One has to hand it to those who pay good money to read the Daily Mail: to believe some of the propaganda served up to them requires a suspension of disbelief, together with an ignorance of the real world, a combination without parallel. Small wonder that right-leaning politicians are so in awe of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre: the brass neck is at times breathtaking. But one can polish a turd only so far.
What's so f***ing wrong with kicking the c***s at the f***ing BBC, c***?!?!?
That thought was not allowed to enter, though, as gloomy pundit Stephen “Miserable Git” Glover received his instructions from the Vagina Monologue and brought forth “I say this in sadness, but unless the BBC gets its act together it may not be here in 15 years”.
Whatever does he mean? “Can the BBC survive as a national institution commanding widespread respect? And in an age of media behemoths such as Netflix, will the relatively small Corporation become irrelevant? These are questions which anyone who feels affection for the BBC, as I do despite everything, is bound to ask. To say Auntie has an existential crisis is no exaggeration”. And what is causing that crisis?
As if anyone needs to ask. “One gigantic problem - which I don't apologise for mentioning again - is political bias. It is getting worse, almost certainly because of the divisions over Brexit, to which most BBC journalists are viscerally opposed … The Corporation has long been left-of-centre”. Yeah, right. Anything looks left of centre to the Mail.
Besides, how does he stand that one up? “There have been three very recent examples of the BBC displaying blatant bias. The first came after The Sun newspaper discovered that the young Jeremy Corbyn met a Czech spy on at least three occasions in the Eighties when the Cold War was at its height”. Oh, f*** off. Just f*** off. A single sourced story told by a proven liar and fantasist. If the Canary had done it, it would have been Fake News.
The second of the three Mail strikes? “A similar combination of fear and covert support surely explains the Corporation's indulgent treatment of Jeremy Corbyn after his change of mind about the customs union - which he previously strongly opposed - earlier this week”. So indulgent, he was grilled extensively by Laura Kuenssberg. Next.
Is the third any more convincing? Sadly not: “The third example of bias came yesterday after the Mail revealed how Max Mosley supported the revoltingly racist far-Right in the early Sixties”. Supported his father’s party. The father who the Daily Mail eulogised in its obituary as recently as 1980. Mosley has renounced those views. The Mail never did formally renounce the far right and say sorry, did it?
But the most jaw-droppingly shameless thing about this story is the Mail calling “You’ve only got 15 years left” on any other media player. Why so? Well, in January last year, the Mail was selling 1.491 million copies a day. But that included 66,000 “bulks” - in other words, giveaways. By November last year, that figure had fallen to 1.384 million.
Do the math, as they say. The Daily Mail, at its current rate of decline, will run out of readers willing to pay for the print edition before that 15 years is up - well before. And it will cease to become economically viable some time before that.
That’s why the Mail is the Titanic calling on the iceberg. And we know how that ended.
There is certainly a problem with BBC News & Current Affairs that can end the BBC, but it isn’t what the Mail thinks.
ReplyDeleteEvents have shown the BBC to be so scared of the orchestrated complaints about “left wing bias” (a tactic imported from the US) that they have become beholden to the government line, and in particular Brexit. This gets disguised as ‘balance’, but gets applied in the most extreme of cases (e.g. showing someone shaking their head to facts about the EU during ‘Question Time’ this week from Blackpool).
The logical conclusion - as we are now starting to see - is people abandoning support for the BBC when they would have previously defended it to the death.
Whether by accident or by design, the BBC is being destroyed from the inside out, and executives/Trust members at the Beeb either don’t know or simply don’t care.
The human race has such possibilities, such wonderful creativity.
ReplyDeleteIn Britain, all we produce is the likes of the hideous Daily Heil, the Scum and an absolute shit hole of a capital with wretched high rise slums of the imagination - and politicians, civil servants and "businessmen" to match. All of it a deluded house of cards.
BBC news and non-political programmes generally have the highest production qualities and educational worth, soap operas and similar dross apart. For anyone to accuse it of "left wing bias", given its employees in news and politics, is nothing short of laughable. The BBC is one of the few remaining institutions this country can be proud of, albeit under siege from a corrupt far right establishment. If it is ever privatised or introduces adverts we will know it has finally gone over the edge. The same goes for the NHS.
Dacre and his corrupt mob, like the tories and New Labour, represent everything wrong and rotten in Britain. The irony is, they might well be done in by the consumerist bullshit they front for. It can't come soon enough.
From the 2017 Labour manifesto "We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union". Not sure how that can be interpreted as strongly opposing the Customs Union but then I'm not a Daily Mail journalist so I have at least some connection to the truth.
ReplyDeleteHliarious to see the Heil 'calling out' the Beeb for 'left-wing bias' when every third edition of Question Time for the last five years has featured either Mr Farrago or one of his heirs and successors, despite the fact that his party never had more than two MPs (only one of which ever elected under the party's name), no representation in the Scottish Parliament or NI Assembly, and a rag-tag of has-beens, never-weres and never-will-bes in the Welsh Assembly who have already split into about three different factions. If any body is responsible for the promotion and mainstreaming of the Far Right in this country, it's the BBC's News & Current Affairs department.
ReplyDeleteAs for Brexit, you may have read that Maplin went into administration last week. The CEO clearly stated that one of the main reasons for the company's problems was the collapse in Sterling since June 2016. When the BBC reported the story, the Brexit angle of the story was never mentioned.
And as for BBC News' coverage of politics in Scotland....
The truth is that the BBC is now overtly what it was covertly for decades, i.e. the State Broadcaster. Add to that the deliberate Establishment nobbling and cowing of the BBC from the Hutton Report onwards, and you can see why fewer people trust the organisation's news coverage to tell something close to the truth than ever before.