If Murdoch is too Powerful, Then so is the BBC

[Teddy Bear]

With the BBC sparing no opportunity to continue their quest to prevent Murdoch taking over BSkyB, Ed West at the Telegraph uses their argument back at them.

If Rupert Murdoch is too powerful, then so is the BBC

By Ed West Politics Last updated: July 11th, 2011

In all the furore over the size and influence of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, let’s not forget one crucial fact: that the greatest concentration of political power remains with the BBC.

Contrary to the idea that Right-wing press barons set the agenda, television and radio are far more powerful in influencing politics than newspapers. And the further down the newspaper market one goes, the less politics matters: the Sun and News of the World might be nominally Right-wing, yet during the 1980s a majority of Sun readers voted Labour; not only that, but a majority of Sun readers thought that their paper supported Labour. How much influence do downmarket newspapers really have? After all, British tabloids are universally hostile to immigration – and a fine load of difference that has made in recent years.

Yes, tabloids tend to be hostile to single parents who jump housing lists, and to asylum seekers who cannot be deported because of human rights act, but that’s because their readers overwhelmingly are. Most of the public are not natural Independent readers; it’s a comforting liberal myth that without the false consciousness imposed by media barons, the proles would be in favour of reduced prison sentences, the alternative vote, and all the other progressive ideas which have a plurality in precisely 12 constituencies in England.

In contrast, the BBC and its house newspaper, the Guardian, wields huge power, both through its biased news coverage and its Left-leaning television making. As Michael Buerk wrote: “What the BBC regards as normal and abnormal, what is moderate or extreme, where the centre of gravity of an issue lies, are conditioned by the common set of assumptions held by the people who work for it.”

This is partly why elite attitudes to a host of a social issues are at such odds with majority opinion. Often, I would venture, the elite gets it badly wrong: remember that a decade ago the BBC/Guardian’s main charge against Murdoch was that he was using his influence to turn the public against the euro, and that without him they might join up.

If that was the case, then thank God that the British people listened to the ruthless, foreign media baron and not the voice of their betters.

[Teddy Bear]

Anybody examining BBC already sickening and blatantly biased output since the prospect emerged about a week ago that the hacking scandal could effect the Murdoch takeover of BSkyB, would have a complete study in just how contemptuous is the BBC of its charter.

They seem to have no shame dedicating every news programme with further interviews to ingrain their message of how 'evil' is the prospect if Murdoch would fulfil his take over. Considering how long ago news of the the hacking scandal first emerged, it is only sice that the use of it as a tool to stymie Murdoch's takeover bid, that it seems to have merited this attention.

Listening to The World at One today on Radio4, it devoted the whole programme to this theme, and as far as I can see the British public just considers this 'normal'. Unable to make the connection that there is a clear motive by the BBC to prevent increased power to Murdoch as it would encroach on that they already have.

Their use of their resources to further their own ends should be a clear sign to the British public that it is time to 'clip the wings' of their national broadcaster and end the licence fee once and for all.

The Commentator has more on the subject.

British Left moves to consolidate media stranglehold after hacking scandal
Labour and the Guardian have the BBC. They’re exploiting News of World debacle to stop greater TV-media plurality, and prospect of FOX UK.

“Murdoch's malign influence must die with the News of the World.” That is the headline chosen by the Sunday edition of the Guardian for its leader column on the demise of Britain’s best-selling Sunday tabloid: an explicit call for the end of Rupert Murdoch as a meaningful force in British public life.

Nothing new there of course. Borderline racism – repeated in Sunday’s article -- about Murdoch’s Australian origins and, worse, his domicile in the United States, has been a staple of Leftist discourse for years. They want to finish him. They don’t care how. And, like vultures circling over a rotting corpse, they sense that the time to swoop is near.

But it is vital to see what lies behind all this, and to understand that if it wasn’t Murdoch it would be (and one day will be) someone else.

To be sure, for the Left, Rupert Murdoch is a hate figure. But he also serves as a proxy for an emerging world of media plurality that fills them with fear.

Of course, that is an inversion of the charge the Guardian itself makes against Murdoch due to his control over several of Britain’s top newspapers.

And once upon a time that argument might have held some force, though a good deal less than was claimed for it. But the rise of the internet has largely put paid to all that.

Most newspapers are loss makers; many will be gone in under a decade; and with the emergence of a multiplicity of online platforms a genuinely pluralistic, text-media environment (including outlets such as The Commentator) cannot now be stopped.

Which is why attention in this debate has so quickly turned to television.

Right now, the issue of the day is Newscorp’s attempt to take over BSKYb. The Labour Party is tabling a motion in parliament calling for the bid to be suspended. The Guardian editorial thundered today that:

“…it is essential that Murdoch's control of BSkyB is rejected, as we have argued consistently in these pages. The spectre of the old Murdoch, whose demise was signalled last week – voracious and threatening – must not rise again from the ashes of the News of the World.”

What exactly do the Guardian and the Labour Party fear so much from this proposed deal? It can’t be media plurality, as they claim, since they’re die hard supporters of the BBC, the state-funded media monolith that dominates international, national, regional and even local broadcasting.

What they fear, of course, is that that left-leaning monolith might get some serious competition. Not right now: Britain’s incredibly rigid broadcasting regulations prevent proprietors from mounting an ideological challenge to BBC bias.

But the fear is that once Murdoch (or someone like him) can establish a major beachhead in the UK television market, it will only be a matter of time before the regulatory environment changes. At which point, the emergence of a British equivalent of the wildly popular FOX News channel will be a foregone conclusion.

That is what this is all about. The Guardian and the Labour Party have a stranglehold over the dominant media outlet influencing the terms of national debate. They don’t have the Sun, they don’t have the Mail, but in the BBC they have something vastly more powerful.

They see a straight line from a successful BSKYb takeover to the emergence of a truly pluralistic television media environment. And that vision terrifies them.

Make no mistake about it. The Left’s agenda is about censorship and control. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Teddy Bear]

Now Murdoch has pulled out of the takeover, no doubt those at the BBC and Guardian must be jumping with joy at their success in being instrumental in bringing this about.

Here's my comment awaiting posting on the Daily Mail article announcing News Corps pulling out.

So let's see...we find out that some journalists have no ethics - NO KIDDING!!! It's horrific that so many people in this country put their faith in them to begin with - WHO ARE THEY?
Those that can DO - Those that can't TEACH - Those that can't teach ADMINISTRATE - and those that can't administrate give their opinions, mostly without a clue how to make anything work in the real world. But they are those that you accept as the alternative to using your own brains.

Did you notice other corrupt journalists at the BBC running every (Balanced and unbiased - HA HA HA) news and topical programme for the last week doing their best to neuter Murdoch's BSkyB takeover? Any surprise that the BBC and Guardian and the rest of the left-wing mindset - the same kind of mindless journalists pushing their pathetic agendas want to get rid of the competition? The 'Great British Public' let them do it without a murmur.

You deserve the EU- AGW-Labour bias- Multiculturalism etc - Expect more - LOTS MORE!

[Teddy Bear]

I can always count on the voice of sanity that is Melanie Phillips to spell out my thinking on any given subject - Bless You Melanie

Murdoch Derangement Syndrome

Not since the death of Princess Diana has there been a Robespierrian moment like this one. In the space of just over a week, what started as a scandal over alleged criminality and corruption involving the News of the World and the Metropolitan Police (where I have always thought the really important scandal lies; more on this later) has developed the kind of insurrectionary frisson that we last saw in the wake of Diana’s death in a car crash, when for a moment the monarchy itself seemed to be in danger at the hands of those who believed the Royal Family had effectively (and in the minds of not a few conspiracy nuts, actually) killed her.

This time round, the frenzied mob consists not of the public but members of Parliament, the BBC and the left-wing media baying for the blood of Rupert Murdoch. That difference aside, the similarities with the Great Diana Derangement are very striking. It’s not just the hysterical delirium, the loss of proportion and rationality in depicting Murdoch as a figure of diabolical power – of which Gordon Brown’s speech to Parliament, as deludedly selective as it was viciously enraged, was an all-too apt encapsulation rather than the weird aberration that it has been painted.

No, the really striking similarity with Diana Derangement is the toxic combination of the cult of the victim, mass credulity and pathological projection and displacement neurosis that is fuelling the frenzy.

After all, no-one cared when it was only celebrities who were thought to be in the frame. The explosion was detonated only when it was revealed that the News of the World hacked or ‘blagged’ the voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. That was indeed awful, not least because it cruelly raised her family’s hopes that she was still alive.

But since then, it has almost seemed as if someone was methodically and cynically going through a list of the most emotive targets possible for the demon hackers of Wapping – families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown’s sick child (though the Sun has pretty convincingly demonstrated that that one was a lie; whoops!), the victims of the London 7/7 victims and now even the 9/11 victims in the US. The felling of Murdoch is the moment when victim culture was armed with rocket launchers.

Credulity because the hysteria is being ratcheted up with every fresh allegation regardless of whether or not it is true (see again Gordon Brown’s sick child, for example). People are waving their fists with every claim -- which they know must be true purely because they want to believe whatever fits their own prejudices. And so the irony is that they are assuming that what the media is claiming is by definition what actually happened -- just as they believed the myth of Diana and the alleged flinty-heartedness of the Royals that she had managed to convey through her manipulation of the media, that very same media whose collective neck the mob now want to place on the block.

As for psychological projection and displacement neurosis, this is on an epic scale. Murdoch is being treated with an infinitely greater degree of fury than, say, war criminals on trial at The Hague. Yet he has actually done good things for the media, as William Shawcross has bravely pointed out in the Spectator.

For sure, if the allegations against his organisation are true then it did very bad things too, and he must take the rap for that. But for heaven’s sake, many other newspapers -- including some which are currently burnishing their haloes -- have done similar things. The hypocrisy and humbug here are really quite staggering. It will be interesting to see if Lord Justice Leveson, who has been entrusted with the judicial task of cleansing the Augean media stables, lists all those newspaper and journalists who have made use of private investigators who employed dubious or illegal means to obtain information.

For many MPs, of course, this is actually payback time against the whole of the media for having exposed their institutionalised corruption over stealing large amounts of public money through the expenses scandal. But Murdoch’s real crime, and the real reason for the hypocrisy and double standards, is not that he may have presided over criminality or corruption, to which MPs are hardly strangers.

No, Murdoch’s real crime is to have exercised power at all. Just look at them, these MPs working themselves up into a tsunami of sanctimony – treacherous, unprincipled, dishonest, corrupt and above all powerless, as they suck up to party patronage and thus surrender the powers that reside in Parliament to curtail the government of the day, and even surrender its powers of self-government of the nation itself with their supine acquiescence to the EU.

And so because Murdoch does possess power, these powerless MPs invest him with truly demonic qualities. Thus the pathetic Ed Miliband tells the Spectator that Murdoch’s ‘spell’ is now broken. His spell? You’d think this sorcerer personally had lobotomised half the country and conjured away the free will of the rest. Those politicians who fawned on him chose to do so. And they fawn on other powerful media figures too. Didn’t David Cameron remake the Conservatives, after all, as ‘not-the-nasty-party’ in order to neutralise the BBC and the Guardian?

Similarly, Murdoch has been blamed for driving down standards throughout the rest of the media. But no-one forced those papers to spiral down-market and pander to the cult of celebrity. That cult most certainly was not the work of Murdoch alone but derives from a profound cultural malaise, a shallowness and narcissism rooted in a loss of certain essential values. I recall when in the eighties the Guardian introduced what I considered to be malicious trivia in its new section, G2. I thought that was a shocking repudiation of the journalistic values in which I had been trained. But the prevailing view was that it was a work of genius because it so perfectly caught the zeitgeist-- and its prime architect was a gifted chap by the name of Rusbridger, who went on to become the paper’s editor. Was that Murdoch’s doing? Hardly.

In other words, this is all classic displacement activity -- blaming a scapegoat for things you yourself have done or characteristics of which you yourself are ashamed. Britain is currently going down with all hands – loss of self-government to Europe, collapse of belief in itself as a nation, destruction of education standards, implosion of family life, loss of moral compass over dependency and victim culture, and so on.

The left hate Murdoch because he alone managed to thwart its hegemony over western culture and its agenda to undermine it. Maybe he has been a source of corruption in public life. If so, all responsible should be brought heavily to book. But the corruption goes far wider and deeper. It is a culture that has rotted from the inside out, and the Murdoch empire was merely a scavenger on the carcass. The frenzy against him is the rage of Caliban at his own reflection.

[Teddy Bear]

Excellent article by James Delingpole on the subject.

The BBC Is at Least a Thousand Times More Evil and Dangerous than Rupert Murdoch
by James Delingpole

Britain has gone completely mad over the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World hacking affair and the contagion is spreading to America fast.

I knew things were bad when I spoke yesterday to a normally reliably conservative US talk radio show. “But they say they may even have hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims,” said the appalled female co-host, as if this were the ne plus ultra of round, unvarnished evil.

Some perspective, please. I too respect and am moved by the plight of the 9/11 dead and their families. And of the murdered English schoolgirl Milly Dowler and of the servicemen who died in the Iraq war. (They too, apparently, may – and let’s stress that word “may” – have been targets of phone hacking by the now-disbanded Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper the News of the World).

But then, so do you. So does everybody. No one in the world right now is sitting there rubbing his or her hands in glee and going: “Heh heh. 9/11 victims. Murdered schoolgirls. Dead Iraq servicemen. I’m so glad their mobile phones were hacked into by the News of the World.”

Yet you’d never guess this from the nauseating sanctimoniousness and cant of the left-liberal media, right now. You’d think this was a straightforward battle between good and evil: on one side a wicked, bullying, manipulative, right-wing Voldemort and his hordes of darkness; on the other, the forces of justice, truth and light whose only desire is that our newspapers and broadcast outlets should be transparent and caring and fair and kind to blind old ladies crossing the road clutching baskets of kittens with bandaged paws.

Yeah, right. This is not – pace a projectile-emetic New York Times article- “A kind of British Spring” in which “Democracy, aided, by sunlight has broken out in Britain.” It is, in fact, that very opposite of that: a ruthless, concerted and horrifyingly effective attempt by the dominant left-liberal MSM to silence free speech and crush alternative points of view.

Consider, for a moment, how much worse it would be in the US if you didn’t have talk radio and you didn’t have Fox News or the Wall Street Journal. Just imagine: wall to wall Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews splurging their relentlessly PC take on world affairs; Peggy Noonan and Paul Krugman pulling somersaults in their eagerness to find new inventive ways to explain why, despite all the evidence, the Obama administration is at the top of its game. No Rush to run to for consolation; no Fox & Friends blondes to cheer you up at breakfast; no O’Reilly or Krauthammer or Stossel to stick it where it hurts.

And if you have any trouble imagining such a hideous, terrifying world, just come to Britain where precisely this situation exists. Since 1927, our broadcast media has been dominated by a presence so monolithic and all-powerful it makes Pyongyang’s Korean Central TV look like your local Mom and Pop station.

Its name, of course, is the BBC. During the first Gulf War, it was briefly rechristened the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation – and understandably so, given the relentlessly anti-Coalition bias of its reportage. But then the BBC doesn’t much like the West. Or the capitalist system. Or the US. Or old-fashioned concepts like liberty, freedom of choice, personal responsibility or limited government. It is – and has been for decades – the official broadcast outlet for the values of the progressive left.

On any given subject you know exactly what the BBC’s line will be. If it’s covering the Middle East it will be bigging up the gallant Hezbollah freedom fighters and the plucky Palestinians at the expense of the hateful, damned-near-as-bad-as-the-Nazis Israeli oppressors. If it’s covering the European Union (what you and I might better know as the EUSSR) it will treat every politician who is not in favor of ever-closer-political-integration as a rabid, swivel-eyed crypto-Fascist loon. If its covering any kind of war in which the US or Britain are involved it will be of the view that the enemy are the good guys and that we thoroughly deserve to get our asses whupped. If it’s covering the environment it wil, of course, conclusively demonstrate that the earth is doomed and it’s all the fault of greedy Western capitalists.

None of this would matter – at least not quite so much – if it weren’t for three big problems. The first (a legacy perhaps of its distinguished World War II reporting; or maybe its dignified and majestic royal wedding coverage) is that around the world the initials “BBC” still convey gravitas and authority. The second is that the BBC is committed by its charter to being fair and balanced. It isn’t of course. Not in the slightest. But this does give its defenders (almost all of them on the left) the perfect excuse to defend the BBC’s hegemonic status on the grounds that it represents the whole nation’s diverse viewpoint (and not, as it really does, the achingly PC values of a self-selecting cabal of metropolitan bien-pensant tofu eaters).

The third and worst problem, though, is that there is no counterbalance to the BBC’s relentlessly liberal-left propagandizing. From cradle to grave – starting with the Kim-Jong-Il-Jr-style brainwashing offered by CBBC, moving on to oh-so-hip-Daddy-O pop broadcaster Radio 1, through classical Radio 3 to fuddy-duddily left-liberal Radio 4, not forgetting the achingly worthy and progressive TV channels BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 – the audience for Britain’s dominant national broadcaster is indoctrinated into a very specific Weltanschauung.

That Weltanschauung, you won’t be surprised to hear, does not find much room for concepts like limited government, low taxation, liberty, political sovereignty and accountability. It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one.

And of course, the house leftists at the BBC (most of them recruited through the pages of the left-wing Guardian newspaper, which BBC employees tend to believe is also the ONLY newspaper) want to keep it that way. That’s why they have been pushing the “scandalous” Murdoch revelations so hard; that’s why Labour leader Ed Miliband and Tony Blair’s ex-enforcer Alastair Campbell and socialist ex-Prime-Minister Gordon Brown and the pathologically left-wing Twittersphere and, yes, the Guardian newspaper have been so eager to join in the fray. Sure they hate Murdoch, that’s a given. But what they hate far, far more – because they fear it – is the possibility that British audiences should be exposed as US audiences are to dangerously conservative concepts like freedom and small government.

This is what Murdoch has been trying to achieve in his bid to buy a majority shareholding in the broadcaster BSkyB. His plan is – or at least was – to hive off the Sky part of the operation (so as to avoid anti-monopoly regulation) and set up the TV channel Britain so badly needs: a UK answer to Fox.

The British government’s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt was due to make a ruling on the issue this week. That’s why the BBC (and its myriad leftist fellow travellers) waited until now to make these “shock” new revelations (using information, of course, they had been sitting on for months if not years). This had nothing to do with justifiable moral outrage – and everything to do with a viciously cynical attempt by the liberal-left to exploit dead schoolgirls, Prime Ministerial children suffering from cystic fibrosis and 9/11 victims in order to protect its hegemonic domination of the media.

And what’s depressing is, the bastards may have have got away with it. It seems genuinely not to have occurred to most of British people now working themselves into a lather of almost Death-of-Princess-Diana-like hysteria over the evils of the Murdoch press that they are duped as the liberal-left’s useful idiots.

If only they were capable of realizing it, they would understand that over the last decades, the BBC has done infinitely more damage to Britain – economically, socially, politically – than anything the yellow journalism of Rupert Murdoch has ever achieved. By setting the parameters of the political debate, the BBC has been responsible for Britain’s cultural surrender to Islamism and “multiculturalism”; for its submission as a vassal to the creaking, moribund European Socialist Superstate; for the current Coalition’s inability either to lower taxes or rein in government spending; for the proliferation of “rights” and dependency culture and the creation of a feckless underclass trained to believe it is government’s job to take care of its every need; for the removal of empiricism, hard science and skepticism in the debate on “global warming”.

Thanks to the BBC, the people of Britain are poorer, more highly taxed and regulated, less able to control their own political destiny and considerably less free. But of course they are not aware of this. How could they when the political outlook they imbibe from birth comes straight from the wrinkled dugs of Big Government’s Nanny In Chief – the BBC?

[Teddy Bear]

I just happened to catch the news on BBC1 following their Open coverage. You'd think there was nothing else going on in the world as their obsession with Murdoch still continues. If nothing else thier continued coverage is feeding a lot of stimulation by journalists who don't subscribe to the BBC/Guardian mindset.

Here's another excellent article, this time by Janet Daley at the Telegraph.

The 'BBC Left' is using hacking to get revenge
Left-wing politicians and broadcasters do not want to debate ideas but they do want to remove their opponents.

By Janet Daley9:00PM BST 16 Jul 2011
It was a broadcasters' event some years ago. I had been invited to speak on a favourite subject: the BBC hegemony in broadcast news and the risk that its own package of tendentious assumptions – that Euroscepticism was a lunatic fringe irrelevance, that anyone who expressed concern about immigration was a bigot, etc, etc – was going unchallenged in the mass media. After I had said my piece, a BBC producer in the audience asked whether, since I was so concerned about the dangers of large media organisations, I did not have the same objection to the existence of the "Murdoch empire".
"No-o-o," I replied patiently, I did not have the same objection. If I did not wish to support Mr Murdoch's enterprises I could refrain from buying his newspapers or subscribing to his television service – and no one could threaten me with arrest and imprisonment for so doing. This was, I suggested, a rather significant difference between the two media corporations.

In the startled silence of his response, I assumed that it had never occurred to him (as I say, this was some years ago) that anyone could question the justification for the legally enforced licence fee since it was clearly, for him, rooted in the inherent moral goodness of the BBC – and by implication of the ethical standards which it purveyed. The BBC may be trying to inculcate a bit more self-critical awareness among its personnel now but that smug righteousness of the Left-liberal media class has not gone away. It is, as you may have noticed, in something of a triumphal frenzy at the moment.

This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown's surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch's papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre. The influence of the BBC as a monitor of what is politically admissible is almost incalculable: the entire Tory modernisation project was effectively made necessary (as its chief architects often admit) by the need to get a fair hearing on its news coverage.

But the power of the BBC – and its historical hatred for the "Murdoch empire" – is just one aspect of a larger battle which has now leapt across the Atlantic, where the target is not newspapers which can be legitimately charged with having committed unconscionable acts, but Fox News. Its offence is to have filled such a huge gap in the market for television news and current affairs that it has swept all before it. Its raucous Right-wing orientation is, in fact, matched by an equally raucous Left-wing equivalent in the cable news channel MSNBC, so why should anyone who believes in open and free debate among news providers object to this?

The problem is that Fox's audience share is enormous, by far the largest of any cable news channel, whereas MSNBC's is tiny, the smallest of any cable news channel. People are voting with their remotes for the kind of opinions they want to hear and the result is infuriating for the Left-liberal axis – and particularly for the Obama White House, which has made no secret of its desire to shut Fox News down.

There is, incidentally – contrary to the conjectures of some excitable commentators – no possibility of the "Murdoch empire" spawning a British version of Fox News. By law, broadcast news in Britain must be impartial. That is why all television news organisations in this country subscribe to pretty much the same soft-Left rendition of neutral reporting (in which Euroscepticism was, until very recently, treated as a lunatic fringe irrelevance, etc). And just the sort of liberal received opinion that now dominates television news because the tight regulation of licensed broadcasters demands it, could prevail in newspapers if the press were regulated (which is to say, licensed to operate) "in the same way that broadcasting is" – a suggestion which is being uttered in precisely those words even by Conservative politicians.

In fact, a similar rule of enforced neutrality applies in the US on network news programming: all news which is transmitted "over the airwaves" must be impartial (which there, too, means Left-liberal). It is only by the technical fluke of their being relayed by cable that the newer news channels such as Fox and MSNBC can show partisanship. Result: network news in the US is haemorrhaging viewers and cable news is hugely influential.

The cable news channels now play roughly the role in American politics that politically aligned newspapers do in Britain. To start regulating (licensing) the press would mean that we would have no frankly, vividly, politically potent news medium to counter whatever conventional wisdom was ordained by the self-appointed "enlightened" class of the day.

It is worth asking in both the British and American contexts why people who regard themselves as believers in free speech and liberal democracy can be so openly eager to close off – silence, kill, extinguish – different political views from their own. This is the question that is at the heart of the matter and which will remain long after every News International executive who may possibly be incriminated in the current scandal has been purged.

There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious.

The Left does not want a debate or an open market in ideas. It wants to extirpate its opponents – to remove them from the field. It actually seems to believe that it is justified in snuffing out any possibility of our arguments reaching the impressionable masses – and bizarrely, it defends this stance in the name of fairness.

[Teddy Bear]

Still no let up by the media, led by the BBC, in using the hacking scandal for their own nefarious purposes. For most it's mainly to try and get rid of the competition that Murdoch represents, for the BBC there's the added intent to promote the Labour party. There are also those ethical and intelligent journalists who wish to see an enlightened society with moral values who continue to comment on the misuse of power engaged upon and the real damage that is being done to the public.

Melanie Phillips again writing in the Daily Mail puts it into a moral perspective that is encapsulated by this paragraph:
The Murdoch empire may need to be brought sternly to book over the hacking scandal. But the media monopoly that really has undermined and demoralised British society and deserves to be broken up is the BBC.

The real media oligarchy that has corrupted Britain

By common consent among political commentators, Ed Miliband’s lamentable leadership of the Labour Party has been miraculously transformed by the News of the World scandal.

With the Prime Minister seemingly paralysed by his unwise friendships with now-compromised News International executives, the Labour leader has been making the political running.

He has achieved this through the simple trick of demanding what had already become inevitable, such as the resignation of Rebekah Brooks or the termination of Rupert Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB.

The result is that the formerly reviled Miliband has gone from zero to hero.

Apparently intoxicated by the novel experience of not being scorned, he has now ratcheted up his demands by calling for News International to be broken up.

But far from reinforcing his newly-discovered statesman credentials, this merely exposes his agenda as callow and partisan.

For sure, the News of the World did things that were wrong; and when the full extent of this behaviour is established, those responsible should be held to account, however high up the chain of command they happened to be.

But why should it follow that News International should therefore be broken up? After all, it is possible to imagine that everyone involved in this affair — including the entire Murdoch clan — might be replaced by people with totally clean hands to run the company.

The reason, says Miliband, is that Murdoch has ‘too much power over British public life’. But this is transparently disingenuous. For there is a media oligarchy which exercises far more power in Britain than News International. And that is the BBC.

The BBC’s monopoly over the media is indeed a running scandal. After all, just imagine if News International had been given the legal power to levy a tax on everyone who bought a newspaper in order to fund the Murdoch empire.

People wouldn’t stand it for a moment. It would be considered an utter abuse of democracy. Yet that is precisely the privileged position the BBC occupies.

Ah, say its defenders, but the BBC is a public service broadcaster, and therefore of course merits a public subsidy as a great British institution which must be preserved at all costs.

Well, that argument just won’t wash any more. For the BBC wraps itself in the heroic mantle of a public service remit which it has systematically betrayed.

That remit was to educate and elevate public taste, as well as to entertain. But for years now, the BBC has instead been playing to the lowest common denominator, competing in the ratings market as ruthlessly as any commercial broadcaster.

In addition, it has also used its public subsidy to gain a wildly unfair competitive edge, with an enormous market share in television, radio and on the internet which has crowded out smaller competitors. Ofcom figures show that its share of TV news is more than ten times bigger than Sky’s and that BBC websites have ten times the market share.

Indeed, since it is a direct competitor of BSkyB, the disproportion and relish with which the BBC has been reporting the News of the World scandal — allowing it on some current affairs shows to drive out all other news — leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

Moreover, the BBC’s role in all this is even more questionable when you factor in the real reason for Miliband’s double standard.

For his motives surely have precious little to do with any criminal behaviour or monopoly power. No, the real reason is that for the past three decades the Left has been desperate to bring Murdoch down.

For such people, he is a hate figure of diabolical proportions. The venom and hysteria he inspires are truly irrational.

He ignites passions far more incendiary than are generated by any tyrant or war criminal. Indeed, to them the Left turns a blind eye, while treating Murdoch as if he dismembers babies before breakfast.

The reason is that he acts as a kind of lightning rod for Left-wingers — the object of a massive displacement neurosis arising from all their rage and disappointment, not least with themselves.

For example, both Left-wing newspapers and the BBC blame Murdoch for the decline of standards in the media, from high seriousness to celebrity culture and tacky trivia.

But at the BBC, that was the result of its own misguided response to the explosion of digital channels and the arrival of a cornucopia of broadcasting choice.

And even high-minded newspapers such as the Guardian decided more than two decades ago to fill their pages with trivia because they judged that the general public was becoming dumber and shallower.

No, Murdoch’s real crime in the eyes of the Left-wing intelligentsia is simply that he has stood in the way of their total capture of the culture.

The dominance of Left-wing ideas has been such that even among so-called conservatives many of them have become accepted as mainstream. And one of the most powerful architects of that shift has been the BBC.

Even its own executives have sometimes been forced to admit that, far from the objectivity required by its public service remit, the BBC generally subscribes to a Left-wing ‘group-think’ which dictates the agenda both in its journalism and entertainment programmes.

With some honourable exceptions, whether in its drama, comedy, news reporting or current affairs the BBC’s output rests upon certain articles of faith.

For example, traditional Christians are all fundamentalist bigots; the science of man-made global warming is settled; opponents of mass immigration are racist; Eurosceptics are swivel-eyed fanatics; and all who oppose these opinions and more are Right-wing extremists.

And then to add insult to injury, the BBC forces people to pay for the privilege of being told day in, day out that their own views are stupid or prejudiced.

What’s more, such is the enormous power and influence of the BBC through its reputation for trustworthiness and fairness that it has arguably moved the very centre of political gravity in Britain to the Left.

By contrast, Murdoch’s popular papers have tended mainly to follow public opinion once voters’ minds are made up. So they respond to and then amplify what people already think.

But for the Left that is anathema, because nothing can be allowed to disrupt the great project to tell people what to think and shut down all opinion to the contrary.

Murdoch’s empire has acted as at least a partial antidote to that agenda by defending America, Israel and the interests of the West.

Which is why he provokes near-apoplexy on the Left.

And which is why they are all slavering at the prospect of bringing down a media organisation which provided an element of competition to the true monopoly of the BBC and the Left-wing intelligentsia.

The great irony, of course, is that for all those years while this scandal was taking place, the Labour Party fawned over Murdoch and his lieutenants. While he was riding high, none of them saw fit to challenge the power they now purport to find so unacceptable.

Only now Murdoch is lying bleeding on the ropes does Miliband flex his puny muscles. And they call that leadership.

The Murdoch empire may need to be brought sternly to book over the hacking scandal. But the media monopoly that really has undermined and demoralised British society and deserves to be broken up is the BBC.

And that is one monopoly over British public life which Ed Miliband unsurprisingly finds to be no abuse of power at all.

[Teddy Bear]

I notice with regard to comments posted on the Daily mail article of Melanie Phillips, (linked to immediately above), that it has attracted a lot of attention from obviously not your usual Daily Mail reader. It would appear that droves of BBC/Guardian readers have summoned each other to try their best to demean Melanie's observations.

Let's face it, if she wasn't touching a raw nerve they would hardly bother.

I must admit I rarely watch or listen to news programmes on the BBC as I'm sickened enough by their bias without having to listen to their sanctimonious tones while they deliver it.

Stephen Glover at the Daily Mail does though, and finds the way the BBC is covering the hacking scandal quite sickening.

The BBC's bias has been one of the most shaming aspects of this entire sorry saga
By STEPHEN GLOVER
Last updated at 10:52 PM on 20th July 2011

Ten years ago, BBC2’s Newsnight devoted an entire show to the resignation of Peter Mandelson as Northern Ireland Secretary. I described it in these pages as one of the most shocking programmes I had ever seen.
Though this was the second occasion on which the accident-prone Mr Mandelson had been forced to resign, the programme was almost entirely sympathetic to him. Only political allies were summoned to mutter reverentially over his political corpse. For a terrifying moment, the BBC was synonymous with New Labour.

A BBC boxwallah later conceded that the coverage had been unbalanced, and issued a kind of half apology. Will the Corporation make amends for an equally shocking example of bias on Tuesday evening’s Newsnight?

The subject under discussion was Rupert Murdoch. Various people were gathered to offer their point of view. Virtually everyone was hostile. The media mogul was by common consent a thoroughly bad thing.

There were contributions from the veteran American investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, Earl Spencer (brother of Princess Diana), the novelist Will Self and a Tory MP called Louise Mensch. All were in varying degrees critical of Mr Murdoch and his newspapers, and some widened their attack to include the whole of the popular Press.

'He doesn't know what's going on': News Corp investors demand 'doddery' Murdoch quits... despite shares rising 6% after grilling
The lugubrious Mr Self even opined that Mr Murdoch had introduced the culture of envy into British society. Perhaps he should re-read a few Victorian novels when he has the time. Needless to say, this idiocy was not even questioned by the Newsnight presenter, Gavin Esler.

Not only was there no one present to speak up for Mr Murdoch, there weren’t even any neutral parties to say what I happen to believe — that there are good things and bad things about the Press tycoon and his influence on our culture, and it is facile to portray him in a wholly negative way.

I appreciate that Newsnight is hardly mainstream viewing, and that it enjoys a small audience. But it is worth citing as a kind of bellweather of BBC coverage, which has been unremittingly hostile to Mr Murdoch and his newspapers over the past couple of weeks. For all his sins, wasn’t he the man who saved newspapers by defeating rapacious trade unions? Hasn’t he kept The Times going for 30 years despite losses of hundreds of millions of pounds?

Let me restrict myself to other examples of BBC bias from the past 48 hours. Tuesday evening’s News At Ten reported Mr Murdoch saying that he had been asked to enter No 10 by the back door so as to escape notice when visiting David Cameron, but cut his subsequent remark that he did exactly the same when calling on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Later in the bulletin, the Corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, and its business editor, Robert Peston, lined up like a couple of undertakers to pass judgment on Mr Murdoch’s performance, and that of his son James, in front of the Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

Much as I respect Mr Robinson, and accept that he normally strives to be even-handed, his account of Rupert Murdoch being uniformly doddery and out of touch with his company was somewhat selective. He also came close to suggesting that David Cameron had been ‘compromised’, and declared that he was in a ‘quagmire’.

Perhaps he is, but this is the kind of judgment one expects from a newspaper commentator, not a supposedly neutral reporter on our public service broadcaster. BBC journalists who used to restrict themselves to reporting events are increasingly drawn into punditry, and so are bound to sound partial. In recent weeks that has meant being virulently ‘anti-Murdoch’.

On yesterday’s Today programme on Radio 4, Sarah Montague interviewed Trevor Kavanagh, a columnist on the Murdoch-owned Sun.
Though he has no executive responsibilities, and does not even visit the Sun’s offices, Ms Montague insisted he state that phone hacking had never occurred on his newspaper. Mr Kavanagh, who handled himself well, should have demanded the same assurance from her about the BBC.

Later on the programme, the same Sarah Montague interviewed the distinguished novelist P.D. James, who is 91 in a couple of weeks. Lo and behold, after a few moments Ms Montague turned the subject around to the BBC’s unflagging obsession — phone hacking.
I could go on. Anyone with a grouse against Rupert Murdoch is invited to dilate without any requirement to produce evidence. A Panorama ‘special’ about him on BBC1 on Monday evening was a straightforward hatchet job in which ‘victims’ of the News of the World (some of them men whom you would not necessarily invite home to meet your mother) queued up to denigrate him and his newspapers. Barely a word was said in his favour.

Naturally, I don’t deny that the phone-hacking affair is an extremely important story, which has rightly been covered extensively by all media organisations. My point is that the BBC has not treated Rupert Murdoch fairly. It has conjured up a rampant monster. More-over, its preoccupation with the scandal has been so all-consuming that it has downplayed or ignored other important stories, such as the increasingly worrying tribulations of the Eurozone and the worsening economic prospects in this country.

None of this would matter very much if the BBC were not a subsidised public sector broadcaster with a greater ‘reach’ than all of its rivals combined. (How much of it would survive if it were forced to compete in the cut and thrust of the commercial market?) By the way, the estimated audience of all BBC news bulletins on television and radio is some 20 times greater than that of the Murdoch-controlled Sky News, which has been reporting the scandal with commendable objectivity — unlike the BBC.

Too far? Sarah Montague even asked 91-year-old novelist P.D. James about the phone hacking during a Radio 4 interview yesterday
As an institution, the BBC loathes Murdoch because he has brilliantly built BSkyB into a formidable programming rival, and in particular shattered the Corporation’s former pre-eminence in sports coverage. And, of course, many Left-leaning BBC journalists (which means most of them) regard him as an anti-Christ for being Right-wing, unashamedly pro-American, and a free marketeer.

He is too powerful, and so I am glad he is not proceeding with his bid to acquire the rest of BskyB. He has in some respects impoverished our culture — for example, by introducing ‘Page 3 girls’. But he has also done some good things, and however much it may distress high-minded liberals such as the aforementioned Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, millions of people choose to buy and read his newspapers.

Incidentally, Mr Bernstein would do well to ponder the fact that nearly all American newspapers driven by obsessive liberal agendas are dying — undermined by unappealing journalism and the kind of pomposity he displayed this week.

Yesterday, Mr Cameron announced that broadcasting organisations including the BBC will also be investigated by Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into Press ethics. Will the inquiry panellists (most of whom are of a distinctly centre-Left hue) look at the Corporation’s coverage of this scandal? I’m not betting on it.

But I still hope that the BBC — the only media organisation in Britain that regulates itself — will examine its shaming coverage of this scandal, and in particular Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight.
Imagine the Murdoch media writing about a crisis in the BBC in the sort of biased and tendentious way that the Corporation has covered his travails. There would be an outcry, and rightly so. That is the measure of the failings of our impregnable public service broadcaster in reporting this story.

[Teddy Bear]

A crisis that has been developing at the same time the hacking scandal has been given top priority by the media who find Murdoch too much competition for them, is the small matter of the possible financial meltdown of the Euro. For as the IMF warns so graphically, the euro crisis now threatens to plunge the West into a second devastating recession, which could wipe up to £400billion from the global economy.

Not uncharacteristically the BBC have put their own objectives and agenda before those of the public they are supposed to be serving.

Auntie’s obsession

Mind you, those who rely on the BBC for their news could be forgiven for being unaware that the West stands on the brink of a second economic catastrophe.

For more than a fortnight, almost every current affairs broadcast has led on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, with presenters and interviewers unable to disguise their glee over the embarrassment of the Corporation’s biggest competitor, Rupert Murdoch.

Isn’t this self-indulgent obsession with their own little media world an insult to licence-fee payers, whose interests extend further than the wrong-doings of a defunct Sunday red-top?

In the Commons yesterday, David Cameron (who seems to share the obsession to a worrying degree) made an impressive job of squashing his critics, who are trying to milk this sorry affair for every last drop of political capital.

While his two judicial inquiries do their work – and what a rum crew are sitting in judgment on the Press! – is it too much to hope that he and Auntie Beeb will now lift their eyes from their own navels to the real issues that affect all our lives?

[Teddy Bear]

Not surprisingly, with the BBC getting away increasingly with ever more blatant bias, it's hardly surprising that they begin gloating over it. It's just typical of their true mindset.

BBC executive ‘gloated’ over hacking scandal
An email by Mark Barlex, the On Demand Editor for BBC News, has led to questions about the corporation’s impartiality in reporting phone hacking story.

By Neil Midgley12:28PM BST 27 Jul 2011

The BBC has been accused of “gloating” over the difficulties being experienced by News International and Rupert Murdoch, after one of its senior news executives emailed his team saying that the phone hacking scandal had been “great fun”.
The email, which began with the words “Praise be to the News gods for the hacking scandal”, also called into question the corporation’s impartiality in reporting the story.

It was sent last Friday afternoon by Mark Barlex, the editor of the BBC’s “on-demand” news service, which supplies clips and video packages to the corporation’s website and through the red button service on TV.

Mr Barlex wrote that the hacking scandal had, first of all, “saved us from having to find something creative to show on the Eurozone crisis. Secondly, it’s been great fun.”

His comments reinforced the view held by some of the BBC’s detractors that it has an institutional left-wing bias and an anti-Murdoch agenda.

Philip Davies MP, a Tory member of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee which questioned Rupert and James Murdoch last week, said: “It sounds to me like somebody who’s gloating at the difficulties being experienced by Rupert Murdoch and News International, which in itself is one of the favourite hobby horses of people who happen to be on the left – the type of people we’d expect from the BBC to be perfectly honest.
“The BBC’s job is not to gloat at the difficulties being experienced by News International or any other media group, it’s to report on things and be completely impartial at all times. And I think people are increasingly worried that the BBC aren’t capable of that.”
A BBC spokesman said: “We have reported the phone hacking story in the same impartial way we would any other. A story of this magnitude is of great interest to our audiences and clearly also something that journalists across the media have found very engaging to work on as it has continued to unfold.”
However a senior BBC source acknowledged that Mr Barlex’s choice of words had been unfortunate.

[Teddy Bear]

The current Leveson enquiry into the hacking affair is the perfect excuse for the BBC to continue its quest, having neutered Murdoch in his take over of Sky, and extend it to every other media outlet that it regards as a threat. Celebrities repeating their stories about how hacking affected their lives is not news any more, but the BBC thinks of they can regurgitate it such because of Leveson, it's newsworthy.

It hasn't occurred to them that what they're really showing is there are many journalists that have no ethics or moral character. After monitoring the nature of BBC bias for so many years, I knew that already, and in typical blinkard ignorant fashion, the BBC haven't taken into account that eventually all of the public will be aware of the insidious nature of BBC journalists in much the same way they are brainwashed now to think of as those in the private sector. In my opinion, the BBC are far worse because they are paid to provide a public service, whereas one has a choice with the private sector.

As for the celebrities 'damaged' by the hacking affair. With few exception, my view is if you don't like the heat - GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN! They're very happy to milk the media when it goes their way, and they rise to their stardom. But they appear to want a one-way street where if they do something 'out of the ordinary' they want it kept quiet. HELLO!!!

Frankly I have no interest in the going on in the lives of 99% of what society considers celebrities today. If their lives are ruined because it's discovered they have been engaged in acts which raise the public eyebrow -TOUGH SHIT! Don't do the crime if you don't want to do the time. It appears from the way the BBC continues to present it, that their audience doesn't see it that way, which I suppose is normal for the brainwashed masses that haven't been told any other way to think.

I caught about 10 minutes (about 10 minutes in - available to listen again for 7 days) today of PM on Radio 4 this afternoon. Just in time to catch an unadulterated promotion of Labour, under the subterfuge of getting information, followed by developments in the Leveson enquiry. Today it was Charlotte Church telling how her mother attempted suicide knowing her fathers indiscretions were about to be made public, as well as her becoming pregnant at 17, and can you believe it - (that evil ) Rupert Murdoch offered her £100,000 to sing at his wedding or receive 'favourable publicity' for her career.

Such a victim - poor girl - nobody is responsible for anything but that evil Murdoch and his henchman.

Read it and weep.

Charlotte Church tells of family's treatment by media

Charlotte Church said the reporting of her father's affair had ''a massive impact'' on her mother's health
Singer Charlotte Church has told how her mother's mental health suffered when the News of the World published a story exposing her father's affair.

She told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that her mother had attempted suicide "at least in part" because she had known the story was coming out.

Later Anne Diamond said the media had been on her doorstep within an hour of the cot death of her son in 1991.

The broadcaster said the press had "trampled all over our dignity".

During Monday's morning evidence, the landlord wrongly arrested over Joanna Yeates's murder, Christopher Jefferies, said the media had "shamelessly vilified" him.

Mr Jefferies said the tabloid press had decided he was guilty of the murder of Miss Yeates in Bristol in 2010. Another man was convicted of her killing last month.

"They embarked on a frenzied campaign to blacken my character by publishing a series of very serious allegations about me which were completely untrue," his statement said.

Massive impact
In her evidence, Ms Church, 25, said the NoW had already published a story talking about her mother's mental health, "so they knew how vulnerable she was but still published the story".

"I just really hated the fact that my parents who had never been in this industry - apart from looking after me - were being exposed and vilified in this fashion.

"It had a massive, massive impact on my family life," she said.


Anne Diamond: "Our front door... filled up with hundreds of press''
Ms Church also said the Sun newspaper had revealed her first pregnancy before she had told her family.

"It just had a massive impact on my mother's health, her mental health, her hospital treatment - the only way they know about that was either through [phone] hacking or the bribing of hospital staff."

Ms Church said at first she had been treated with kid gloves when she became famous aged 12, dubbed "The Voice of an Angel". But she said she had experienced " the "worst excess of the press" between the ages of 16 to 20.

She told the hearing paparazzi had taken pictures up her skirt, there were photographers outside her house on most days and her manager had found evidence of a camera hidden in a shrub outside her home.

Ms Church said she had been "totally appalled" by a clock on the Sun's website which counted down to her 16th birthday, an "innuendo" highlighting the fact she was reaching the age of sexual consent, she said.

"It was just horrible, I was a 16 year-old-girl and was uncomfortable with it," she said.

Pregnancy revealed
The inquiry heard how the Sun had published a story about her being pregnant for the first time before she had told her family.

She said she believed journalists had obtained their information through hacking voicemail messages from the doctor or through other surveillance, although added she did not have any evidence.

"I had not told anyone apart from when I had gone to have my initial scan. I can't see how it came from any other area. My family were really upset that I had not told them first," she said.

Ms Church also explained that she waived a £100,000 fee to sing at Rupert Murdoch's wedding when she was 13 in exchange for a promise of favourable publicity from his newspapers.

She said she remembered wondering "why on earth would anybody take a favour over £100,000?" but was urged by her management to take the favour from a "powerful man".

The inquiry heard News International denied this had happened.

Ms Church said newspaper coverage had adversely affected her career as it was difficult for her to be taken seriously as her credibility had been "blown to bits".

She said she had attended the inquiry because she did not want her children to go through the same thing.

"A lot of this happened to me whilst I was a minor and whilst I was really very young. It was really hard and it has had a psychological effect upon me. It almost feels like they put you through this psychological grinding, test your strength, and you come out the other side and it just keeps happening."

Vendetta
In her evidence, Ms Diamond, 57, described the aftermath of her son Sebastian's death.

"Our front door was very quickly filled up with hundreds of press. And there was one incident when a female reporter tried to rush the door. She rang the door and she had a big bouquet of flowers and when the chain had to be removed to open the door, she rushed in."

She said she had written to every Fleet Street editor "begging them to stay away from the small, private family funeral", but the Sun published a photograph on its front page.

"On the day of our little boy's funeral - and this was held at a very remote country church - there was a photographer on the public highway. Here we were, a young couple at our child's funeral, and they took this photograph."

Ms Diamond also suggested Mr Murdoch's editors had waged a vendetta against her after she asked him how he slept at night knowing his newspapers ruined people's lives.

While taking part in a Channel 4 documentary earlier this year she learned Mr Murdoch's former butler, Philip Townsend, recalled Mr Murdoch had "indicated to his editors" that she was "a person from that point onwards to be targeted".

She said the Sun offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and infiltrated the hospital where she was giving birth by impersonating a doctor.

[Teddy Bear]

Apart from this thread, there are quite a few others on this website that detail the relentless demonisation of Murdoch by the BBC over the hacking scandals. These are besides the numerous comparisons on many threads to show just how skewed and 'personally interested' the BBC were in the outcome.

Here's the main threads.

• 2 Birds With One Stone - Labour Up/Murdoch Down
• Hacking? Only Big News for BBC if it's Murdoch
• BBC Twists 'Unfit Murdoch' Outcome

Naturally the BBC denies any accusations and claims there coverage was perfectly justified and maintained in their best fair, balanced, and impartial style.

A few days ago, Gavyn Davies, Director-General of the BBC—2000-04, and Greg Dyke, Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors—2001-04, gave evidence before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on The Future of the BBC.

As the session opened, with Dyke in the 'hot seat', here's how it went:

Q1 Chair: Good morning. This is the second session of the Committee’s inquiry into the future of the BBC. I would like to welcome the former chairman of the BBC board of governors, Gavyn Davies, and the former director-general, Greg Dyke.
Let us start with a general question. Since you both left the BBC, which is nine years ago, coming up to 10, what do you think of how the BBC has done since that time?

Greg Dyke: I will say this: in the summer before last—as someone who is interested in and always concerned about the BBC and as I looked forward—I thought this would be a very good time for the BBC. I thought the combination of a brilliant Olympics and the damage that had been inflicted on the Murdoch organisation, who are our long-term enemies, I think you could say, or certainly opponents of the BBC, meant that this could be a good period for the BBC. It just shows you how wrong you can be, really. A series of things, all coming one after the other, has led to a pretty dismal 12 months.

Clearly voicing what everybody with enough intelligence and awareness of BBC output already surmised. I did a double take when I first saw his statement. Does he really understand what he just admitted to?

Now what in the BBC charter could possibly make Murdoch 'the enemy' of the BBC?

(hat-tip Alan)

[steevo]

Well something can happen when people are former anything to the Organization. But now we can conclude, intentional or not

[Teddy Bear]

Yes indeed! Since there's nothing in the BBC charter that could be interpreted to make Murdoch ‘the enemy’ of the BBC, it shows perfectly how openly the BBC have strayed from seeing they need to adhere to it. They blatantly follow their own agenda.

[Teddy Bear]

We have covered fairly comprehensively in this thread and also here how the BBC covered the hacking scandal where Murdoch was involved. With an upcoming trial of 8 cases in March that concern Trinity Mirror, and their role in the hacking, Steerpike at the Spectator wonders how the BBC will cover this.

It's a foregone conclusion, seeing as the Daily Mirror is a left wing tabloid, that the BBC won;t be pursuing them with anything like the vigour and demonisation they went after Murdoch with. My prediction is it will hardly get a mention, and for sure will not feature on Question Time.

How will the Guardian and the BBC cover the Trinity Mirror phone hacking?
Steerpike

Trinity Mirror have admitted that they published 71 stories which were enabled by phone-hacking. Now eight cases are due to come before Mr Justice Mann at the beginning of March, with a two-week trial scheduled. Those they concern include Alan Yentob, Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne.

Steerpike is curious to see what coverage the trial will get in the papers and from the BBC. Both the corporation and the Guardian have taken glee in the past at resting the phone hacking crimes firmly in Rupert Murdoch’s court. Giving the impression, of course, that the sin of hacking came straight from the blackness of Murdoch’s heart – rather than a sin that was spread right across an industry.

At the time of the News of the World allegations, Roy Greenslade wrote on his Guardian blog that the decision to close the paper was an ‘entirely proportionate’ response to ‘the crisis that was engulfing the paper’.

Interestingly, in the case of Trinity Mirror, Greenslade, who was editor of The Daily Mirror from 1990 to 1991 , thinks no such step is needed. ‘I wouldn’t wish to see Trinity brought down, especially given the fact that it is under new management and has new editors in place,’ he writes in a post about the trial. ‘Nor would I want it to follow Murdoch, who closed the News of the World as a response to the crisis, by closing the Sunday Mirror or the Sunday People.’

When hacking was discovered at the News of the World, there was great excitement from the Guardian and the BBC. How much coverage will they now give to the disclosures about the Mirror? Mr S will stay tuned to the 6 O’Clock news – without holding his breath.