As revealed by a senior controller.
Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning, said that the corporation should encourage "peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking."
Mr Stephenson then tried to excuse his bias by claiming that the phrase had no political meaning.
"Like 'left-field', it is a phrase that I use with frequency when talking to the creative community to encourage them to develop and approach their ideas from a completely new perspective," he said.
In which case Mr Stephenson is either a fool - and I don't think that someone that stupid should be a controller in the BBC - or is being deliberately disingenuous. Unless he is a complete idiot he will know damn well that "left of centre" is a political phrase meaning socialist. He'll also know that it does not mean the same as "left field" and is not interchangeable with that expression.
I don't think Mr Stephenson is a fool - I think he knows only too well what is meant by "left of centre" and slips it in to promote his own particular choice of politics - and I believe he is far from being the only one who is left of centre in the BBC who does this. I think he's got so used to doing it unchallenged that it didn't occur to him that some people might disagree with him.
2 comments:
He's a liar, plain and simple. He got caught trying to push something that he shouldn't have and is desperately backtracking.
What a weasel.
Absolutely, but the main concern for me is that this is indicative of the in built bias that exists at the BBC and which goes unchallenged. If this were a commercial company then they could be as biased as they like (well - they couldn't, but it would be less of a concern) - but this is an organisation funded by the public under threat of imprisonment if we refuse to pay. As a conservative I resent the idea that I am required to fund the promotion of socialist propaganda. The BBC claims that is is balanced because it gives fair hearings to Labour and Tory - a dubious claim in my opinion, but one that the watchdog concurs with - but my argument is that isn't enough. Virtually all non-political programming from the BBC - drama and comedy as well as factual - comes with a profound left wing slant. There is little (if any) programming that has a positive conservative message which is a clear bias. Add on to that the fact the Conservative Party isn't very conservative anymore and virtually the Beeb's entire output is left wing to one degree or another.
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