Thank god for Emily Maitlis. Finally someone has had the balls to call out the pro-Brexit, pro-Boris bias of the BBC. It’s been staring us in the face for years, as the Today programme, Newsnight, Question Time and the rest have become ever-more subsumed into the Ukipper deep state, forever deferential to its poundshop fascism.
If that portrayal of our state broadcaster sounds like some wild-eyed conspiracy theory to you, utterly detached from reality, that’s because it is. But that didn’t stop Maitlis – formerly of the corporation, now unshackled from Beeb impartiality rules and with a new Global podcast to promote – from trotting out a version of it in a high-profile speech in Edinburgh yesterday.
Maitlis – a BBC journalist of 20 years, latterly at the helm of Newsnight – gave the MacTaggart memorial lecture yesterday at the Edinburgh international TV festival. Which in recent years has become a forum for ‘impartial’ broadcasters to bash the government. In 2019, the head of news at Channel 4 used the spot to accuse Boris Johnson of ‘aping Vladimir Putin’s media strategy’.
I can’t have been the only one wondering if Maitlis has been watching the same BBC as the rest of us
This time around, Maitlis’s ire was aimed more at her old employer, albeit for indulging the alleged lies of Boris and Co. and failing to stand up to populism. She accused the BBC of ‘both side-ism’, specifically its outrageous tendency to seek out the pro-Brexit side of the argument, and of failing to adapt to an era in which ‘facts get lost’ and ‘constitutional norms [are] trashed’.
Apparently, there are Tory subversives crawling all over Broadcasting House. Maitlis singled out Robbie Gibb, without naming him, labelling him an ‘active agent of the Conservative party’ who is now ‘acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality’. (Gibb, a former BBC man turned adviser to the May government, was appointed to the BBC’s board by Johnson last year, and has been involved in impartiality reviews of BBC output.)
I can’t have been the only one wondering if Maitlis has been watching the same BBC as the rest of us. That is, the BBC that clearly stacks panels against Brexiteers, whose reporters wonder out loud on air why pro-Brexit demonstrations are ‘very white’, and whose former editorial director was caught saying Brexit was ‘rubbish’ in an email offering guidance to journalists.
What’s striking about Maitlis’s critique, which has been curdling among elite Remainer media for a while, is that it essentially posits attempts at impartiality as bias. Booking a pro-Brexit economist isn’t offering the other side, from this warped perspective, it is legitimising quackery – Maitlis and her favoured experts have apparently already decided which debates are ‘settled’.
Perhaps we’d be more inclined to follow her torturous logic if Maitlis herself had left us in any doubt as to her own political leanings in her final years at the Beeb. There was her infamous Dominic Cummings monologue, a fact-lite screed that was found to have broken BBC impartiality standards. And she once chided The Spectator’s own Rod Liddle for ‘the bile that you spew up’.
What she’s essentially arguing for is for the BBC to more explicitly become the voice of liberal Remainerism, the UK’s answer to MSNBC. She came close to admitting this at the end of her speech, insisting that ‘while we do not have to be campaigners, nor should we be complacent, complicit, onlookers’ (my emphasis). That ‘do not have to’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
The Remainer media often talk about how Johnson has torn up the rulebook and destroyed democracy, largely it seems because he helped win a referendum and then had the gall to insist the result be implemented. But it is they who have changed. So much were their minds scrambled by Brexit, they seem to have convinced themselves that impartiality is bias, that overturning a vote is democracy, that the BBC is pro-Brexit.
The only thing the Maitlis speech proves is that, six years on from the referendum, they’re still not even close to being over it.
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