NPR/PBS and Now the BBC: The Problem of Government-Funded Media

Greetings and hallucinations.

Today in history:

1931 Abbey Road Studios opened in London. Pathé filmed the opening of the studios in November 1931 when Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in recording sessions of his music. They were doing stereo recordings there as early as 1934.

1954: The immigration reception centre at Ellis Island, New York, which had processed more than 12 million immigrants, was closed.

Birthdays today include Robert Lewis Stevenson, Ryan Gosling, Neil Young, and Charles Manson. And, no, I'm not going there.

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As someone who spent many years in the broadcast business and who openly celebrated President Trump's executive order cutting federal funding from NPR/PBS, I've been watching with interest the controversy surrounding the BBC and its editing of President Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. For one thing, I'm convinced our domestic media simply spread untruth in that editing, and so were a party to the lie. As someone who wades in this stuff, I can tell you that the majority of the media these days involves cut and paste, particularly if it sounds leftist enough.

But, to the point: That controversy at the Beeb has always struck me as being of the same problems as our own NPR/PBS issues. So I was quite interested when this Sean Walsh piece came over from the UK to my screens this morning, writing of that event:

His critics are entitled to criticise the performance, and restrict coverage to the highlights, but not to editorialise vindictively. If you’re going to bowdlerise a Trump ‘weave’ it would be better manners to do it in a way that doesn’t have him saying the opposite of what he did in fact say. And if you are going to do news in the style of a bad homemade video, at least don’t get caught.
The BBC does news in that postmodern way. Things no longer happen or do not happen in its universe. There are no events. Instead, there are narratives. Some of which are helpful, others of which are offensive to the homogeneous liberal sensibility and are therefore problematic. When you think about the world like that, it doesn’t much matter to you that your reporting is a lie because you’ve already given up on truth anyway.
The BBC’s Trump forgery reminded me of that thing Channel 4 does every Easter when it cannibalises the Gospel accounts of the Passion to ‘prove’ that Jesus faked his own death and was never in the tomb at all but spent three days shacked up with Mary of Magdala. All very predictable; all very dull.

Thing is, the belief that any government-run “news” agency has any possibility whatsoever of being impartial is the height of ignorance. It is axiomatic that any organization that is not ostensibly and overtly conservative and freedom-minded will end up with a strong left bias before the echo dies from its formation.

As our own PBS/NPR propaganda ministry has clearly demonstrated, it is impossible for such an organization not to evolve into an apologist for the left, a point now confirmed by the BBC. And here's the thing: We here in America have been watching our press flaunting their bias for years. But so, too, with the BBC, as well. As SkyNews says:

The reckoning of our own government-paid-for “services” has already occurred, with the cutting off of federal funding for the whole of it, at least temporarily. The Brits are just now catching up. David Keighley writes:

Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the BBC’s Director-General and Director of News, are set to resign after revelations that a BBC One Panorama programme in the build-up to last year’s presidential election deliberately falsified a Donald Trump speech to suggest that he fomented rioting on Capitol Hill. The BBC at the highest levels knew about the fraud for many months and concealed the truth.
It is arguably the most serious scandal in the Corporation’s history. But let us be clear: this collapse did not happen last week, or even last year. It has been at least a quarter-century in the making, the inevitable result of successive governments’ cowardice and BBC arrogance.
So-called accountability has been left in the hands of the BBC itself – as judge and jury of its own standards – and Ofcom, and both bodies have become bastions of self-interest and complacency, censorship of dissenting voices and fraudulent fact-checking.
For at least 25 years government ministers have mouthed platitudes about ‘valuing our great national institution’ while ignoring every warning about its bias, its secrecy and its contempt for ordinary viewers. They have watched the BBC turn from a national broadcaster into a self-appointed moral guardian and spouter of propaganda, and they have done nothing.

Change the names and you have a perfect description of what’s been going on with PBS/NPR here in the States. It should be no shock to anyone that the people who are the loudest defenders of taxpayer-funded broadcasting are the politicians who benefit most from its output: leftists. In the case of the U.S., it's the guano wing of the Democrat party.

But lets go for more of an explanation of the events on this side of the drink:

Does anyone honestly believe that what has been coming out of PBS and NPR does not have a negative effect on our culture and our people?

It is worth saying that the above-mentioned Deborah Turness, who just resigned as the BBC news director over that edited Trump speech scandal, was president of NBC news until 2017. She was also, in 2011, the only journalist invited to the Buckingham Palace State Banquet for Barack Obama. After watching NBC over her tenure, I doubt there are many who don't see a pattern.

It gets better. Her current husband is John Toker, who formerly was in the employ of the Cabinet Office, which is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for supporting the prime minister and Cabinet. Toker now works for ITC.

I've pointed out in the past that the UK is our coal-mine canary for the intersection of cultural issues and government, including immigration. The unrest over there on that topic is ongoing and building. I would add government-paid-for media to the fuel for that fire. The similarities between the two issues in both the UK and the U.S. are striking and instructive. It seems to me that there is a link between the issues of open immigration and what the people are being told on their taxpayer-funded and grossly biased outlets.

You see, if it were just the NPR/PBS bias, we could logically consider it a problematic one-off and associate it with the single organization. With the very same bias issues showing up at the Beeb, and there as here arguably causing a leftward shift in the culture, or at least amplifying it, however, we now have a pattern that is undeniable.

I am afraid it's going to take a long time to uproot the bias from the BBC, and it will be nearly impossible to eliminate the BBC outright. The roots of that bias and that stranglehold on what the British people hear on their radios and TVs go back to it's foundation a century ago. I'll be watching that struggle, and I wish them luck with it.

Stateside, however, a lot of the work has already been done, but there's still more to do. The ban on the federal government funding of domestic news organizations needs to be made permanent.

And by the way, I would include funding for the failing dead-tree media. We keep seeing calls for government-funded "journalism" from places like Columbia University, for example. This is folly, and for the same reason funding for electronic media shouldn't exist. There's a reason newspapers and other supposed news outlets are failing: They're simply not trustworthy any longer.

But for PBS/NPR, the problems described here are merely one mishandled election away from reappearing.

As for the two BBC execs, I'm not worried. From what I understand, Al Jazeera is always hiring.

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