The Nightmare from which the BBC Claims to Have Awoken Us … Continues
Civitas, 8 November 2004
Those domiciled in Britain are obliged to pay an annual license for the privilege of being able to watch any television in that country. The revenue raised from this license fee goes to fund the BBC which justifies its privileged position by claiming its news and current affairs of the highest quality and both well-informed and impartial.
Over the past three weeks, the BBC has broadcast a three-part documentary series entitled, ‘The Power of Nightmares’. Designed to rebut the idea that the West faces any orchestrated threat from an Islamist terror organisation, the series claimed the idea of such a threat to be a neo-conservative myth, deliberately manufactured to fill the public with enough dread to enable its manufacturers to succeed in a cynical and repressive political power-play which threatens civil liberties in the West.
The documentary series might have been correct in denying Al Qaeda is akin to a regular army with a central chain of command. However, any suggestion the West does not currently face an orchestrated terror campaign from Islamic fundamentalists who take their inspiration, if not marching orders, from Osama bin Laden, must be rejected. This is something, sadly, events that have taken place in Holland since the screening of the final part of the BBC series have revealed.
Sunday’s newspapers contain chilling accounts of the brutal murder at the hands of Islamic terrorists of a Dutch filmmaker who had had the temerity to make a documentary critical of Islamic attitudes and practises towards women.
What makes this murder so chilling, and why it discredits the BBC’s documentary series, is that several Dutch politicians have simultaneously received death threats from Islamists who have declared anyone in the West who speaks out against their religion or otherwise offends them to be fair-game for similar treatment.
You might not need a central chain of command to orchestrate such hit-squads. Disaffection with the West combined with a merciless disregard for the sanctity of human life will suffice. We in Europe seem in line for the start of an Islamist terror campaign which, if it happens, will have all the qualities of nightmare – save for being real!
Rather than the idea of an Islamist threat to the West being only a neo-con nightmare that lacks any genuine basis in reality, it is rather the BBC who are guilty of attempting to induce the British public to dream there is no such threat. It is time for the British public to wake up to just what poor service its state-funded broadcasting service is currently providing it in return for the TV licence. It is time for them to call on their political representatives to think again about renewing the BBC’s Charter.
I found the series to be informative and, upon checking many of the facts, could be easily verified. Grow up. The series did not say there was NO THREAT from Islamic fundamentalists, rather that the threat is being used to perpetuate fear. The idea that propaganda is being used to augment an enemy’s danger is not new to humans and thoroughly expected by most thoughtful people.
Grow up, Ken!
The BBC is not “intent on only promoting its liberal left agenda”. In point of fact, the producer of the “Nightmares” piece in question criticizes the BBC, amongst other news organisations, for promoting the view that Al Qa’eda is a big monolithic terrorist organization. That’s hardly a liberal left agenda.
It is true that the BBC tends to have a trendy-left worldview, but to claim “It is a danger to democracy to have such a powerful organisation slanting all of its news and current affairs programming to show only one perspective of the world.” is a little hyperbolic.
I suspect that conservatives are feeling a little got-at at the moment, but it is surely the role of a news organization to challenge and question, and given that the dominant world meme with regard to terrorism and the Middle East is that of President Bush, his views are inevitably going to be challenged more than the views of those who have already lost the argument.
There can really be no case for keeping the BBC intact at the expense of the licence fee we all have to pay, if the BBC is intent on only promoting its liberal left agenda. It is a danger to democracy to have such a powerful organisation slanting all of its news and current affairs programming to show only one perspective of the world.
The BBC does, sadly, seem to have the corporate mindset of a Guardianista. This is most visible in its coverage of the US, and overflows into its treatment of Islamist terrorists as the misunderstood freedom fighter picked on by the bullying Yanks. This does not detract from its reporting, which is the fairest of the media outlets that I have encountered, but is present rather in the spin and interpretation provided by the newscaster or the documentary presenter.
However, the surest case for keeping the BBC more or less intact can be seen in America. 300 channels of complete bilge with adverts every 7 minutes that render what little good programming there is unwatchable.
It is seemingly impossible for the BBC to avoid the injection of a “personal” agenda into anything that it does.
Certainly its news broadcasts are tinged with the opinions of the reporter and/or the producer and the same is true to an even greater extent with its so-called documentaries which, far from being factual, express the views of its devisors.
The problem is not that these broadcasts are the products of a human mind that cannot help but have a slanted view one way or the other, but that the BBC has become over nearly 100 years to be the absolute epitome of fairness and impartiality. That it is no more so than any of the other broadcasting networks is seemingly impossible to impress upon a public that has been weaned upon the myth.
It is for this reason rather than the actual existence of bias, that the BBC must lose its licence and its position in society as the final arbiter of truth and justice.