The BBC and Gordon Brown

This is an odd piece I found in "drafts" from March 2008. I think it must have been taken from the comments section on the BBC have Your Say.


Oscar:
Andrew Neil just had a pretty surreal discussion with Denis McShane on the Daily Politics (no treasury minister would agree to show up). The interview was a non starter because there was not a single figure that Neil could agree with McShane. I don't really want to bandy about figures - but we all know the basic fiction - er sorry - message - about government triumph and Tory shame. The point is the government can get away with saying anything at all. And if you aren't a brilliant economist or very knowledgable business person - how is the average person to know any different? To be fair to Neil he tried very hard to inject some real figures into the interview. But time and again the BBC just sit back and allow this propaganda to go out unchallenged.

To top it all the programme ended with schoolkids interviewing leaders of the opposition - Clegg and Cameron were given a quick soundbite sitting around a formal table. But for Gordon the kids went to No.10 and he sat in the middle of two of them on a sofa. Only the kids who interviewed Brown were invited to the studio where they dutifully told the nation what a brilliant bloke Gordon was. This really is my idea of Soviet style hagiography.

I know the BBC has always been bad - but since Gordon Brown came to power there's been a sinister change of tone. After Iraq they went into overdrive to bash Blair. But with Gordon there's this appalling new deference. Everything is smoothed over and covered up. From Balls' shameful heckling during Cameron's budget speech to Northern Rock, to the dodgy David Abrahams donations, to the Lisbon Treaty. No mention even of all those missing discs. Whatever happened to them? Under Brown all the dirt is washed away along with any sense of what is really happening. In the economy, crime, prisons, immigration, education, health, the EU. No one ever gets to hear the real picture in an open debate. It all gets airbrushed out, and meanwhile the country is fed a diet of Jade Goody giving us her expert opinion on the budget.

That just about sums up the depths to which the BBC has sunk.
Oscar | 13.03.08 - 2:11 pm | #