Monday, December 21, 2009

BBC grovelling to the left

The failure of the left to force an agreement at the UN Copenhagen conference last week has obviously upset a lot of people in the media. The left wing newspapers (just about all of them) have been voicing their displeasure, but this wasn't so easy for the BBC who are, supposedly, impartial.

But the BBC are THE left wing media organisation. More than any other they encompass the beliefs and values of the left. They employ an almost entirely left wing staff and broadcast only left wing approved programming.

However, because they are "impartial" they are not allowed to put forward opinions on failures such as Copenhagen. So what to do? It's quite a conundrum but the BBC have now established a way around this.

What they do is they put forward a number of representatives from various left wing NGOs - such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF - and ask them their opinion. As if that matters!

Greenpeace, FoE and WWF are not democratically elected organisations. Their opinions are not required and should not be sought - and they are no more valid than my opinion. The BBC should no more be seeking the opinion of these organisations any more than they should be seeking the opinion of a large multinational corporation for their views on Copenhagen.

But in the days following the failure of the Copenhagen conference the BBC trotted out various spokespeople from the NGOs I mentioned for their opinion in a shameless display of grovelling to their puppet masters.

The worst thing about this is that they aren't even subtle about it. They are quite open about their unashamed bias now - they have stopped even trying to be impartial. It's a national disgrace that this organisation is now so institutionally biased and continues to receive public funding to put forward their putrid views.

5 comments:

bernard said...

Stan -

The only people who take the BBC seriously are the siko-fants that run it. You take them or leave them.

What WAS deeply satisfying was that Copenhagen had the coldest December for over 30 years...and that the "Wisdom of the Crowd" prevailed in the form of China, among others. This huge country saw the hoax for what it was, and put the kybosh on it. They have an abiding fear of black people, and when they saw them with their begging bowls they shot the global warming fox con-trick, stone dead.
I crapped myself larfing.

Stan said...

That may be true about the BBC in the blogosphere, bernard - but out in the real world the vast majority who watch BBC still think it's impartial. Admittedly they are the same people who think that the Sun is a "news" paper and the epitome of upright journalistic standards, but that also happens to be a significant proportion of the electorate.

China was always going to be a problem for the Environazis and I personally wasn't surprised that they refused to stifle their economic growth for the sake of an unproven and highly improbable hypothesis. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that there is at this moment a considerable amount of horse trading going on at the UN behind closed doors to bring China on board.

Anonymous said...

What the BBC is doing is quite rightly public-funded. There is no serious doubt about it. But if you say their views are "putrid", then I, whose opinion is as worthy as that of yours, would say that they are only their "views", not putrid or something like that nor are they acceptable beyond question.

We like to hear from others what we expect them to tell us. But shall we expect the BBC to tell us those things that are the "views" of "some of us"? Perhaps the BBC thinks they are getting people(the NGO variety, of course)to tell those things which are liked by the majority of its viewers. But the question is, should they? To this I say,Why not?

I could say just this knowing full well that my opinion is as good as those of yours.But the BBC's opinions are as good as those of other right-wing or conservative media world-over(since the UK has none of them!)

Self-preservation and self-serving mode will soon ruin this world.And when the wrath of nature strikes, it will be the end of all discriminations.All left-right debates will be put to rest. That will be the only divinely neutral thing to happen to the foolish creatures called human beings. The other creatures will just die-without understanding the implications of the blow.

But, self-pity is certainly not the answer.

Stan said...

I don't really understand your point, anon - but basically I think you are saying that the BBC are entitled to an opinion?

To which I would say no - they are not. If they were privately funded then they would be, but they aren't. Their funding comes from all of us so they must either support ALL opinions equally or have no opinion whatsoever. It is NOT acceptable for the BBC to even take a majority viewpoint - particularly as that is by no means tested by any democratic process within the BBC (which is corporatist).

However, my original complaint was that the BBC sought views of non-democratic organisations (the NGOs) from only one side of an argument and pushed those views as definitive - which it has no right to do. To do so is blatant propagandising and the BBC should be held to account for such distortion.

Anonymous said...

One of my points was precisely that and you are bang on.

But I have another point which, perhaps, has missed you. What should be more important to us all? The BBC’s shameless promotion of one particular view, of which you are somehow convinced, or the whole content of the debate on the issues which Copenhagen grappled with for sometime- with or without success. Of course, I don’t want to start the original debate here. Nor do I want to put forward the devious (?) view that the course of action the world as a whole should take on climate change will be morally right if it is in keeping with the aspirations of the majority of the people inhabiting the world today. If I argue on that line, I would invariably be told that it was not acceptable because only a minority of the countries in today’s world have their governments democratically elected. I don’t have an answer to that.

I could not have agreed more that the BBC should (ideally?) support all opinions. That is warranted simply because all of us pay them. But from the journalistic point of view, it is never easy, if not impossible, to support, or be seen supporting, all opinions. 61 million people will have 61 million views on any blasted issue and they would differ from each other in some way or other. That’s why you are forced to take some policy stand. This position may prompt some people to conclude that you are promoting some cause.
Apart from that, the issue in question does not affect only us, it affects the earth and all its inhabitants. The aspirations of other countries or other parts of the world are not to be scoffed at. What’s the harm if we explore them a little bit? After all, what’s the trouble we are taking except paying the BBC for familiarizing ourselves with those views which we do not support? Those may not be the BBC’s views/opinions at all. Those may be the views of people of some other parts of the world who may cope worse than us when it comes to crunch. We in the UK cannot live in isolation in spite of all our problems.

We had better inculcate the habit of listening to other people (even at the cost of paying for that, too). In passing, I would like to share something which comes to my mind. Speaking of State-funded compulsory education, we pay taxes to fund our education at the basic level. Are we in a position to decide what our children should learn or what they must not? Fortunately, we are not. Because if we had the opportunity to decide those things, the government would have to support and accommodate an unmanageable number of views!