From Cut & Paste in today's The Australian:
Cut & paste: A public broadcaster acknowledges its left-wing bias
Leading British media writer John Lloyd, in Prospect magazine, on some frank admissions about the other Aunty
ANDREW Marr, the former BBC political editor, recently stood before an audience and said that "the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It's a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it's better expressed as a cultural liberal bias."
It was an extraordinary day, momentous even ... The day's project went deep ... into the BBC's emotional hinterland, unleashing a certain amount of controlled anger, even of self-contempt. There was a sense that the BBC was saying to itself what it roundly condemns others for saying. Much of what came out in the open - and it was not private: it was webcast, and I was told I could write about it - can now be used by its opponents to say: "Look! Even the BBC says it!"
Perhaps the most powerful moment was a brief exchange towards the end of the day between Sue Lawley, who was the event's compere, and the BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb. Webb, whose question-and-answer reports with some of his BBC colleagues sometimes reveal a certain testiness at their assumptions on the US, said that the BBC was generally biased against America. He said that in the tone in which it reported the US, the BBC tended to scorn and derision, and that it didn't give America "any kind of moral weight". It is not hard to imagine what the BBC would say if this had been put to it by the US ambassador, but Webb got grave nods...
Before this, the (UK) Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley was given the lectern to lambast the BBC, as she does sometimes in her columns, for showing "an uncritical acceptance of smug consensual opinion". It was, she said, staffed by people whose views and beliefs, and those of their dinner party companions and the writers they read, were so entrenched as to be no longer visible. People outside this consensus - as she was - were given space, but put on air "with a health warning" that they were right-wing.
She admitted that the liberal consensus did change its mind, giving examples of certain propositions that could now be aired, if gingerly: that children of two parents have better life chances than children of one; that there may be more effective ways of providing health care than a state-funded public monopoly; or that multiculturalism can lead to alienation of ethnic minorities. However, a new raft of topics could not be discussed, such as the corrupting effects of foreign aid or that a benefit system which rewards the poor ensures the continued existence of poverty...
Interspersing the sessions were cameo appearances, on video, by well-known people in the broadcasting world who said that the BBC was absurdly elitist, or had gone soft, or presented a caricature of liberal leftism.
Read more here. I think the same could well be said about Australia's Aunty ...
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