'Yes Minister' Creator Attacks 'Bias Ridden' BBC

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While predominantly to do with the BBC climate change bias, this article covers quite a few other areas where the BBC can be seen to be nothing like impartial, and raises some important points - like ‘Why is the BBC so huge, why does in dominate the nation’s communication'?

He also tells us Sir Antony admitted that when he was a BBC staffer, he ‘absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment; and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education’.

Creator of Yes Minister launches blistering attack on the 'bias-ridden' BBC

By Daniel Martin

The co-creator of Yes Minister has launched a blistering attack on the BBC – saying it is biased on issues such as climate change.

Sir Antony Jay, who worked as a BBC producer before writing the hit comedy, called for a dramatic downsizing of the corporation, saying it had simply become too powerful.

In an attack on his former paymasters, he said he would scrap all its radio stations except Radio 4, and all TV stations other than BBC One.

And he claimed that the values of the organisation were opposed to the principle of private profit and the monarchy.

Sir Antony was speaking at the launch of a report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which claims the BBC is biased over climate change.

‘If you believe in a free country and a free press, why do we have a state broadcasting system at all?’ he said.

‘Or why do we not have a state newspaper with £4billion spent on it and associated magazines all published by the state?

‘Why is the BBC so huge, why does in dominate the nation’s communication?

‘It is the biggest communications organisation in the world.’

He went on: ‘I do think it does some very good things and I’m not actually in favour of abolishing it – not at the moment anyway. I do ask why it dominates the media so much.

‘Why do we not simply have one BBC television channel, one speech radio channel – what more do we need?’

This week he wrote the foreword for a report on climate change bias in the BBC.

On Thursday, he said that when he was there, BBC people tended to be anti-industry and saw private profit as distasteful. Many were anti-monarchy, and were suspicious of the Army.

He said: ‘What I have noticed is that it comes down to values, and the hardest thing to change in an organisation is its values.

‘And these values are behind the BBC’s view on global warming, which is everything the BBC didn’t like – it was about industry, profit, big corporations and that sort of thing.’

Sir Antony said the BBC would not be as large as it is if the broadcasting landscape had been designed now, rather than in the 1920s.

In the foreword he wrote to the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s report, he developed his theme of a slimmed-down BBC.

He wrote: ‘All its other mass of activities – publishing, websites, orchestras, digital channels, music and local radio stations – could be disposed of without any noticeable loss to the cultural life of the country, and the licence fee could probably be cut by two thirds. Could it happen?

‘As the economic squeeze tightens, the case for a drastic slimming down of the BBC gets stronger every day. Cash-strapped households might be glad of the extra £100 a year.’

Sir Antony admitted that when he was a BBC staffer, he ‘absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment; and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education’.

Yes Minister and sequel Yes, Prime Minister, which Sir Antony wrote with Jonathan Lynn, were hits in the 1980s and a particular favourite of Margaret Thatcher.

They follow the ministerial career of Jim Hacker, played by Paul Eddington, and also star Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds.

Sir Antony worked as a BBC producer and editor in the 1950s and 1960s, where he established the Tonight programme.

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James Delingpole reminds us of 2 main areas of bias blatantly exhibited by the BBC this week, which we covered here
EU Treaty Change Bias and BBC + Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal
and adds his applause to Anthony Jay's admonishment of the BBC, including his introduction.

Sir Antony Jay: slash the BBC by two thirds!
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 10th, 2011


The BBC's reporting of David Cameron's recent adventures in Europe has been a disgrace. Last night – following the example set by that very exemplar of quisling Europhile values the Today programme – the BBC's Ten O'Clock News managed to reiterate about half a dozen times its view that Britain had been left more "isolated" than ever by Cameron's eminently sensible decision not to sell his country's interests for a mess of pottage. To listen to Nick Robinson and co, you might actually have imagined that it was somehow a bad thing for Britain not to wish to shackle itself to the rotting corpse of the EU; you might even have thought that it was a good and desirable thing for Cameron to accede to an arrangement which hamstrung Britain's financial sector (on which so much tax revenue and around ten per cent of our economy depends). And it was the same again today. Can you guess who BBC Radio 4 news managed to wheel out of retirement to represent the Conservative point of view? Yes of course you can. It was that bastion of traditional Tory Eurosceptical values Michael Heseltine. In the BBC bubble, you get the strong impression, the Euro is still a vibrant success for which we would be well advised very soon to ditch the pound, while the only people who oppose closer union with the great European miracle are swivel-eyed, xenophobic Little Englanders.

This is the second time this week that the BBC has been revealed as a national embarrassment. The first, of course, was Christopher Booker's magisterial report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, detailing how the BBC has breached its charter, destroyed its integrity and betrayed its audience in its grotesquely one-sided, heavily politicised treatment of the Great Global Warming Non-Story. Every bit as big a treat as Booker's thoroughly researched report was the superb intro by Sir Antony Jay (creator, inter alia, of Yes Minister) which puts the BBC's nauseating behaviour into its proper context. Read on, licence-fee payers, and weep.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a duty of impartiality, as we all know. But what exactly does ‘impartiality’ mean? If it simply means giving equal time to Labour and Conservative politicians on matters of party contention, the BBC fulfils its duty fairly well. But if it means not having, or at least never revealing, any views of its own on any subject of public debate, well, that is quite another matter.

Anyone familiar with large organisations knows that over the years they develop and perpetuate their own ethos, their own value system, their own corporate beliefs and standards. The police, the Army, the National Health Service, the Civil Service – they all subscribe to their own central orthodoxy, even if not every member accepts every item of it.

Connoisseurs of Whitehall are aware that different Ministries have different and even conflicting attitudes – the conservatism of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade and Industry contrasts with the liberalism of the Departments of Education, Health and Social Services and the Department of Environment, though they are united in their belief in a large and well remunerated Civil Service. Those at the top of the tree are the custodians of corporate orthodoxy; they recruit applicants in their own image, and the applicants are steadily indoctrinated with the organisation’s principles and practices. Heretics tend to leave fairly early in their careers.

It would be astonishing if the BBC did not have its own orthodoxy. It has been around for 85 years, recruiting bright graduates, mostly with arts degrees, and deeply involved in current affairs issues and news reporting. And of course for all that time it has been supported by public money. One result of this has been an implicit belief in government funding and government regulation. Another is a remarkable lack of interest in industry and a deep hostility to business and commerce.

At this point I have to declare an interest, or at least admit to previous. I joined BBC television, my first job after university and National Service, in 1955, six months before the start of commercial television, and stayed for nine years as trainee, producer, editor and finally head of a production department. I absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment, and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education. But perhaps our most powerful antagonism was directed at advertising. This is not surprising; commercial television was the biggest threat the BBC had ever had to face. The idea that television should be financed by businessmen promoting their products for profit created in us an almost spiritual revulsion.

And when our colleagues, who we had thought were good BBC men, left to join commercial broadcasters, they became pariahs. We could hardly bring ourselves to speak to them again. They had not just gone to join a rival company; they had sinned against the true faith, they were traitors, deserters, heretics.

This deep hostility to people and organisations who made and sold things was not of course exclusive to the BBC. It permeated a lot of upper middle class English society (and has not vanished yet). But it was wider and deeper in the BBC than anywhere else, and it is still very much a part of the BBC ethos. Very few of the BBC producers and executives have any real experience of the business world, and as so often happens, this ignorance, far from giving rise to doubt, increases their certainty.

We were masters of the techniques of promoting our point of view under the cloak of impartiality. The simplest was to hold a discussion between a fluent and persuasive proponent of the view you favoured, and a humourless bigot representing the other side. With a big story, like shale gas for example, you would choose the aspect where your case was strongest: the dangers of subsidence and water pollution, say, rather than the transformation of Britain’s energy supplies and the abandonment of wind farms and nuclear power stations. And you could have a ‘balanced’ summary with the view you favoured coming last: not “the opposition claim that this will just make the rich richer, but the government point out that it will create 10,000 new jobs” but “the government claim it will create 10,000 new jobs, but the opposition point out that it will just make the rich richer.” It is the last thought that stays in the mind. It is curiously satisfying to find all these techniques still being regularly used forty seven years after I left the BBC.

The issue of man-made global warming could have been designed for the BBC. On the one side are the industrialists, the businessmen, the giant corporations and the bankers (or at least those who are not receiving generous grants, subsidies and contracts from their government for climate-related projects such as wind farms or electric cars), on the other the environmentalists, the opponents of commercial expansion and industrial growth. Guessing which side the BBC will be on is a no-brainer, but no one has documented it in such meticulous detail as Christopher Booker. His case is unanswerable. The costs to Britain of trying to combat global warming are horrifying, and the BBC’s role in promoting the alarmist cause is, quite simply, shameful.

So what do we do about the BBC? One course of action that would be doomed from the start is to try and change its ethos, its social attitudes and its political slant. They have been unchanged for over half a century and just about all the influential and creative people involved in political programme commissioning and production are thoroughly indoctrinated. So do we abolish the BBC? After all, we do not have any newspapers or magazines that are subsidised with nearly four billion pounds of taxpayers’ money; why should broadcasting be different? If broadcasting were to start now, with all the benefits of cable and satellite technology, I cannot see anyone suggesting a system devised for the era of restricted wavelengths in which the BBC was born in the 1920s.

Of course no government would actually face up to the problem of privatising the BBC. And there are strong arguments for keeping it: some of its production units are among the best in the world. There is also a case for leaving its news and current affairs operation alone; it may have a built-in liberal/statist bias, but there are lots of other news channels which are commercially funded, so there is no great damage done if one of them is run by the middle class liberal elite.

No, what really needs changing is the size of the BBC. All we need from it is one television channel and one speech radio station – Radio 4, in effect. All its other mass of activities – publishing, websites, orchestras, digital channels, music and local radio stations – could be disposed of without any noticeable loss to the cultural life of the country, and the licence fee could probably be cut by two-thirds.

Could it happen? As the economic squeeze tightens, the case for a drastic slimming down of the BBC gets stronger every day. Cash-strapped households might be glad of the extra £100 a year, even at the expense of repeats, movies, imported programmes, quiz show and panel games – not to mention the sporting events we would see on other channels if the BBC hadn’t outbid them – that the BBC currently uses to fill out its schedules. But in some ways, the strongest case of all is made by Christopher Booker: if the BBC is to be paid to propagate the opinions of a liberal elite minority, it should not be allowed to dominate the national airwaves as it does today. Its voice should be heard, but it should not be allowed to drown out the others.