Dacre attacks BBC 'cultural Marxism'

[Teddy Bear]

Dacre attacks BBC 'cultural Marxism'


Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Tuesday January 23, 2007
The Guardian


The Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, last night used a rare public speech to launch a devastating attack on the BBC, accusing the corporation of "a kind of cultural Marxism" that is harming political debate and failing to represent the views of millions of licence fee payers.
He said the BBC's tendency towards institutionally biased left-leaning views, part of what he dubbed "the subsidariat" of newspapers and broadcasters that did not pay their own way, was a factor in feeding political apathy.

Delivering the Hugh Cudlipp lecture in memory of the legendary Daily Mirror editor, Dacre - also editor in chief of sister titles the Mail on Sunday and the London Evening Standard - claimed the BBC was not only expansionist but guilty of subscribing to a singular world view.

"BBC journalism is reflected through a left wing prism that affects everything - the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of the interviews, the interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated," he said.

Dacre - who has become the best-paid editor in Fleet Street on a salary of more than £1.2m a year after maintaining the Mail's circulation at more than 2.2m - said that while he approved of much of what the BBC did, he believed it was out of step with large swathes of licence fee payers.

"What really disturbs me is that the BBC in every corpus of its corporate body is against conservatism with a small 'c'. Which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons," he said.

"Thus it exercises a kind of cultural Marxism where it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning those values on their head."

The Daily Mail, which Dacre has edited since 1992, has long been ideologically opposed to the BBC.

But last night he argued that brand of journalism he claimed was practised by the BBC was, "with a few honourable exceptions", not up to the task of holding the government to account.

"Is the BBC's civic journalism, too often credulously trusting, lacking scepticism, rarely proactive in the sense of breaking stories up to dealing with a political class that so often sets out to dissemble and deceive," he said.

"An over powerful subsidariat - dominated by the BBC behemoth - is skewing the political debate."

Dacre also accused the so-called "subsidariat" - a group in which he placed the Times as well as the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC - of patronising its audience and being "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people".

"Having started as an admirable philosophy of tolerance, it has become an intolerant creed allowing a self-appointed elite to impose minority values on the great majority. Anything popular is dismissed as being populist, which is sneering shorthand for being of the lowest possible taste," he said.

Notoriously publicity shy, Dacre tends to prefer to let his newspapers do the talking. He is renowned as a workaholic, rarely grants interviews and maintains a forensic eye over every edition.

Asked whether his newspaper would support David Cameron at the next election, he said: "It's far too early to say.

"The Mail is a conservative paper, it would be very surprising if it didn't support the Conservatives. Whether the current Conservative Party is conservative remains to be seen."

He said Mr Cameron had been "broken" by the liberal agenda of the BBC and others and said its policies were "a blood sacrifice to the BBC god".

In a passionate defence of the ability of the popular press to produce "brilliantly entertaining sugar coated pills" that married that which entertaining with that which is important, he also warned that through the Human Rights Act, judges were "itching" to bring in a privacy law "by the back door".

"Yes, Britain still has a reasonably robust, commercially viable and democratic popular press," he concluded.

"But it is under siege as never before. Circulation is halved, traditional revenues are migrating, distribution is becoming more problematic.

'But the greatest threat comes from an ever more controlling establishment that is becoming increasingly intolerant of any form of dissent."