The grandly titled CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, Deborah Turness, described Donald Trump’s re-election as ‘a dramatic night that changed everything’. She made that claim in an internal email to staff, lauding the Corporation’s ‘unmissable’ US election results coverage.
Her email though raises an interesting question: if Trump’s victory has changed everything, will it also lead to change at the BBC? Among the significant factors that undid the Democrats in the US election was the runaway spread of what Elon Musk calls the ‘woke mind virus’. But while the Democrats seem to have now realised the way they allowed identity politics to alienate their voters, there is no sign yet that our national broadcaster has learned the same lesson.
The BBC and the Democrats have followed a similar path when it comes to identity politics. I recall being baffled when I first heard Kamala Harris state her pronouns publicly back in 2019. I had no idea what Orwellian consequences this strange grammatical tic foreshadowed. The same year, ‘A brief history of gender-neutral pronouns’ was published on the BBC News website. The article cited research that claimed to have found the use of gender-neutral pronouns reduced ‘mental biases that favour men’ and increased ‘positive attitudes towards women and the LGBT community’.
After becoming Vice President, Harris went to even greater lengths to display her ‘inclusivity’ credentials, once introducing herself at a White House roundtable discussion with the bizarre statement, ‘I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she/her, I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.’ Had Trump said something so bizarre you can imagine the sneering commentary from BBC pundits. Instead, crickets.
President Biden next succumbed to progressive politics, describing efforts in Florida to protect children from experimental transgender medical treatments as ‘close to sinful’. At the same time, the BBC prioritised the feelings of trans murderers and rapists when it came to using their pronouns. One appallingly misleading introductory paragraph remains on a story on the BBC News website to this day: ‘A woman obsessed with death who once livestreamed the killing of a cat has been found guilty of murdering a man.’
It was not just gender madness where both the BBC and the Democratic party failed. The Democrats justified looting and calling for the police to be ‘defunded’ in the wake of the George Floyd protests and riots. Meanwhile, the BBC continues to allow spurious charges of bigotry to be made against British police officers, such as in the case of Chris Kaba.
Like the woke warriors of the Democrats, the BBC is too squeamish and cowardly to address the challenges and complexities of multiculturalism head on. Whenever the Notting Hill Carnival comes around, the BBC bends over backwards to portray it as a delightful example of diversity in action, glossing over the inevitable criminality at the event until it is too extreme to ignore, such as when two people were stabbed to death this year. The knife crime epidemic in London is also reported through the BBC’s progressive prism: despite the victims and perpetrators being predominantly black, the coverage focuses on wider societal issues or the availability of so-called Zombie knives, as if the blades are sentient and kill of their own volition.
Across a host of contentious issues, my employer has made the same mistakes as the Democrats, promulgating a set of divisive, far-left values to the dismay of an increasingly alienated and disgruntled public. The BBC is not subject to a popular vote but a recent YouGov poll found just over half of Brits said they have ‘not much’ or no trust in the Corporation. The Beeb fares better than its rivals but it’s not a good sign if one in two people don’t believe what we’re telling them.
Thankfully, Trump’s landslide victory is serving as a curative for some Democrats who have finally woken up to the reality that millions of their fellow Americans voted Republican as a repudiation of the virtue-signalling and judgemental zealotry of the progressive left.
Just as the Democrats need to reconnect with the American people by embracing commonsense values and moral clarity, the BBC must eschew progressive proselytising in favour of genuine impartiality, or it too could face a devastating reckoning.
Comments