"A BIT OF THE OTHER"

"A BIT OF THE OTHER"

>> SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 05, 2010

From a discussion about crime, punishment and rehabilitation on Kate Silverton's Radio Five Live show this morning:

Laurence Lee (solicitor for Jon Venables): It goes back in my opinion to maybe the sixties, lack of parental discipline. I don't want to sound too right-wing here…

Silverton: No, carry on because we all get accused of being too left-wing here so we like a bit of the other.

Yeah, a "bit" being the operative word. Apart from Lee, who felt the need to apologise for sounding right-wing, Silverton's other guests were The Guardian's chief political correspondent Nick Watt, leftie blogger Sunny Hundal and, for the second week running, leftie lawyer Philippe Sands. And people have the nerve to talk about left-wing bias. As Beeboidal says in the comments: "Kate take a look at your programme today and tell me if the accusers might just have a point."

Silverton's programme was followed by the first in a new series of 7 Day Sunday which, for once, did try "a bit of the other" by including in its guest line-up Toby Young of the Telegraph and Spectator. I only caught some of it but what I did hear was a definite improvement on the last time I listened.

Perhaps I should do one of these about a production meeting for Kate Silverton's show.

FAVOURED DESTINATION FOR ALL TERRORISTS.....

Part of the menace of the BBC lies in how it willingly, even joyfully, allows itself to be a propagandist for terrorism. The IRA milked this (still does) for all it was worth, so do radical Islamists, and now we have ETA making sure that it lets the BBC know first that it is to stop murdering. Of course, it has made similar claims before, and then gone back on them, but if a terror group wants an image make-over, it has the BBC on speed-dial.

TALL TALES

Interesting story here.

ABC News apologises for running a story claiming that melting ice is making Mount Everest dangerous. But can you guess where ABC got the idea that this was true? Yes - the BBC! ABC has retracted the story. acknowledging it has no factual basis. The BBC remains mute. Lucky all that bias Mark Thompson now confirms lies in the past.

RED LETTER DAY!

The BBC will go to any lengths to say it is not biased, as Mark Thompson has graphically shown this week with his faux confession that the corporation was guilty of bias in the past but not now. The Leviathan wriggles, it bends, it contorts, it grimaces in pursuit of that central tenet. We on this site know that such defensiveness is a load of hogwash, but it's nevertheless very rare for anyone who has held a senior position to break ranks and come clean on the record.

September 5 is therefore a red letter day, because former Today editor Rod Liddle, writing in the Sunday Times (frustratingly, I can't link to the article because of the site paywall),lays bare the pressures he was under in the early noughties. He tells how every week, he was summoned to the office of his boss to be lectured on the need for impartiality on topics such as the US election - by a man who had posters on his wall supporting the Democrats. He also relates a story about something I know something about, having been to some extent involved.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch - back in 2001, a Conservative peer, now of course, soon-to-be ex-leader of UKIP - commissioned a series of independent reports into the BBC's coverage of the EU. This work, stretching back to 1999, is very detailed, systematic analysis of a range of BBC programmes, and has found - as readers of this site will know - that the BBC's coverage of the EU seriously under-represents the eurosceptic perspective (to put it mildly).

Mr Liddle recounts how he was persuaded that what the reports said had substance, and he raised this at his weekly meeting with his Democrat-supporting boss. The response? He was told that Lord Pearson and "these people" (behind the report) were "mad".

Adds Mr Liddle:

"Ah, that's the BBC. Desperate to be fair, according to its charter, but never truly fair. its editorial staff are convinced that they are not remotely biased, just rational and civil and decent, and that those who oppose their congenial, educated, middle-class poiint of view are not merely right-wing, but deranged. They will not for a second accept that they are in fact biased at all..."

What Mr Liddle does not say is that when he was editor of Today, he was just as guilty of stonewalling complaints as his colleagues. He met Lord Pearson to discuss the issues raised by the reports about the EU back in 2001. Then, exactly like his boss, he resolutely defended his programme's output and accused Lord Pearson in print of trying to define bias by stopwatch. This was a classic BBC diversionary riposte that conveniently glossed over that the reports were far more than measurement of the time devoted to the eurosceptic perspective. But at least our Roger has at last seen the light.

Peter Hitchens also looks today at BBC bias in the wake of Mark Thompson's remarks this week. Relevant to what Rod Liddle says, he notes the recent admission by BBC reporter Jonathan Charles about the blind new-era excitement he and his colleagues felt when the euro was launched almost a decade ago. Lord Pearson also complained about that, and he backed it up with solid analysis of how biased the coverage had been. Like everything else, the document was pooh-poohed by BBC top brass as xenophobic fanatasy.

Update: I have been told that one of Rod Liddle's bosses resorted to libelling the author of the Lord Pearson-commissioned EU reports as part of the BBC anything-goes approach to attacking its enemies. The then chief political advisor told Lord Pearson that the report writer was not to be trusted because he had been sacked by the BBC. This was an outright untruth which she was forced to retract following a lawyer's letter.

HORRIBLE HISTORY...

The BBC Thompson unbiased mindset is made up of a complete set of nanny-state values that is based, in turn, on fantasy views of science and human development. One of the central axioms is that life in nature and the past was idyllic. People grew their own food, didn't produce any carbon dioixide, didn't burn nasty fossil fuels and lived in constant orgasmic stasis (or whatever tendy word is in vogue). Anyone who advocates such ideas is instantly elevated to sainthood, or at the very least, front page status on the BBC website. So it is today for this piece of moonshine, carefully crafted by BBC health zealot Jane Elliot. She talks admiringly of a group of behaviour police in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, who are touring schools telling long-suffering youngsters that if they eat like peasants (peasants, note, not the villanous landowners because they crammed themselves with expensive nasties) did in medieval times, they will not get fat and not taint their bodies with vile salt or - shock, horror - food from abroad.

That will be the medieval diet that meant in reality that there was a life expectancy of around 30-35, diseases were rampant and there was a dependence on local food that meant every period of bad weather or low rainfall spelled starvation for our ancestors. Not to mention the back-breaking labour involved. There's an excellent critique of the food problems of the past here; the writer also brilliantly shows how the greenie obsession with localism and organic food is dangerous, self-indulgent nonsense. For the thought police of Mr Thompson's unbiased BBC, of course, the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day.