We know the BBC is biased – we just can’t agree which way
Lord Adonis is in no doubt. The BBC’S coverage of Brexit, says the Labour life peer, is biased. Hopelessly, embarrassingly, appallingly biased. Biased, that is, in favour of Brexit. The BBC, he declares, has become “the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation”. He accuses it of devoting insufficient coverage to anti-brexit protest marches, and of running an “internal system of censorship”, which “vetoes output likely to offend [the] Government and [Nigel] Farage”. Indeed, he explains, Brexit is “largely the creation of the BBC”.
Of course, Lord Adonis isn’t alone in calling the BBC’S coverage of Brexit biased. Lord Tebbit, the Conservative life peer, has called it biased, too. Except that he called it biased against Brexit.
“Quite frankly,” he told the House of Lords just a few weeks ago, “the BBC has become the supporter of a foreign organisation called the European Union.”
Sadly, however, Brexit isn’t the only subject that the BBC is biased both against and towards. Ever since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, his supporters have constantly accused the BBC of Right-wing bias. Which must come as a surprise to the many Tories who have been accusing it for years of Left-wing bias.
Confusing, isn’t it. We all know that the BBC is biased. We just can’t agree which way.
Under attack from all sides of the political spectrum, the BBC must be feeling worried about its future. Luckily, I have a solution. The BBC already produces separate news bulletins for different parts of the country. So why not produce separate news bulletins for different parts of the electorate?
To Remainers, broadcast the news that Brexit is cancelled, and that Farage has been unmasked as a secret agent in the employ of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Lord Voldemort.
To Leavers, broadcast the news that Brexit has come early, and that as a result the NHS is so awash with cash that every injection is made using a solid-gold syringe. To the Left, broadcast the news that Corbyn has been elected with a 650-seat majority, and that poverty, injustice, war and Tony Blair have all been instantly eradicated. And to the Right, broadcast the news that Corbyn poisoned the Skripals himself, with a pot of his home-made jam.
Only then will we be able to call the BBC’S journalism truly objective.
This week the Beano sent Jacob Rees-mogg a spoof legal letter, ordering him to stop masquerading as Dennis the Menace’s old foe Walter Brown. I liked the letter. But one thing puzzled me. Who was “Walter Brown”?
I read the Beano every week, back in the 1980s, and I don’t remember anyone called “Walter Brown”. In my day, Dennis the Menace’s enemy – more accurately, victim – was called “Walter the Softy”. That, and nothing else. Because that’s who he was. He was a softy. He was timid, weedy and weak – and effeminate. That was the whole point of the character.
Yet, in the Beano’s letter to Reesmogg, the word “Softy” doesn’t appear. The character is referred to exclusively as “Walter Brown”. And the letter contains no suggestion that this Walter is “soft”, unless we’re meant to count the passing reference to his “enjoyment of classical music (because he thinks it makes him seem clever)”. Walter, it seems, is soft no more.
Well, I suppose it was inevitable, really. In this day and age, the Beano could hardly expect to get away with the kind of politically incorrect jokes it published in my day. Every week, we were being invited to laugh at a boy for crying, and liking flowers, and dressing up in girls’ clothes. Rather cruel, now I look back on it.
Mind you, that was only the 1980s. Back in the 1950s, of course, he was called Walter the Fat Disabled Pacifist Communist Lesbian.
Some of the time, it must be great, working in a nursery. After all, you get to spend your day talking to very small children, and very small children are much more fun to talk to than grown-ups. Grown-up conversation is so repetitive and predictable (work, feeling tired, politics, feeling tired, house prices, feeling tired, Brexit), whereas you never quite know what a very small child is going to come out with next. The other day, for example, my four-year-old son devised his first ever riddle. Here it is.
Q. What’s invisible?
A. An invisible dinosaur.
You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty tough. If the Nazis’ codes had been written by four-year-old children, Bletchley Park wouldn’t have had a prayer.
On the other hand, there must be times when working with a roomful of very small children is just a tiny bit trying. The evening before last, my son was telling me about “the rules”, which all the children in his class at nursery are expected to follow. According to him, the rules are: “No running, except in the garden”; “We don’t say unkind things to our friends”; “We don’t hit our friends”; and “No climbing on the teachers”.
“Hang on,” I said. “No climbing on the teachers?”
“Yes,” said my son simply. “That’s a rule?”
“Yes.”
“Do children climb on the teachers?”
“Yes.”
“Why do they climb on the teachers?”
“Because they like to.”
“What happens to children who climb on the teachers?”
“They get put in a ‘time out’. You aren’t supposed to climb on the teachers. If you climb on the teachers, the teachers can get hurt.”
I don’t know what nursery staff get paid, but I doubt it’s anywhere near enough.