The Boobs of the Beeb: A media monopoly that only gets worse

National Review, Sept 1, 2003 by Theodore Dalrymple

In the days when I traveled into the remoter parts of Africa, I would often be surprised by a villager who would proceed to inform me of the latest events in the next country but three. There had been an attempted coup there, and my informant seemed inevitably to have been a party to the secret machinations of the plotters.

"How do you know all this?" I would ask.

"I heard it on the BBC."

This meant that it was true, unarguably and undeniably true: as set in stone as the Ten Commandments. The BBC was not a mere broadcasting organization (as were the Voice of America, the Deutsche Welle, or Radio Moscow), much less was it the voice of Britain: It was the Fount of Truth.

Such a reputation is easily destroyed, of course, and can never be re- established once destroyed. For conservative Britons (a dying and almost extinct breed, admittedly), the BBC has long been not a fount of truth, or even of reasoned debate, but of insinuation, perfidy, political correctness, and cultural subversion. Among us today, the reverse of the African villager's belief seems to be true, or at least more true: I don't believe it, because I heard it on the BBC.

There's no denying that the world's most famous broadcasting company is now in deep trouble, and not just with conservatives. It is trusted by almost no one, even where, in the past, only people on the paranoid fringes doubted its impartiality. Indeed, people have started to question the need for its existence at all.

Its first director-general, Lord Reith, was a dour, puritanical, authoritarian, joyless Scotsman, a difficult character but a man of iron integrity, whose goal for the BBC was a noble one-indeed, the only such goal that could justify a publicly funded broadcasting organization: to make the good popular, and the popular good. He succeeded to an astonishing extent. His ethos lasted long after his departure, and meant that millions would eagerly tune in to discussions by the greatest intellects in the country about matters of genuine importance. Postmodernism changed all that. There was no demand for change from below, no groundswell of revolt against cultural high-mindedness, despite the fact that it was the compulsory licensing fees to receive broadcasts both by radio and by television (in effect a hypothecated tax) that paid for the BBC. No: The change occurred because the elite itself lost its belief in the distinction between the better and the worse, the higher and the lower, justifying its loss of faith by various pseudo- or semi-philosophical arguments. From now on, Shakespeare was no better than soap opera-how many professors of literature, the Marshal Petains of their subject, have now signed up to the proposition that the latter are as worthy of serious study as the former?

There was no one to defend the Reithian view, therefore, and so the race was on for the BBC to compete with demotic commercial broadcasting. Henceforth, the popular was good: Indeed, popularity was the only measure of value. Thus the BBC purveyed pop music, though the evidence suggests that this baleful form of mass hypnosis requires no state subsidy whatever to spread through society. The distinction between higher and lower was not the only one to be abandoned in the corridors of the BBC: that between truth and falsehood was also. The postmodernist, Rortyan, pragmatic view of truth-that there was no correspondence between statements and actual states of affairs, but only varying degrees of usefulness-became standard. And what was useful, as far as the BBC was concerned, was what attracted audiences.

Seen in this light, the current spat between the BBC and Mr. Blair is more in the nature of a family quarrel than an argument over any fundamental point of principle. From the British point of view, the American characterization of Mr. Blair as a hero rather than an opportunist is preposterous: He is himself as thoroughly postmodern as the BBC, a man of no cultural attainments or interests (other than pop music), a despiser of any tradition of which he himself is not the originator, a master of the language in which words have connotation but no denotation. Vague in his pronouncements, he is cunning in his calculations; he talks of feelings, not facts.

Until the war in Iraq, Blair and the BBC were completely compatible. Each was culturally destructive, even while they took advantage of the residual kudos of their respective institutions in order to destroy them.

Though attached neither to truth nor to intrinsic quality, but only to the exercise of power, the BBC, like Mr. Blair, is not without a higher moral purpose: that is to say, to reform the past (for which it harbors an imperishable hatred) out of existence. A constant flurry of reform, irrespective of whether anyone wants it, is therefore necessary, to prevent anyone from retaining his moorings to his own cultural past. By this means, the reformers will achieve absolute and uncontested power.

The BBC promotes conformist like-mindedness by recruiting its staff through the pages of only one journal, the Guardian. This liberal newspaper has long been in the vanguard of cultural destruction (though it is now, regrettably, also the only serious newspaper in Britain, certainly the only one that is consistently worth reading). It cannot see any institution, other than itself, without wishing to destroy it. The mere fact that the BBC advertises its jobs only in its pages is symbolically very telling.