BBC ‘SOWS HATE: Academic David Sedgwick, whose latest book about the BBC is called ‘The Fake News Factory’, claims that the Corporation , which sees itself as a ‘national unifier’, is actually more concerned with sowing dissension and hatred in its blatant partisan support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Under the headline ‘ Can Britain endure seven more years of the BBC?’ on Comment Central (July 6, 2020), he compares the BBC’s current zeal for multiculturalism with McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the 1950s.
OBFUSCATION: On Breitbart London, James Delingpole, attacked what he called (among other words) ‘a mealy-mouthed, evasive, slimy, politically-correct, issue-ducking’ tweet issued by BBC South-east, in which it was said that a victim of the 7/7 London terror bombings died ‘when the bus he was on exploded’. Mr Delingpole noted a comment under the tweet which asserted: The bus did not explode. The rucksack being carried by an Islamic lunatic high on religious zeal … exploded on his back’.
BBC ‘BLACKMAILS GOVERNMENT’: Guido’s blog (July 7) suggested that the decision by outgoing BBC director general Tony Hall to spend £100m on a cultural diversity drive has led to exert alleged ‘blackmail’ on the government by threatening to axe Poilitics Live and also to dispense with the services of presenter Andrew Neil.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY: Fraser Myers, writing on Spiked! , claimed that in culling one in six regional programme and local radio staff and threatening to axe Politics Live, the BBC had lost the plot. Like Guido (above), Mr Myers linked the decision to the increased concentration on cultural diversity, and pointed out that this was despite the fact that internal surveys showed that employment levels at the Corporation of ethnic minorities were above the percentages in the population as a whole. He noted that a clutch of programmes that were an embodiment of public service broadcasting were being chopped. Mr Myers asserts:
“It’s been clear for some time that the BBC has struggled to marry its coverage of the culture wars with its commitment to impartiality. But its output in recent weeks has been extraordinary, and the lines between reporting and analysis versus opinion and activism seem to have disappeared entirely.”
WOKISM “DOMINATES BBC OUTPUT”: Doublethinker, on Biased BBC (9/7), claims that no area of BBC output – not even Gardeners’ World, of Antiques Road Trip – is now free of ‘nauseating levels of Wokism’.
NEW TODAY EDITOR: The BBC corporate press office has announced that Owenna Griffiths, currently editor of BBC Radio 4 programmes PM and Broadcasting House, has been appointed to be editor of the Today programme in succession to Sarah Sands. The press release says that Ms Griffiths has spent most of her career at the BBC, including a nine-year stint as a Today producer. She is the daughter of Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, a Conservative politician and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher.