC is funded by taxation, extorted from people who have no choice. It is a paternalistic, socialist anachronism and the only people who support its funding methods are those whose Left-liberal opinions it promulgates.
Sour grapes has absolutely nothing to do with it. If the BBC were left to get its own funding, I would no longer care how many Guardianistas it employed or imbecilic “liberal” causes it championed. But while I am forced to pay for its non-stop rubbish or be sent to prison, I care very much indeed.
Joao
You need to know that we MUST pay £110 ($160) each year for our TV licence, and this money goes to the BBC. Some $3 billion each year.
This is a hangover from decades ago, but no political party has offered to change it.
What we object to is the BBC, which we are forced to pay for, taking a consistent left-wing bias in news analysis and presentation.
The Iraq conflict has merely pointed up how clear the bias is, how endemic.
What we object to EVEN MORE is the Dir-Gen of the BBC claiming that the BBC is impartial. He does not answer any of the complaints against the BBC’s coverage – he tries to deflect attention by criticising Fox.
This time, maybe, the BBC has gone too far in its arrogance.
For Joao Branco – People don’t vote in national elections on the grounds of the parties’ attitudes to the BBC. You are right, in your slack-jawed little comment: No one forces the people to watch the BBC (- yet). The point is, Brits are obliged to fund the BBC, with whose policies they may profoundly disagree, if they want to have a TV in their homes, regardless of whether they would allow its programmes into their homes of their own free will. People are free to support one political party or another with cash – as we know from Bernie Ecclestone, Lakshmi Mittal, Greg Dyke, Mr Sainsbury and all the others – but they’re not free to opt out of supporting the BBC. The jackboot is on their necks. They support it by paying the Danegeld or risk imprisonment.
During the Iraq conflict far more people watched the ITN news at 10pm than the BBC news at the same time. FAR more.
Which perhaps indicates that in time of war the BBC is no longer fully trusted. These figures would have been unbelievable in past decades.
If the BBC did not have the licence fee – if it had to stand on its own feet – it would fall over !
My forecast – within a decade, the BBC will be forced, financially, to get into bed with Murdoch’s Sky. No other broadcaster will be able to sustain the BBC’s inefficiencies.
(By the way – has anyone tried to post any criticism on the BBC’s website ? It is virtually impossible to post anything that is not left-leaning)
I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the BBC make up the headline it wants to deliver as ‘news’ first, and then going about tricking people into giving soundbites that agree with the journalists viewpoint.
I’m all in favour of a publicly owned news service – I pay my licence fee after all – but I just wish sometimes they were a little more accurate and a little less biased.
JohninLondon writes:
“(By the way – has anyone tried to post any criticism on the BBC’s website ? It is virtually impossible to post anything that is not left-leaning)”
I’m glad someone has brought that up. Having had my posts censored on BBC message boards by their commissars (they call them moderators, but we know what they mean), I actually sat down and did that thing one usually just threatens to do: I wrote the BBC a strongly worded letter of complaint.
Astonishingly, a few weeks later, I received a long (as in three pages) and detailed reply. As expected, it refuted my suggestion of political bias, but it did accept some of the other points I had made.
I intend to pursue the matter further when I have the time, but the answer to your question is yes. I remain convinced that the BBC’s messageboards are being politically censored – and were particularly so during the run-up to the Iraq conflict.
Joao Branco says no one is making me watch the BBC. Fair enough.
If I knew where Joao lived, I would take a large smoked salmon and deliver it to his home every single day. When I deliver it, I would also break into his house and take £100 from his wallet as payment. I would do this every day and if he tried to stop me, I would call the police and have him arrested.
I am not FORCING him to eat that yummy smoked salmon, am I? But it is not like I am not giving him something for his money, right? I mean, for all I know Joao loves smoked salmon! And if he does not, well, that is not really very important as I am delivering it to him anyway.
Sure, he did not ask me for the smoked salmon in the first place, but why should that matter seeing as I am delivering it into his home anyway?
Much of the above applies to the ABC [Oz] too.
Despite several surveys/enquiries looking for bias, each time the official version is that there is no bias.
Meantime almost no working class people watch/listen to the ABC, and most Liberal/National voters believe that the bias to the left is the full 90 degrees. And the organisation costs us about 800 million bucks in taxes every year.
Alan
Much of the above applies to the ABC [Oz] too.
Despite several surveys/enquiries looking for bias, each time the official version is that there is no bias.
Meantime almost no working class people watch/listen to the ABC, and most Liberal/National voters believe that the bias to the left is the full 90 degrees. And the organisation costs us about 800 million bucks in taxes every year.
Alan
I wonder, though. In the U.S. the news channels are privately owned but (I think) the airwaves are licensed out by the Guvmint.
Does anybody know what effect that has? Is there implied pressure from the said Guvmint to toe the Fox News line and not report any anti-war stuff? If so, that’s a bad thing too ([not] Voltaire etc)
Not only do the UK pay a forced household tax to the BBC, they also subsidise the internationally screened (via cable) BBC World through the Foreign Office (i.e. taxes).
I personally stopped watching BBC World because of its biased Iraq war coverage. I found CNN was much better and I now watch CNN almost exclusively.
Does anyone have pre and post viewership figures for BBC and BBCWorld? I’d be very interested to see them.
Cydonia wonders how airwaves are licensed out. Spectrum is considered a public resource like land. The government (FCC) decides which portions should be used for what purposes (TV, cell phones, radios etc.) Then, they’re auctioned off publicly to whoever can pay. After that they are basically equivalent to private property and can be bought, sold, divided, merged etc. just like private property. In theory, the television stations are supposed to have a public duty, and do stuff like cover public service announcements and have the newschannels cover presidential debates as a public service, but that is just talk. The channels normally cover that kind of stuff, but only because they want to, for their own reasons. In fact, several channels didn’t cover the presidential debates in 2000, and aside from a lot of despair over civic duty in the editorial pages, nothing happened. The government has zero influence over television by owning the spectrum etc. The real concern is that the television companies have too much influence over the government, including selling spectrum for less than market price and allocating spectrum for the wrong uses and the whole High definition television thing, which is just stupid. The government also has anti-monopoly laws to, in theory, prevent any single company from getting control of all of any region’s news sources. However, the Department Justice has been taking a very loose view of the statute, allowing very large companies with a very large amount of hegemony. Televison executives would laugh if the government tried to control their broadcasts.
Cydonia wonders how airwaves are licensed out. Spectrum is considered a public resource like land. The government (FCC) decides which portions should be used for what purposes (TV, cell phones, radios etc.) Then, they’re auctioned off publicly to whoever can pay. After that they are basically equivalent to private property and can be bought, sold, divided, merged etc. just like private property. In theory, the television stations are supposed to have a public duty, and do stuff like cover public service announcements and have the newschannels cover presidential debates as a public service, but that is just talk. The channels normally cover that kind of stuff, but only because they want to, for their own reasons. In fact, several channels didn’t cover the presidential debates in 2000, and aside from a lot of despair over civic duty in the editorial pages, nothing happened. The government has zero influence over television by owning the spectrum etc. The real concern is that the television companies have too much influence over the government, including selling spectrum for less than market price and allocating spectrum for the wrong uses and the whole High definition television thing, which is just stupid. The government also has anti-monopoly laws to, in theory, prevent any single company from getting control of all of any region’s news sources. However, the Department Justice has been taking a very loose view of the statute, allowing very large companies with a very large amount of hegemony. Televison executives would laugh if the government tried to control their broadcasts.
Simon Barnett posts: “I’m all in favour of a publicly owned news service – I pay my licence fee after all – but I just wish sometimes they were a little more accurate and a little less biased.”
This is a perfect illustration of the supine nature of the majority of the “mustn’t complain” British. He says he pays his licence fee, after all. Yes, because if he didn’t, he would be hauled off to court and fined or imprisoned for his effrontery. And his wish is passing modest. As the statist propaganda machine is funded by him, he “just” wishes they were “a little more accurate” and “a little less biased”. Simon puts himself in the position of supplicant. No wonder the BBC is totally out of control.
To those who note that conservative, libertarian or right of centre comments do not get past the gatekeepers on Have Your Say, try posting a comment just for the hell of it. When the thank-you notice comes up, you will be invited to click on Meet The Team (or words to that effect). Click on it to have your preconceptions proven correct. The “team” who are deciding on whether you may have a say on the notice board funded by your licence fee look to be in their twenties, fresh out of a lefty university and still wearing sloppy student-type, as opposed to business, clothes. One look and you realise that posting an intelligent defence of a conservative or libertarian position is a total waste of time. These self-righteous, politically correct little lefty dictators are not going to let you have your say.
Liberty Belle writes:
“The “team” who are deciding on whether you may have a say on the notice board funded by your licence fee look to be in their twenties, fresh out of a lefty university…”
Well said, Ms. Belle! And, as an earlier correspondent reminded us, by default they are all Guardian readers – because that is the portal through which BBC job applicants must pass.
Having read and re-read the letter the BBC sent me when I complained about its website censorship policy, if it did anything it reinforced my sense that the problem we face is not one of conscious Leftist censorship – it is that the BBC employs people who are so dyed-in-the-wool that they cannot even see that they are biased. They remove Libertarian or Right posts to achieve what they see as a fair balance – which is, as you would expect, massively to the Left of most of us. When we complain, we speak to them in a language they simply cannot comprehend.
These people have been born into a Leftist worldview, educated in a system which rewards compliance with that state of mind and encounter no dissenting opinions until they run up against “Right-wing loonies”. How else can one explain their spluttering rage against the Daily Mail? Their problem with that paper is not so much what it says, as that millions of people go out every day and buy it, because they, broadly, support its views. These are views which the average BBC employee didn’t know existed until they left University and which, in her or his heart of hearts, would like to see eradicated.
Why Greg Dyke’s appointment was a tragedy is because it has simply given carte blanche to the BBC. Instead of being held in check by its senior management, it is now actively encouraged in its propaganda efforts.
Expect worse to come under this pint-sized Stalinist.
G Cooper – Sadly, I agree with you. I too have corresponded with BBC senior management, and the sense of honest bafflement in their replies gives one pause for real concern. I was even told that many accuse the BBC of being too right wing! (He seemed to think this answered the argument.) I believe this mindset makes them more dangerous than they would be if they were manipulating the news and analysis consciously.
To take ‘Have Your Say’ as an example again, as we were discussing it, is it not bizarre that young people just out of university are judging comments made by people of all ages from many countries who have a vast variety of life experiences and a wide variety of disciplines to bring to the table? Yet anything outside this young team’s experience is dismissed as laughable, or loony, or “hard right” – this meaning, in BBCspeak, not left enough. Given the politics of British universities today, these people will never have been exposed to an opposing point of view except as something that earns of a dismissive laugh. They are little thought fascists yet, as you rightly, in my opinion, remark, they don’t know it. Now they’re in the lefty cocoon of the BBC, they will never experience life outside it and will burrow snugly in, propagating views they do not understand are not shared by the people who are obliged to pay their salaries under threat of imprisonment.
I can only echo everything Liberty Belle has said about the terrible state the BBC is in and the seeming impossibility of reforming it.
Stuck in a traffic jam today (what a fine fellow that John Prescott is – what great achievements!) I listened to the repeat of yesterday’s Any Questions. As is the case nine times out of ten, the panel comprised one soft Conservative (in this case, the hopeless Theresa May) plus three Left wingers, one of whom was an American polemicist (though I believe *he* thinks he’s a journalist). I lose count of the times I have complained about the political complexion of this programme’s panels and, as you say, the BBC’s response is always one of wide-eyed, innocent bafflement. They simply do not understand that some of us consider Theresa May a Left-liberal and that people to the Left of her are dangerous extremists.
Following the appalling Any Questions? Why, it’s Any Answers, in which an army of Leftists jams the switchboard. On the rare occasion that anyone with a Right-wing or Libertarian point of view is broadcast they are either speaking with an accent guaranteed to make the toes of the Lefties curl (and I include in that an American one), or they are speaking in green ink – close to mad.
In the past I used to think that this imbalance was due to the selectivity of the BBC switchboard censors. Eventually, I came to believe that the Corporation’s claims of fairness were probably true. The programme is so biased towards the Left-liberal point of view that only fellow travellers can bear to listen to it and call in afterwards. A sad corollary to that, by the way, is that I suspect that only those of a Left-liberal persuasion have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than `phone in their vacuous opinions to Radio Guardian.
It has taken me many years to make the journey from BBC Radio devotee to someone who would cheerfully consign the whole organisation to the scrapheap. As far as I am concerned it is now beyond possibility of redemption and should be done away with.
Cydonia: just to follow up on government regulation of news channels in the U.S.: Fox News (FNC), MSNBC, and CNN are cable/satellite channels; they fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC, but there are no spectrum licensing issues. There are some minor regulations about equal access to cable/satellite providers (they aren’t allowed to exclusivity to a particular outlet; i.e. CNN can’t only offer itself to cable systems owned by AOL/Time Warner), and they do come under the indecency standards (like all TV programming except pay-per-view or subscription services, which are subject just to the obscenity standards), but beyond that there’s little regulation.
However, Fox/News Corp and NBC/General Electric do have broadcast interests, so theoretically those spectrum interests could be squeezed, and AOL Time Warner has other regulated businesses (cable, telecom), as will Fox after the DirecTV (a DBS satellite provider like BSkyB that competes with another DBS service called EchoStar/Dish Network, landline cable, and a few remaining microwave services) acquisition.
(There are other news channels too; Newsworld International takes programming from the CBC and other public broadcasters, the cable/satellite-funded C-SPAN channels air some international news, and there are a few non-English channels. Not sure why BBC World isn’t distributed in the U.S., but I suspect it’s the BBC’s decision, not a U.S. one.)
Thanks to Chris and ML for info. re the regulatory position.
The reason why I posed the question was because an anti-war friend of mine has forcefully made the point that U.S. media coverage has been, in its own way, as slanted as some of the coverage here.
If this is purely a result of free-market pressures then I have no problem with it. He who pays the piper etc. On the other hand, if the Federal coverage has leverage (directly or indirectly) then that would be worrying.
Can Chris/ML say whether there are any other Government related media regulatory or control issues in the U.S. that might have impacted on the nature or tone of the reporting of the war in the U.S.?
Cydonia
cydonia… “If this is purely a result of free-market pressures then I have no problem with it. He who pays the piper etc.”
…so you have no problem with inaccurate, pro-government reporting, provided it doesn’t come about as a consequence of government intervention? Pardon me, but man! isn’t this being ideologically partisan in the extreme, with no real-world pragmatism whatsoever? Following your reasoning, presumably you’d prefer to be misinformed by a privately owned news company than presented with relatively unbiassed news from a government-run news service. Is this really the case?
I can understand that if you start with the premise that the free market will always deliver good results, then yes, a biased, but privately owned, news outlet is a perfectly good thing, and inherently superior, by it’s very nature, to any state-monopoly system, but by any other standard of judgement (like the usual way of judging news; is it accurate & relatively unbiassed), it will surely be found lacking.
If i’ve misunderstood your post, apologies, & feel free to clarify.