24January
Last Monday, the Cudlipp Lecture was delivered by Paul Dacre, whose day job is to edit the Daily Hell viewspaper. Time, I think, for a point-by-point rebuttal of his arguments. Mr. Dacre's basic position is that the BBC is distorting Britain's media market, crushing journalistic pluralism and imposing a monoculture that is inimical to healthy democratic debate.
The popular press is the very embodiment of the views of the great majority of the British people.
Mr. Dacre begins with a completely unjustified appeal to populism. He claims that a large number of people support the views of the popular press. How does he know? Has he asked them all, personally? Even if it's correct, what evidence does he have that the papers follow the people, rather than the other way round?
The corporation is simply too big. For instance, it employs more journalists and their support staff - 3,500 - and spends more on them - £500m - than do all the national daily newspapers put together.
So, fewer than 3500 people are responsible for the entire distribution of the national newspapers? Does that include the print workers, or the army of lorry drivers who deliver the paper to the vendor? Indeed, Mr. Dacre's statement pertains only to daily newspapers, which provide information for six days a week; the BBC is a seven-day operation.
There is not a single Labour scandal - Ecclestone, Mittal, Mandelson and the Hindujas, Cheriegate, Tessa Jowell, and Prescott and Anshutz - on which the BBC has shown the slightest journalistic alacrity.
Mr. Dacre has the makings of a valid point here, but loses sight of the big picture. All of these are, at heart, personal matters. The real scandal of the Labour administration is its waste of huge amounts of public money - on the health service, on public transport, on a pointless and illegal overseas war. All of these policies were held to criticism by the BBC; all were supported by the Daily Hell.
Over Europe, for instance, the BBC has always treated anyone who doesn't share its federalism - which just happens to be the great majority of the British population - as if they were demented xenophobes.
On the contrary; the BBC has been prepared to give equal access to all points of view on the European integration debate. Those who would see a greater convergance, those who wish to pursue a trade-only agreement, those little Englanders who think the world stops five miles inland from Dover.
We can contrast this even-handed approach with the myths and lies peddled by the popular press, from straight bananas to playground swings to television prizes. Anyone who dares propose anything short of complete political withdrawal from the community is made an object of derision, and often by Mr. Dacre's organ.
Anyone who questioned, however gently, multiculturalism or mass immigration was treated like a piece of dirt - effectively enabling the BBC to all but close down debate on the biggest demographic change to this island in its history.
This is not a problem from the broadcaster, but stems from a complete failure of nerve by the politicians. They are the ones who have failed to address the problem, just as the Daily Hell has failed to help matters. Is it liberal guilt that's causing Mr. Dacre to shoot the messenger? Oh, and the biggest demographic change in Britain's history was probably the Black Death. Or the invention of sanitation.
There is no problem great or small - and this is one of the factors in Britain's soaring victim culture - that cannot be blamed on a lack of state spending.
This comment reminds me of someone lying on their back, staring at the clouds. The human eye will attempt to resolve the image into something more familiar; where one person sees a teapot, another might see a pot-plant. It's the same with BBC reports; Mr. Dacre wants to see a high-spending bias, so a high-spending bias is what he sees. What he means by a victim culture is not clear; maybe it's a phrase that makes sense to the two or three readers of his hellish nonsense.
The BBC's journalists, protected from real competition, believe that only their worldview constitutes moderate, sensible and decent opinion. Any dissenting views - particularly those held by popular papers - are therefore considered, by definition, to be extreme and morally beyond the pale.
And the Daily Hell doesn't consider views from which it dissents to be extreme and morally incorrect? Yeah, right. Ask Ken Livingstone (or the previous week, and a few other entries later that week.)
Whole areas of legitimate debate - in education, health, race relations and law and order - are shut down, and the corporation, which glories in being open-minded, has become a closed-thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak.
Again, what of the popular press? The Sun, the Mirror, the Hell, they all have their own views. No-one is prepared to tolerate change. It's all very well for Mr. Dacre to rail against the perceived bias of the BBC, but what about the very real bias of his organisation? When will the Daily Hell clean up its own house?
Is the BBC's civic journalism - too often credulously trusting, lacking scepticism, rarely proactive in the sense of breaking stories itself - up to dealing with a political class that too often set out to dissemble and to deceive? The bitter irony, of course, is that when, for once, the BBC was proactive in its journalism and did stand up to the Labour party by breaking a genuine story, the corporation and its craven governors all but imploded under pressure from a rabid Campbell.
The BBC's journalism is already a far cry from the Is there anything more you'd like to say, minister? ethos of the 50s and 60s. It could certainly profit from treating politicians with the utmost scepticism, but I think that attitude is far more prevalent to-day than it was even ten years ago.
There's no defence for the BBC governors' supine action three years ago, forcing the resignation of Greg Dyke. But nor is there any defence for the craven credulity with which the Daily Hell and its stablemates reported the original claims about the weapons Iraq wanted people to think it had. Ali Campbell included the ludicrous 45-minute claim specifically to get the front page of the Everzinstannar.
If Associated Newspapers employed decent journalists, capable of questionning the claims of politicians, and not calling them concentration camp guards, things could well have been different.
Britain needs a sensible, lucid, and intelligent press corps. Instead, it's got the Daily Tabloid, the Daily Hell, and the Daily Looking Glass.
