Neil Clark writes:
Suppose I told you I was setting up my own broadcasting company -
NCBC - the Neil Clark Broadcasting Corporation [one of the best ideas that I have read in a very long time].
And that NCBC and an NCBC-owned
affiliate had received over £37m in funding from the European Union.
Would you trust NCBC’s coverage of the forthcoming in-out British EU
referendum to be totally impartial- even if I assured you that the EU money was
not going to be spent on program related to the referendum- and that most of
the money had gone to an ‘offshoot unit’?
At the very least, I’m sure you’d
have some doubts. He who pays the piper calls the tune, as the old saying goes.
If NCBC was too critical of the EU-
then its unlikely there’d be too many more checks coming in from Brussels. But
this is no hypothetical example.
Now you don’t have to be Nigel Farage or a paid-up member of UKIP, or
even an EU-skeptic, to be seriously concerned about these developments.
It’s not as if the BBC really needs
Brussels’ money. It already gets £3.37bn a year from the license fee, as
British MP Andrew Bridgen has pointed out.
If more money is needed for
programming then the BBC should be looking at cutting the obscene salaries paid to
its top earners.
It should certainly not be taking money from a political body like the
European Union, especially before a critically important referendum.
The importance of the European
vote, which could be held as early as next summer, can’t be overstated.
A UK
withdrawal would be a huge blow to the EU elite, and to the US, which
desperately wants Britain to stay in to push the US line at meetings.
We know
that the CIA supported Britain staying in the EEC in the 1975 referendum, and partially funded the ’Yes’ campaign and they’re likely to want a
similar result in 2016.
The stakes are high. all right. And with the polls close, it could be the
BBC’s coverage which swings it.
While the rise of RT and other news channels
continues to chip away at its audience, the BBC remains very much the British
people’s first source of news.
If you live in the UK, it’s hard to avoid
listening to or watching a BBC News bulletin or seeing the news when you check
out the BBC website for the weather forecast or the football scores.
But while some right-wing critics of the BBC overstate
their case, it’s sadly true that the old impartiality that the broadcaster was
once famous for has gone.
We have seen plenty of evidence of
BBC bias in recent political events.
The Independence Referendum in
Scotland in 2014 was a close run thing, and arguably it was the BBC’s pro-Union
coverage which made the difference.
“Whatever happens on Thursday, skewed
media performance on Scottish independence, in particular, from the BBC -
has helped huge numbers of people see ever more clearly the deep bias in
corporate news media,” wrote
the media monitoring organization Media Lens.
“Media manipulation was exposed
in stark form when Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, was rumbled by
viewers able to compare his highly selective editing of an Alex Salmond press
conference last Thursday with what had actually transpired,” Media Lens noted.
Then there was the coverage of the 2015 Labour leadership
campaign, which was heavily biased against the non-Establishment challenger
Jeremy Corbyn.
Even after Corbyn was elected, BBC’s current affairs
programmers have been keen to give priority to the new leader’s Blairite
critics, ignoring that fact that almost 60 percent of Labour members and
supporters voted for him.
It’s fairly obvious that the anti-war MP for
Islington North was not the Labour leader that the BBC wanted.
The BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Syria has also lacked
impartiality.
We’re left in no doubt when we watch BBC reports that the
conflict is primarily the fault of official enemy Bashar-al-Assad, with the
Russians playing a malevolent role too.
While the Western powers are portrayed
as benign actors only wishing to do the best for Syria and its people, the
Russians are there to prop up the Assad regime and protect their interests; the
rotten swines!
I noted in my OpEdge last week how
the BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight was still asserting that
the terrible chemical weapons attack in Ghouta in August
2013 was carried out by the Assad government, as if it was all 100 percent
proven.
We shouldn‘t be too surprised at
the way the BBC reports Syria, after all, its current head of news and current
affairs, on a salary of £340,000 a year, is James Harding, a neocon
and former editor of the pro-war Times newspaper.
Pro-Iraq war neocons and Blairite ‘liberal interventionists’ who should be thoroughly disgraced
after Iraq and Libya are still the mainstay on BBC current affairs programs
such as the aforementioned Newsnight, while those
who were proved right on Iraq and Libya rarely get bookings.
In fact, you’ve
got to tune in to RT to watch them.
On Europe too, you don’t have to watch or listen to BBC
News for too long to realize that the Corporation is fairly strongly pro-EU.
Don’t be fooled by the regular appearances of Nigel Farage
on Question Time; the BBC may like to give Farage a platform because let’s face
it, he’s nearly always entertaining and, like George Galloway, boosts audience
ratings, but they don’t share his views on Brexit.
Euro-skeptics already had
legitimate grievances against
the BBC, and now knowing that the Corporation has received funding from
the EU, only makes things worse.
So what is to be done?
The answer
is obvious, the BBC must return all the money it and its ‘offshoot unit’ has received from the EU. That is an
essential first step if public trust in the BBC is to be restored.
In addition, there also needs to be a new grassroots
‘Reclaim our BBC’ movement to try and get the state broadcaster back to the
higher standards of impartiality, and indeed great program making, it had
thirty and forty years ago.
As I highlighted here, the subjugation of
the BBC by government began with the removal of the independently-minded
Director-General Alasdair Milne in January 1987.
Since then, the BBC has been
gradually been brought into line, so that today it merely parrots whatever is
the official government view on a wide range of issues.
As the UK government
line shifts, so does the BBC’s.
Over the past few years, much of its foreign
news coverage might as well have been produced straight from the
FCO.
To add insult to injury, some
political journalists at the BBC, instead of looking at their own role within a
state propaganda system and challenging the way things have gone at the ‘Beeb’, have the nerve to
sneer at RT, joining in with relentless neocon attacks on the station.
Of course, RT has an agenda, to present the news from a
Russian perspective, but to pretend that the BBC doesn’t have an agenda too is
palpably absurd.
The old saying that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t
throw stones comes readily to mind.
With its current charter set to
expire at the end of next year, the BBC urgently needs to regain popular
support if it is to survive as a public sector broadcaster in a far more competitive
media world than it has ever experienced.
Taking money from the EU before a referendum on Britain’s
continued EU membership is most certainly not the way to go about it.
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