AID POISON...THE ROOTS OF BBC BIAS?

AID POISON...THE ROOTS OF BBC BIAS?

When, why and how did the rot set in at the BBC? As an ex-employee who joined the corporation in 1978 when there were at least some news and programme editors who did not support left-wing lunacy, I have often pondered this point. But a penny dropped this morning when I read an excellent piece about the inestimable corrosive damage caused to Africa by Live Aid...which also has led inexorably to the current prime minister's hell-bent destruction of enterprise in developing countries by his insane insistence on boosting so-called aid budgets. It was, of course, the BBC's Michael Buerk who broke the Ethopia famine story that led to Live Aid the following year. I was indirectly involved, and in the immediate aftermath, I was proud of the broadcast and the impact in terms of famine relief. But then I watched with horror of a series of behind-the-scenes battles erupted. As the television award season approached, I became aware of a major row between Reuters Television(then Visnews) and the BBC. Reuters claimed it was their stringer camerman, the legendary Mo Amin, who broke the story; the BBC, for its part, wanted to take all the honours. It was an unseemly fight to the death which the BBC, with its superior resources and knee-in-groin approach, won - and the corporation walked off with the major gongs at that year's Royal Television Society Awards. I now see that it was probably at that time and in that context that the corporation hitched its wagon irrevocably to supporting "aid" to Africa at whatever price and without regard of the facts. The corporation - and phalanxes of left-liberal recruits who had been drafted into the BBC over the years - became so determined to show it was doing good in the world, in particular in Africa, that it abandoned any pretence of "balance" on such issues. A touch simplistic maybe (you tell me). But it is a fact that since then, the BBC has blindly supported the tenets of aid to Africa and all that goes with it. Bob Geldof and the insufferable Bono are their shining knights. TheWorld Service Trust, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is a campaign vehicle for both its aid paradigm and climate change activism. Comic Relief is another conduit involving BBC staff, resources, and endless one-sided journalism. And out of the steadfast support for such approaches flows the uncritical propaganda about climate change and world poverty that I wrote about yesterday. I thus believe that what happened back in 1984-5 was a watershed. Michael Buerk - however unwittingly - set in train a paradigm of activism that has now become a biased crescendo and underpins the ideology of Cameron and his useless Tories.