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The BBC will achieve balance when those contesting consumerism, corporations and the power structures pushing us towards planetary disaster get as much airtime as those promoting them. At the moment the ratio of appearances is about 1:1000
So deep is this bias that it's not even recognised as such. Consumerism and corporate power are treated as if they are the natural order of things. Those of us who challenge them exist beyond the limits of acceptable thought. The BBC doesn't even seem to realise it's excluding us
I can imagine an archivist of the future trawling through the BBC's output in 2019. "You mean to say they *knew* they were spiralling towards environmental breakdown, yet hardly anyone contesting it was allowed on air? What on earth was going on?"
They might conclude that we lived under some kind of totalitarian regime, systematically excluding anyone who disagreed. But they would be wrong: it's deeper than that. This is about an ideology so pervasive that most people cannot see it: Consumerism.
Consumerism is the plastic soup in which we swim. Because it surrounds us, it is almost impossible to see. Such ideologies require no totalitarian control to become absolutist and universal. They rely only on a failure of perception.
I have watched this ideology creep across broadcasting. It began with the shutting down of investigative programmes, and the sudden emergence, everywhere, of business programmes and business correspondents. THAT was deliberate. What followed was mostly drift.
Celebrity culture began sweeping across all channels, even the highbrow ones (that now worship highbrow celebs). Celebrity is the facilitator of consumerism.
Environmental programmes were systematically purged. Then the alternative voices got purged from current affairs programmes. I used to be invited on about once a week. Now I get asked once a year, and mostly it gets cancelled before transmission.
I wouldn't mind, if other people were filling the gap. But they aren't. We have all been shut out, in the midst of environmental crisis. They might allow the odd scientist on to explain the research. But not people challenging the system causing this catastrophe.
Yet, *every day* opaquely-funded lobby groups such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute and TaxPayers Alliance are on air, promoting corporate interests and calling for even less regulation of the system driving us towards disaster.
And that's not to mention the myriad other voices promoting business interests without challenge, on business programmes, business segments and right across current affairs output. Among these voices are the BBC's own correspondents.
Business broadcasting plays the same role as business schools in universities. It's an arena in which normal standards of rigour, research and balance do not apply. Corporations and those they sponsor can make their self-serving claims without challenge.
