BBC activism

The BBC almost seems to loathe its licence payers. It seems to resent its dependence on them as if it harbours a superior contempt for their naïve willingness to watch its programmes. Like a famous but desperately conceited fiction writer whose output has fallen far below her glory days. So far has she fallen that creaking conceit is now horribly misplaced. She even seems content that fewer and fewer people bother with her mediocre output.

Yet even in her dotage the BBC clearly clings to a globalist narrative where those same licence payers have their country, culture and history swept aside forever in pursuit of ideological and surprisingly furtive political dogma.

In its attitude to licence payers the BBC appears to have acquired a culture of cocktail party Leninism. A revolutionary outlook where all reasonable people must adopt the soul of the wealthy tourist and a few of the words of Lenin. One which is never content to stay within its own borders whatever the fate of those millions of ordinary people who helped raise would-be BBC revolutionaries to the dizzy heights of the upper middle classes and the edgy satisfactions of ersatz intelligence.

That is merely an analogy, but the BBC seem to view ordinary licence payers as a kind of latter day kulak. Passive conservative progress-blockers who sullenly hinder the world from its true destiny, a globalist utopia which never manages to define just what it offers the ordinary worker or the children of the ordinary worker. The suspicion is that this poorly defined utopia the BBC seems to believe in so vehemently is little more than a new world order governed by clever people such as those who quite coincidentally work at the BBC.

The analogy with Leninism is surprisingly strong and it may even be more than an analogy because even today the ideal of the totalitarian utopia is as strong as it ever was. The BBC is not dispassionate enough to see its own utopian assumptions for what they are. We may as well assume therefore that the BBC attracts activists with a long discredited political agenda and has done so for decades. Worse than that though – it recruits them and worse still fails to rid itself of them even when they make their threadbare professional standards embarrassingly obvious

Yet this covert activism also engenders a sense of patching together of rigid political correctness and responsible professionalism which make no coherent sense because these things cannot be patched together. They do not belong together. The failure is too obvious, so much so that an inability to actually be professional, to correct lapses of professional standards when they occur, this failure seeps into everything the BBC tries to do.

It injects an unfortunately amateurish flavour into news and current affairs which once upon a time may not have been noticeable, but with the entire internet available in seconds it has become too noticeable. What is even more apparent is that it is not improving.

The BBC seems to be gripped by a difficulty often seen in bureaucracies where endless griping argument, evasions and petty principles take the place of pragmatic professionalism. A milieu where even the office ideologue cannot be evaded because management boats were burned long ago. BBC failures are compounded by its inability to lose face, admit wrongdoing, waste, bias and sloppy journalism and worst of all activism masquerading as investigative reporting.

Bureaucracies such as the BBC have this problem, this reliance on omissions and evasions to shield them from their own internal weaknesses but in our age of alternative sources - not from the outside world.