As the BBC was last week engulfed in what its chairman, Lord Patten, called “a tsunami of filth”, some observers widened out our attention to the peculiar role played at the head of the BBC’s affairs by Lord Patten himself.
Under the headline “Patten personifies everything that’s wrong with the BBC elite”, the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne trenchantly observed how “the BBC in recent years has been colonised and captured by a narrow, greedy, self-interested and self-perpetuating liberal elite, contemptuous of ordinary people and of ordinary morality”. In other words, the unspeakable Savile affair is a symptom of a deeper corruption that has pervaded the BBC for years.
Apart from a desire to award each other grotesquely inflated salaries, one of this elite’s most alarming traits has been the contempt they show for the BBC’s legal duty, under its Charter, to report on the world with “due accuracy and impartiality”. There is an ever-longer list of issues on which the BBC has a clear “party line”, which it pushes with shameless disregard for balance.
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A year ago, I published a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the consequences of a deliberate decision by the BBC’s top brass in 2006 to throw all its prestige into propaganda for climate-change alarmism. Equally blatant, a few years earlier, was a campaign, through its news programmes, for Britain to join the euro – which looks even more deluded now than it did at the time.
The man, above all, with a legal duty to ensure that the BBC meets its Charter obligations is Lord Patten, as chairman of the BBC Trust. Yet on these issues, as on many others, his views and those of the self-important mediocrities making up the BBC hierarchy are indistinguishable.
Patten has long been a global-warming zealot. Last year he endorsed an absurd report for the Trust which called on the BBC to show more bias on climate change, rather than less. Back in the late 1990s, when the Today programme wheeled on luminaries almost daily to extol the benefits of the euro, constantly appearing alongside Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan was EU Commissioner Chris Patten. He is the last man who would see a need to call the BBC back to a semblance of balance in its reporting. If the moral and intellectual shambles into which that once-proud organisation has sunk could ever be cleaned up, it is certainly not going to happen with Patten in office.
Glimmering here and there in the twilight, there may still be a good many things about the BBC we would miss. But, with its Charter due for renewal in 2016, recent events are likely to make the case for breaking up this vast, corrupt, publicly funded empire stronger than ever.
Click source to read more from Christopher Booker [Greenies miss the point of a badger cull]
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