I keep bumping into this problem. I want to be able to stand up and unequivocally defend the BBC. But it has repeatedly shut out radical voices and crucial issues while providing a massive platform for the alt-right to spout ill-informed nonsense. It is hard to love.
It's important to be specific about where the BBC fails. Its failure is not in drama, comedy, nature, history or sport, in all of which it excels. It's in news and current affairs.
Here too, we should be precise. The bias isn’t simply right vs left (though there is plenty of that, too). If you talk in broad left or green terms, they’ll let you on. After all, there are boxes to tick. But if you directly challenge corporate or financial interests, forget it.
There are a couple of brave programmes that will occasionally let you speak, but most will shut you out. You’ll be treated – as I’ve told the editors of one important programme see me - as an “extremist”.
Challenging corporate and financial interests is arguably the most important of all tasks. Our very survival depends on it. So the BBC is not failing trivially or peripherally, but in the most significant way of all.
The failure is systemic, consistent and active. Opaquely-funded thinktanks supporting corporate interests can publish any old rubbish, and it’ll get wall-to-wall coverage. Nigel Farage, a bundle of opaque corporate interests in human form, is everywhere.
But if you challenge powerful financial or industrial interests, it doesn’t matter how much you have to say, or how well you say it. The great majority of the BBC’s news and current affairs programmes will no-platform you.
It’s corruption. Not brown-envelope corruption. But the much deeper and more insidious corruption of an organisation that doesn’t even know it’s failing, as its perspectives have become so closely aligned with the interests it should challenge.
Yes, I still want to save the BBC. I want to save it from the government and from Rupert Murdoch.
But above all, I want to save it from itself.
But above all, I want to save it from itself.
