After its Gotterdämerung week, capped by the ‘sorry not sorry’ resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, it didn’t take long for the BBC and its supporters to start flinging mud. You are political; we are not. We are only being nice; you have mounted a ‘right-wing coup’. I’m trying to imagine what a Daily Telegraph coup would look like – Janet Daley rolling in atop a T-54 tank, Charles Moore installed as El Presidente.
You might think that reacting to Michael Prescott’s internal report sooner might’ve been a better idea for Tim Davie than doing nothing much and hoping it wouldn’t leak; that ‘I’ll put this fizzing stick of dynamite in my bottom drawer for six months and cross fingers it won’t go off’ was an unwise strategy. But that isn’t the BBC way.
Striking away from the proscribed ‘nice’ positions is a very hard path to take
Hilariously, chairman Samir Shah yesterday – in his public letter defending the corporation – protests that the issues raised are the very things the BBC’s editorial board has been fervently discussing since January. This is a defence against a charge of inaction? Nothing could be more on-brand. But then, as we also saw yesterday, this is an organisation that reacts to a crisis by – literally – giving itself a round of applause.
Many have been trying to work out the problem with the BBC. At his press conference yesterday, Nigel Farage crystallised the general view among detractors, saying that the BBC ‘employs from such a narrow segment of society’. And yes, that’s true. But this is not a unique issue for the BBC, and it is not inherently connected to its archaic public funding model. ITV, Sky, and Channel 4 News are populated by much the same thin stratum of middle class progressives, and their output is just as bad on the salient issues, and regularly worse.
The problem is far, far wider than the BBC, and cuts across the culture, through all kinds of institutions, both public and private. There are not hordes of rejected, unemployed free thinkers out there; progressivism is the default, and increasingly so. Striking away from the proscribed ‘nice’ positions is a very hard path to take. Even seasoned journalists with left-wing backgrounds have been frozen out for dissenting on the hot potatoes of Israel and gender. ‘Our vital and valued work providing trusted journalism continues,’ says the new acting Head of News Jonathan Munro – the same man who characterised the Trump speech edit as ‘normal practice’. The arrogance is breathtaking. A younger underling would need extraordinary strength of character even to consider going up against that.
We regularly hear that this is an echo chamber or a bubble. But these are inadequate analogies. I can assure you from my own experience with the BBC that these people see and hear the same sensory input as the rest of us. The difference is that their minds simply do not register as valid anything that does not tally with the progressive suite of opinions. I know it’s hard to credit, but they really do believe they are impartial and above politics, that they are self-evidently Good People and thus any criticism is malicious.
The disconnect can be dizzying. Samir Shah blathered yesterday:
Tim [Davie] has gone through a lot of attacks. It’s been relentless, it’s also a very, very difficult job to join… it asks a lot of the director-general in terms of physical resilience and also emotional … you’ve got to remember that these people are human, they have families, they have emotions … It’s not fair, and it wasn’t fair on Tim.
Not one single thought was given for the families and emotions of Jews, or detransitioners, or gender-critical women. They just had to take being ignored, or vilified, or lied about. The increase in anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools, and the growing exclusion of ‘Zionists’ from academic and other associations, has followed the BBC’s twisted reports from Gaza. But poor old Tim on his six-figure salary – get out the hankies! Doesn’t it make you want to spew?
The old guard of BBC News – John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Nick Robinson – were bad enough, but now they have become the dupes of horrible, entitled middle-class brats. The BBC’s problem is the same as everybody else’s: a critical mass of progressivism among the uni-educated middle class. The BBC should’ve seen this and stamped on it when it first became evident around 2012. Instead it ran riot there, worse than anywhere else. It faced the test of a spread of mass delusions – gender, Black Lives Matter, Israel-hatred – and it went all-in on all of them.
This younger, progressive workforce are more interested in using the institution to advance their cause than in anything else. This is something so many outsiders (and indeed older insiders) do not understand, so I must put it into italics: they think that is their job.
In that horrible 90s buzzword, the BBC has to be proactive in ridding themselves of this affliction. The vampire was invited over the threshold long ago, and the only way to rescue the BBC is to break out the garlic and the wooden stakes, as Jeff Bezos has done at the Washington Post, and also Bari Weiss at CBS News. The riot act must be read: leave the activist part of your ‘whole self’ at home, or get out and never darken our door again.
Comments