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Not going to link to it but the Daily Mail’s second attack in a month on one of the BBC’s most prominent young Black journalists ought to be a wake-up call for those within and beyond the BBC who don’t realise the peril we’re in right now. (Thread)
The story comes from Guido Fawkes, a far-right website which has debased our media even further and which regularly offers dog-whistles (and worse) to its readers - check the comments on pretty much any story and marvel at the fact that those are the _moderated_ replies.
Guido is a leading supporter of #DefundTheBBC, a real and growing phenomenon - it’s gone from the fringes of far-right discourse to the centre of the Conservative Party and ‘mainstream’ right-wing media. It’s rooted in the idea that the BBC has a hopeless left-wing bias.
As a Labour member I am pretty confident that the BBC didn’t show much left-wing bias at the last election; we can argue about whether its treatment of Corbyn was fair, but clearly they subjected Labour to relentless scrutiny. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/question-time-host-emma-barnett-labour-nationalise-sausages-a4309576.html
But the right-wing narrative sees the BBC as infested with ‘leftists’ & past redemption despite all evidence to the contrary: former Tories becoming BBC political editors, Tory PMs recruiting spokespeople directly from BBC News, decade of Tory rule, etc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12348159
Part of the right’s animus towards the BBC is that, as with the universities, they see it as an institution that isn't as right-wing as other parts of the establishment. Some truth to this for unis but the BBC employs a ton of right-wingers & is still presented as rabidly left.
Bashing the BBC without completely destroying it has been a right-wing pastime because it drags the BBC's 'impartiality' further to the right - which helps at election time if you're a Tory supporter. But media barons have always wanted to destroy the BBC & may now pull it off.
What we should be talking about much more is that the death of newspapers is making the BBC’s dominance of broadcast media & online look so much more juicy to right-wing media. #DefundTheBBC is absolutely part of that agenda.
Rupert Murdoch now owns radio stations that shadow nearly all of the BBC’s major output - Times Radio is the final piece in the puzzle, and will be there for you when Murdoch & his political servants can kill off Radio 4. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/14/times-radio-offering-big-money-in-effort-to-lure-bbc-presenters-chris-mason-nick-robinson-news-uk
If you think about the massive public engagement with the BBC, advert-free, it’s easy to see why commercial players like Murdoch are so jealous. It's a crying shame to see all that unsold airtime if you're a media baron, esp. as print journalism enters its death spiral.
We know that Google and Facebook are the principal assassins of the newspaper industry; but rather than going after them, which would be properly in the public interest, the right wants to destroy public broadcasting in the UK. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/opinion/coronavirus-newspapers-journalism.html
Destroying the BBC will remove the most trusted news source in Britain (which now floats somewhere between the centre and centre-right); that will give the right-wing media even more latitude, and will allow the Tories to keep talking to voters via fascist-adjacent Facebook ads.
Again, I can't stress enough that the subtle shift here is from Tories bashing the BBC simply to force it rightward to Tories & media barons openly plotting the destruction of public broadcasting. The agenda dates back a while but it's gone into overdrive under Johnson.
One other thing about the BBC: it has made some progress in representation, which infuriates the right & leads them into dog-whistles about ‘diversity’. Which takes us back to the attack on the young BBC journo in the Mail. There’s nothing random about this: it’s all deliberate.
Many inside the BBC will respond by making further efforts to palliate the far right; but at this point they should be asking themselves whether giving a platform to Nigel Farage or numerous Guido/Spiked hacks has done anything to slow the #Defund movement. Quite the opposite.
I totally appreciate that many on the left will be exasperated by the BBC’s traditional alignment with establishment interests (see the fine book on this by @ta_mills) and its acrid hostility to Labour last year; but a world without the BBC is going to be even worse, believe me./
