How the BBC makes me sick (From The Northern Echo)

How the BBC makes me sick

11:17am Tuesday 12th July 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

OF COURSE, it is wrong for journalists to hack into people’s phones and, so it has been alleged, for newspapers to pay the police for information. But don’t tell me that the News of the World was the only paper up to these sordid tricks.

Information – quick, early, before all the others information – it’s called a scoop – is what journalists strive for. To get the story and, if possible, to be the only reporter with the story, is what journalists live for. That is no bad thing. It is a fair ambition: to do your work efficiently and take some pride in it. But phone-hacking and backhanders are a step too far.

What irritates me about this squalid episode is not that the News of the World has been found out, but the great clamour of kettles calling pans black from those who have not been found out, but who very likely deserve to have been. The truly hideous scene is the triumphalism of the BBC which is rejoicing in the streets because its bete noir, Rupert Murdoch, is in trouble. It would like to see a stop put to Murdoch’s attempt to gain control of BSkyB. Of course, the policies and apparatchiks in the BBC oppose Murdoch’s taking control because they say it would give him undue influence in the mass media: that his journalistic and TV empire would begin to approach something like a monopoly.

This is rubbish. I should say at the start that I’ve little sympathy for Murdoch – not least because he single-handedly ruined a once great newspaper, The Times.

That long-respected organ is now little better than its sister paper The Sun. It’s full of gossip and mindless drivel by correspondents and columnists who write about the school run, hair styles and fad diets. The Times is so debased and trivial these days that you can’t believe the mind-numbing, stuff you read. You think it must be a satire.

But then you realise with a shock that they bloody well mean it.

But for the BBC to criticise Murdoch for some alleged near-monopoly of influence really makes my eyes water. Sky Television is a very small part of TV broadcasting as a whole – simply because only a minority of people have a satellite dish and so are left with no choice but terrestrial. And, while we’re talking about corrupt monopolies, how about the bloated BBC which daily and nightly turns out showbiz rubbish, celebrity twaddle and political propaganda – and obliges us to pay for this muck though the imposition of the licence fee.

The BBC used to be an institution worthy of our esteem, but for the last 30 years at least it has degenerated into a self-serving left wing political clique with its own – very predictable – agenda: pro-Arab, anti-Israel, anti- American, obsessed with pop music, global warming, campaigning for euthanasia and for every fashionable cause you can think of.

The irony is that the BBC bigwigs ascribe to themselves the high moral ground, whereas the truth is that they are so far from the high moral ground they are in the swamp. They imagine themselves cutting edge, critical, anti-establishment, but what these blinkered, self-interested, largely ignorant hypocrites and overpaid timeservers don’t understand is that they are the establishment.

No doubt Murdoch has sinned, as we all have sinned – as I dare say even The Guardian and The Daily Mail have sinned.

But if you’re looking for serious dirt, look no further than the BBC.