Following the example of Not a Sheep and the Biased BBC website, I must link to this fine article by David Hughes, chief leader writer of the Daily Telegraph. His comments on left-wing bias at Newsnight are well worth a read:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7055460/The-30th-anniversary-of-Newsnight.html
But the programme today has a drawback for political junkies and that is its general view of the world. If you took all the trendy liberalism that makes up the BBC and bubbled it over the Bunsen burner until you were left with the purest residue, the irreducible core of metropolitan Left-wingery — well, that’s Newsnight.
It regards Right-wing politicians as some alien species, necessary (just) to the political process but viewed with either curiosity or contempt, depending on their demeanour. I’m sure this is not deliberate, that people aren’t consciously trying to present politics from a Left-wing standpoint (what, not even Michael Crick?). It happens because that’s the programme’s mindset.
Take last year’s stunt by the programme to set up a panel to identify candidates for public spending cuts. The four members were Greg Dyke (a former Labour donor); Deborah Mattinson (Gordon Brown’s pollster); Lord Jones of Birmingham(a former Labour minister), and Matthew Taylor (a former adviser to Tony Blair). Didn’t it strike anyone, anyone at all, that this looked just a little rum? Probably not. This is never going to change, of course. As long as the BBC is a publicly-funded state broadcasting organisation, its leading current affairs programme is going to take a Leftist view of things. It’s the way of the world, pointless complaining about it. But it’s still a shame. Imagine how good it could be if it broke out of its comfort zone occasionally.
As far as I was concerned the dye was cast for Newsnight on the 2nd September 1983.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those dates that sticks in my mind just like the 13th September 2001 when the BBC broadcast the obscene QT having packed the audience with a mob of baying muslims.
On the 30th August 1983 the US launched the STS8 Shuttle mission using Challenger. The purpose was to deploy a Comsat.
On the 31st August Korean Airlines flight 007 took off from New York en route to Seoul via Anchorage.
No one knows for sure what the crew did following takeoff from Anchorage but the probability is that the pilots entered then wrong flight co-ordinates into the inertial navigation system. It strayed off course and into Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula where it was shot down with all on board killed.
Following the event the usual bluster came from the sinister Soviets.
How did the BBC Newsnight spin it? Well they went hook, line and sinker for the Soviet version.
Donald McCormack intoned that Korean Flight 007 was most likely a spy mission in consort with the Challenger STS8 mission.
Andy C (TPO)
Tonight on radio 4 Westminster Hour they had a labour spokesperson and a Lord, from UKIP it seems, who gave their view on Labour, Conservatives, poll ratings, deficits, the forthcoming election and funding cuts, under a Lustig intent on pushing the leftist agenda.
ReplyDeleteHad to turn it off before I took out a fatwah on the bbc - this is something that really scares them.
This programme is getting more and more blatant by the week.
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