Evan Davis clearly has a great sense of humour. You can tell because on his Twitter profile it states: ‘These are only my views — the BBC has no views.’ Yeah, nice one, Evan. Very pert. Very dry.
In fact, of course, the BBC has a view on everything. Israelis? The Nazis taught them everything they know. Palestinians? The human equivalent of those darling little kittens with different-coloured eyes who tumble out of wicker baskets on charming calendars. Man Made Global Warming? A bigger threat than the Black Death, the 1918/19 Flu Pandemic, second world war, Ebola and Armageddon combined. Bankers? Like the SS Das Reich at Oradour, only without their milk of human kindness. Conservatives? Ditto. Businessmen? Like a sort of cross between Nosferatu, Dracula, and the Master from Salem’s Lot but with much longer, more vicious fangs, a greater capacity for blood and a tendency to prey on really sweet blond children while they’re at prayer.
It’s the BBC’s position on business, capitalism generally, which had me so puzzled by Davis’s three-part series Made in Britain. How on earth, I Tweeted to him afterwards, did he manage to sneak under the BBC’s radar such an economically lucid and subversively pro-business thesis? And I wasn’t just angling for a Retweet to his 35,000-plus Twitter following. I meant it: what Davis had done was the equivalent of Soviet-era Pravda running a feature on why five-year plans for tractor production were a seriously bad idea and maybe we should think about free markets for a change…
I caught the final episode (which poured scorn on the old leftist canard about Margaret Thatcher having destroyed Britain’s ‘manufacturing base’ — as if somehow we’d all be so much better off if we still had an ailing shipbuilding industry) just after my ten-day jaunt to the Land of the Free, so I was in an especially anti-BBC mood. Though in the US, as in Britain, the vast majority of the TV broadcast media is in thrall to the liberal-left, the one crucial difference is that in America they have the right-wing counterbalance of Fox. And Fox is what we so badly need over here too.
If you believe the Guardianista caricature, the Fox network’s schtick is to churn out right-wing propaganda in which liberal icons such as George Soros and Ted Turner are revealed to be agents of Satan, President Obama is a crypto-communist and all manifestations of government are a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer on an epic scale. But this tells only half the story. What it neglects to mention is that the blonde co-presenters are really hot, that the Fox network is also responsible for the greatest TV programme in history, The Simpsons, and that in most of its allegations — including the ones above — Fox is in fact bang on the nail.
One of the many jewels in Fox’s crown is the John Stossel show on Fox Business, in which classical liberals and other free-market and small-government types are given space to discuss their ideas without being made to feel like the kind of people who’d sell their grandmothers to the dog-meat factory rather than shave a fraction off their selfish greedy lifestyles to help the poor or combat climate change. I went on myself and what a treat it was: like discovering you’re not, after all, the Only Gay in the Village; that there are in fact millions out there who share your vice and that they’re not all creeps and perverts, they’re really great people just like you.
You’d think what with all the lip service they pay to the vital importance of self-expression and minority rights and freedom of expression, US left-liberals would be delighted at the niche service Fox offers its audience. But they aren’t, they loathe it, which is why leftist campaign groups such as Media Matters for America are forever trying to get Fox’s sponsors to withdraw their advertising. Like most liberals, they’re all for freedom of expression so long as it’s the correct kind of freedom of expression.
And so it is with the British left, too, which has recently been working itself into frothing paroxysms of righteous rage over the News of the World revelations. But however disgusting the NoW’s behaviour may have been — and let me emphasise: I’m not condoning it — it’s nowhere near as disgracefully cynical as the way the liberal-left is exploiting the public’s strong feelings about Milly Dowler and deceased servicemen in order to advance its ongoing campaign against Rupert Murdoch.
Whatever one thinks about Murdoch’s power, influence or morality, on one issue I am absolutely sure: nothing he has ever done in his entire career has had even a fraction of the corrupting influence on British politics as has the BBC’s crippling dominance of the airwaves. On Europe, on tax, on immigration, on ‘Climate Change’, on regulation, on the economy, on multiculturalism, we are where we are because we have allowed our national debate to be defined in terms decided on our behalf by the cabal of smug, metropolitan bien-pensants who run the BBC. We need an alternative voice and if Rupert Murdoch is the only man who can provide it through his BSkyB takeover then he deserves our fullest support. I’d rather get my news from an organisation presided over by a businessman who has made his money by offering consumers what they want, than from one overseen by a statist apparatchik like Chris Patten who specialises in giving consumers what the government wants, that’s for sure.
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