Murdoch BBC Lies Exposed

The use of the Murdoch press to perform the Tories’ dirty work is nothing new, but as the attack on the BBC is ramped up, the rhetoric has tipped over into forthright dishonesty in an effort to put the boot in. Nowhere can this be seen to better effect as today’s effort from the supposedly upmarket Sunday Times, where ex-Mail political editor Tim Shipman has his name on the by-line of an especially creative article.

“Tories give BBC reform ultimatum … Demands for broadcaster to stop chasing viewers” reads the headline. What, pray, does that mean? “THE BBC will be told to return to its public service roots and do away with highly commercial programmes such as The Voice as part of the widest-ranging shake-up of the corporation for a generation” tell Shipman, before the mildly sinister “BBC bosses will be put on notice this week”.

So what is this about? We read of a “Government green paper”, which is nothing more than a discussion document with no force in law and no guarantee that any of it will ever lead to even a white paper, let alone legislation, and otherwise there is the repeated mantra that the Corporation should “stop chasing viewers”. This is bullshit. The BBC is supposed to produce content that appeals across the board. That’s what we pay for.

Then comes the first whopper: “Last night John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, appointed a board of eight advisers with a brief to conduct a ‘root-and-branch’ reform of the Corporation as part of the process of renewal of its royal charter, which will expire at the end of 2016”. There will not be any “root-and-branch” anything.

Here’s what Whittingdale actually said: “Each member of the independent advisory group brings individual skills, experience and expertise … Together they will contribute to the oversight of the government's review of the BBC royal charter. I look forward to working with them on this important issue”. So there will be an advisory group, nothing more.

It gets worse: the green paper will supposedly “Suggest that the BBC website could be scaled back after complaints that it is killing local newspapers”. This is another blatant lie: as James Harding, now at the Beeb but a former Murdoch editor, has had to point out, what has done for local papers’ revenue is that there are less and less paid-for adverts, because of online sources such as Zoopla and Gumtree.

The BBC does not involve itself in advertising, and so does not abstract from the income stream of local papers. Harding observes “In countries where internet penetration has been higher and faster than ours, and there is no BBC, the impact on the regional press has been as, if not more, severe”. This is just another excuse thrown at the Corporation as a means of attacking it, part of a softening-up aided and abetted by the beneficiaries.

And the chief beneficiary would be Creepy Uncle Rupe - having the BBC cowed at the same time as he brings his bid for 100% of Sky back to the table. The real pity is that a supposed paper of record is being used for this dishonest propaganda campaign.