Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > Another Admission of Liberal Bias at the BBC

Via Ace of Spades, a former BBC man reflects on BBC political attitudes:

The BBC's 2007 impartiality report reflects widespread support for the idea that there is "some sort of BBC liberal consensus". Its commissioning editor for documentaries, Richard Klein, has said: "By and large, people who work in the BBC think the same, and it's not the way the audience thinks." The former BBC political editor Andrew Marr says: "There is an innate liberal bias within the BBC".

For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.

And that echoed to me this from Joe Huffman:

It's been said before: We tend to live our lives as conservatives, regardless of our political affiliations. I've heard R. Limbaugh say it several times. We don't take our paycheck, decide we're living on "more than we need" and give half of it away each payday. We don't confront our neighbors, telling them they must cut back on their consumption or we're going to do something really bad to them. You don't believe that you, personally, have far too much freedom, then demand that someone take your freedom away from you. Chances are you don't feel you have the right to steal from someone on the basis that he has more than you.

Not exactly. But we do often advocate such coercion against our fellow countrymen on a regular basis, through government.