Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 21, 2007 21:33:44 GMT
Scathing attack on the BBC from Frederick Forsyth (author of 'Day of the Jackal', 'The Dogs of War' and 'The Odessa File', to name but a few) in the Daily Express. Also worth a read is the article referred to in his comment 'Confessions Of A Reformed BBC Producer', and linked to below.
BBC RUN BY THOSE WHO LOATHE BRITAIN
Friday July 20,2007
By Frederick Forsyth
THE BBC has had a quite foul week but its own best friends, of which I fear I am no longer one, could only say: it was entirely your own fault.
Let’s leave on one side the rigging of children’s quizzes and the invention of phoney prizewinners. Much more serious for the country is the exposure of bias in the news and current affairs (NCA) division.
First came the fiasco of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham disseminating a piece of film that claimed the Queen had stormed out of a photo session in a huff. Later it was admitted the sequence showed her bustling into the photo sitting in perfectly good humour but muttering about the weight of those Garter robes. Well, who wouldn’t?
Mr Fincham’s fault was not that he was fed by the subcontracted film-makers a duff tape: we all make mistakes. His fault was that, once alerted that the head of state had been insulted, he sat on his thumbs while it went round the world. That is why he should be fired.
Then came day after day of servile grovelling to Tony Blair, Cherie Ditto and Alastair Campbell.
I could not turn the damn set on without one of them looming across the sitting room at me, and always faced by a BBC interviewer who surely must have been bought and paid for. As an old-fashioned reporter, I cringed at the obsequious tone. And while the lot of them simpered at the camera, young men the two males had sent to Iraq were dying there.
It seems if you upset Alastair Campbell, as Greg Dyke did, you get fired. But slander the Queen and
it’s tut tut, dearie me.
Next came a decision by the BBC Trust (replacement for the old Board of Governors) to respond to Lord Pearson’s demand for an explanation as to whether Radio 4’s Today programme is passionately pro-EU. It is like starting a board of inquiry to ask if the sun rises in the East.
But the high point for me was a pamphlet by Sir Antony Jay called Confessions Of A Reformed BBC Producer, published by the Centre for Policy Studies. It was brief but brilliant. Antony Jay was founder of the current affairs TV show Tonight in 1957, staying with the BBC until 1964. Going freelance he co-wrote the now classic series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.
In his monograph he describes the trendy, witless, Left-wing, anti-Crown, anti-armed forces, anti-just-about-everything-British community of young BBC recruits to the NCA division back then. I had no idea the termites had entered the woodwork that early.
Forty years later, as he explains, their conquest of the NCA sector of the BBC has become total and even more fanatical. He makes it perfectly clear that for this far-Left, Guardian-worshipping mindset, there is no place for hard-nosed impartial news. The “agenda” comes first, middle and last. And the agenda is fundamentally describable in two words: loathe Britain.
David Cameron dare not say so yet and no one can blame him for that. He does not need the BBC to hate the Conservatives any more than it already does.
But if he ever enters Downing Street, one of his priorities must be to reform the NCA division of the BBC from top to bottom, if need be hiving it off from the rest of the Corporation. And at the kernel of the reform must be a complete clear-out of the claque of UK-haters who have captured it.
Friday July 20,2007
By Frederick Forsyth
THE BBC has had a quite foul week but its own best friends, of which I fear I am no longer one, could only say: it was entirely your own fault.
Let’s leave on one side the rigging of children’s quizzes and the invention of phoney prizewinners. Much more serious for the country is the exposure of bias in the news and current affairs (NCA) division.
First came the fiasco of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham disseminating a piece of film that claimed the Queen had stormed out of a photo session in a huff. Later it was admitted the sequence showed her bustling into the photo sitting in perfectly good humour but muttering about the weight of those Garter robes. Well, who wouldn’t?
Mr Fincham’s fault was not that he was fed by the subcontracted film-makers a duff tape: we all make mistakes. His fault was that, once alerted that the head of state had been insulted, he sat on his thumbs while it went round the world. That is why he should be fired.
Then came day after day of servile grovelling to Tony Blair, Cherie Ditto and Alastair Campbell.
I could not turn the damn set on without one of them looming across the sitting room at me, and always faced by a BBC interviewer who surely must have been bought and paid for. As an old-fashioned reporter, I cringed at the obsequious tone. And while the lot of them simpered at the camera, young men the two males had sent to Iraq were dying there.
It seems if you upset Alastair Campbell, as Greg Dyke did, you get fired. But slander the Queen and
it’s tut tut, dearie me.
Next came a decision by the BBC Trust (replacement for the old Board of Governors) to respond to Lord Pearson’s demand for an explanation as to whether Radio 4’s Today programme is passionately pro-EU. It is like starting a board of inquiry to ask if the sun rises in the East.
But the high point for me was a pamphlet by Sir Antony Jay called Confessions Of A Reformed BBC Producer, published by the Centre for Policy Studies. It was brief but brilliant. Antony Jay was founder of the current affairs TV show Tonight in 1957, staying with the BBC until 1964. Going freelance he co-wrote the now classic series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.
In his monograph he describes the trendy, witless, Left-wing, anti-Crown, anti-armed forces, anti-just-about-everything-British community of young BBC recruits to the NCA division back then. I had no idea the termites had entered the woodwork that early.
Forty years later, as he explains, their conquest of the NCA sector of the BBC has become total and even more fanatical. He makes it perfectly clear that for this far-Left, Guardian-worshipping mindset, there is no place for hard-nosed impartial news. The “agenda” comes first, middle and last. And the agenda is fundamentally describable in two words: loathe Britain.
David Cameron dare not say so yet and no one can blame him for that. He does not need the BBC to hate the Conservatives any more than it already does.
But if he ever enters Downing Street, one of his priorities must be to reform the NCA division of the BBC from top to bottom, if need be hiving it off from the rest of the Corporation. And at the kernel of the reform must be a complete clear-out of the claque of UK-haters who have captured it.