 | By Stephen Pollard
September 5, 2010 | Share |
Peter Hitchens has written the column I'd have loved to write today about the BBC DG's admission of bias, a remark in Edinburgh last week which seems to have gone almost unnoticed.
Here's the key part:
[F]rom
the Director-General himself, Mark Thompson, we have the admission
that, when he joined the Corporation 30 years ago, there was a ‘massive
bias to the Left’.I love that ‘was’, as if all those
Eighties Leftists have stopped being what they were, and stopped hiring
people like themselves.Also there’s the absurd claim that
the Corporation now has ‘an honourable tradition’ of journalists of the
Right working for it.Really? Perhaps they are strong among the makers of children’s programmes in Gaelic.
The
BBC remains reliably pro-EU, pro-PC, anti-Israel, in favour of the
sexual revolution, soft on drugs, fanatical about man-made climate
change. It has partly cured itself of its crude anti-Americanism, and
Mr Thompson’s confession is plainly a sign of a wider recognition that
things have not been right, in both senses of the word.
DLeigh-Ellis
5 September, 2010 - 13:24
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Rather have a left leaning organisation than another wing of News International and their ironically sloganed 'fair and balanced,' Fox News franchise. The BBC is attacked for being 'leftist,' when other media outlets are so far towards the right they are practically falling over themselves to discredit the BBC, tear it up, buy the bits of it they want and turn it into a profit machine.
And the BBC does have many right leaning individuals working for it.... Have you ever listened to Jeremy Vine on the radio for instance?
This article makes the excellent point that political consensus has shifted towards the right in the last two decades, therefore the BBC being liberal now makes it look more left-wing. The BBC cannot be blamed for holding their position in the face of increasing right-wing sentiment outside their organisation.
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/1206