Charles Moore on BBC Bias: "BBC Assumes White People Are Bad & Black or Brown Are Good"

[Music] a lot more you are famous of course for being the biographer of mrs thatcher and i wonder if we could start by asking you what was mrs thatcher's view of uh the bbc and did she see it as having failed in some way um she was always hostile to the bbc um and her husband dennis even more so he tends to say things like that stinking stinking stinking bbc would be the sort of way he would put it um but in a way a lot of that hostility was the simple hostility that politicians feel when they sense they're being attacked um so there was an element of sort of unreflective quality about it um and i don't think she thought deeply about what was on the television didn't really watch it very much um she did however attempt reforms um and they were quite important one was opening up the market much more because the era of satellite broadcasting was beginning and that was a very important change to permit that and the other was that the only way the government can legitimately intervene in the bbc in terms of what's going on is by who it appoints as chairman and she appointed mamadou cassie um after the been the most tremendous bust up with the director general uh alastair byrd and um that did make a difference and hussy who was basically a traditional british establishment figure rather than a thatcherite radical but he was quite tough and he um he did see that the bbc needed some internal discipline um and uh by putting him in she achieved what in her view was some sort of modus vivendi i mean there was somebody she felt she could trust to behave um responsibly and everything died down a bit she sometimes had wider ambitions to change the whole system but as has always been the case every time this has come up um in the end politicians don't quite think it's worth their while and the attack they'll get from the media will be so great and it's also complicated and so noisy that in the end they leave it alone because the bbc has very powerful allies and friends doesn't it it would be it would be a brave politician who would take the bbc on in particular in her case um the home secretary who in those days was the minister responsible for the bbc was also her deputy willie whiteclaw who she trusted very much but who was always very much in favor of the status quo at the bbc so there was never really the right tools to hand to to sort this out um but i think she did change the landscape and of course the the rage at the time that she was allowing rupert murdoch to start a satellite channel was beautiful to behold because i was i was in the ranks then at the bbc and as a as a reporter and it always seemed to me it was a very clear hostility to everything that mrs thatcher stood for within the bbc itself do you think that's fair yes i do think that's fair i don't think it was party political i don't think it was that they were all labor and she was tauri i think it was more of a cultural attitude that um she's a right she's right wing low middle class and a woman and those are all bad in their view at that time and um they my biggest criticism of them in that period was not so much that they were hostile to her though they were but that they could not understand or explain her to the viewer that's the key thing you you if you just depended on the bbc in that time you wouldn't have known what all this is about what what's she doing why is she doing it um it was sort of mysterious and that's the biggest that's one of the biggest failures of bias i think is that it gets in the way of understanding change that's very interesting you should say that we've just come from interviewing um a representative of republicans abroad um and we were talking to her about the way the bbc tackled the trump phenomenon yeah what you've just said i think could be said of that also of him also don't you think yes i mean i think donald trump is much more genuinely problematic than margaret thatcher but um i think the same thing applied which was that um if you just watch the bbc you think how is it possible that this man has become president i mean it doesn't make any sense whereas if you sort of good reporting would explain why there were a lot of reasons um and that story though he is trump you there were powerful points about why trump was president and to some extent what he was trying to do i mean he was much less coherent than mrs thatcher but nevertheless um and that's really you know that's again what a particular national broadcaster set up by law finance by law um and told by lord to be balanced um it's got to elucidate things not sort of um just fill that fill the whole scene with the smoke of battle but of course um the point you touch on there is that if the bbc approaches um an issue like trump um from an ideological point of view it actually it actually militates against understanding doesn't it i mean that is really the problem with bias and maybe the same thing was at work when the bbc uh so badly misjudged its turn on brexit do you think i think there was respect in in modern political and media culture which has made this worse because some things are considered so wicked in what you might call the woke way of thinking that such people actually think it's their duty to be what you or i might call biased so for example if they think someone is a racist and some of them thought that trump was a racist they feel because it's so terrible to be a racist they must say he's a racist it's in their view their duty to the truth whereas i would say you should never describe someone really as a racist unless a sort of overwhelming evidence such as they say that they're racist for example or they say absolutely blatant um things you have to um those judgments are very severe judgments to pass on people and they've got to be objectively correct um but they don't really think that because they think and the same i think to some extent do with sexist or what is called homophobic possibly islamophobic and so on there are things that are just so out of order in their minds that they regard the restrictions on bias as being a way of caging the truth and uh and indeed they might say they were even designed to cage the truth um and therefore of course to most viewers i would think they were failing in their duty um you had the interesting experience of being in house at the bbc a couple of years ago when they invited you to be guest editor didn't at christmas one year yes um tell me what your impressions were of that experience for you did it did it um did it uh did it reaffirm you in your view did you did you come away um thinking anything different or was your experience of that well obviously when they invited me to be guest editor of the today program um it was nice of them to do so they didn't have to do that um and but what i did notice is that i think the aggressive editor the day before or the day after was greta tunberg and she got any she got an easier ride than i did let's put it that way and in particular i noticed that um the person interviewing me really did everything he could to wrong foot me which is an odd thing to do with a guest editor because that the idea is that the guest editor um comes forward and guest edits instead of which um it was more like being a sort of interrogation chamber and bringing up things that he thought i'd thought 30 years ago and that sort of thing that seems strange to me but i can't complain i was allowed to do at least a certain amount of what i wanted for an hour and a half or whatever which is a great privilege and but i did also notice this the way the system works so that the all sorts of things i asked for that i was told i couldn't do because of course the idea of guest editing is not just simply that you speak but you invite x and y in and so on um so for example i wanted to interview the person who i think is probably the most biased of all the uh correspondents um on anything on the bbc who is roger haribin the environment correspondent who seems to be just a spokesman for extinction rebellion and so on and um uh they wouldn't allow that um and they say extraordinary things when you ask about they say it's like he can't answer back um uh is one of things they love saying if you criticize a bbc journal it seems to me he gets a chance to answer the whole time all day um on all channels so um it's about time that the positions were reversed did it feel like being in the enemy camp well no i mean there are a lot of people i like very much um on the bbc and a lot of very talented people and they don't all have the same view um and i particularly like the people you never see i mean there are a lot of very nice young producers and assistants and um but um so i didn't feel that i was suffering persecution at all but i um you certainly feel that um you are regarded as a very strange creature well i'm not supposed that might be true and um and that you um sort of shouldn't be there really um that's pointy raise about roger harebin um and the way that you were not allowed to to cross-question him or talk to or talk to him at all actually talk to him at all yeah um or get anyone else to i should add i mean i suggested why doesn't he talk to i think i wanted him to talk to matt ridley who's a brilliant commentator on the environment but no no but um this touches on a more general point which is the way the bbc avoids engaging with its critics would you agree yes i mean like all bureaucracies um it has a tremendous pallava of engagement so there are all sorts of sort of feedback type systems but also like all bureaucracies it knows how to suffocate these things so it's very difficult to have a true engagement in these matters on air i did one thing i did once that struck me about that was i appeared on question time and fiona bruce was in the chair and um it was after the brexit result sometime after the brexit result and um early on i said i would just like to say i'm honored to be here but i would just like to say that of the five panelists i'm the only person who voted for brexit um and um 51 percent of the british people voted for brexit but only 20 percent of the people on the panel um and this doesn't seem to be unusual seem to be what you do almost every week um and um obviously they couldn't actually stop me saying that but i've never been asked on the program again they don't take kindly to that kind of public criticism but the brexit issue which you raise i think was a point at which for quite a lot of people the the penny dropped about the bbc because um i don't if you'd agree but the the bbc's coverage of brexit seemed to me so obviously lopsided that um you know more people suddenly became aware of the problem um well i would like to divide the bbc's coverage uh on brexit off brexit into two because i think it tells you something about how it all works and how bias works during the actual campaign referendum campaign they're in fact quite fair because there are very strict rules which go down to counting by seconds how many seconds or minutes each side can have and they're quite easy to enforce you just have to be very careful about doing it and the bbc is good at that sort of thing that you can work that out and it's fine but the moment the result came in and um then you had a tirade and torrent of uh opposition to brexit going on for months and months and months first of all just expressing utter shock that it could have happened because they truly truly didn't believe it could have happened and then as they began to conserve with others to come to believe that they could reverse it by some means perhaps the second referendum perhaps judicial reversal perhaps a general election where it would go the other way whatever um and there the bbc was more biased than i've ever seen it i would say as a as a general proposition and um and then you're right i think that this became very apparent to the public and was very significant um in boris johnson leading the tour becoming leader of the tory party and leading the tories to a huge victory at the december 19 election and how systematic do you think that sort of bias is at the bbc i mean how is it that on an issue of that scale after all the major cleavage in british politics over the past 50 years really the european issue um why is the bbc so out of sync with public opinion well of course some of it to use the cliches is to do with a particular sort of what people used to call a cleric of people educated in the same places with the same views um almost sort of hereditary caste um then i think there is therefore there tends to be a common view and therefore they tend not to notice what else is happening so i think i mustn't underrate the extent of shock at the result not just so they didn't like it but they were absolutely amazed by it because they really hardly ever met people who wanted brexit i mean of course i exaggerate but not very much actually particularly not met socially you know the perhaps would have met someone interviewing them for some news event or something but um and so they they couldn't couldn't cope with it and in a funny i think that shows that they are rather a ruling cast because one of the things about a ruling cast is it doesn't feel the need to question um itself much because it's ruling so if you're if you're ruling things must be quite good doesn't they and so um a bit like when you know the foreign office completely misjudged the state of iran before um the fall of the shah because the shah was uh pro-british and he seemed quite a charming chap and everything and his opponents seem to be maniacs and a lot of them were unfortunately um and so they would keep on reporting that um the foreign office would that uh you know it was all fine and then suddenly it happens um and it's happened ever since for the since 1978-79 and um so there's a sort of conspiracy an unintended conspiracy against understanding in the bbc i mean the popular way or the fashionable way of talking about this is to say that you know people exist within their own intellectual social bubble and that is maybe the explanation of the bbc yes and i think this is particularly true if you're because of the way it's funded that might sound str might it might sound strange to say that because you would think that a license fee paid for compulsory by everybody would make the bbc very attentive to everybody but it doesn't work like that because you know you're going to get the money come what may and um you can't lose the audience or you can lose the audience but you can't lose the money and um so you can um keep cracking on with whatever it is that obsesses you and within very broad limits you will go on being allowed to do that whereas whatever the faults of a newspaper if you're talking rubbish that the readers don't like or even if you're telling the truth which the readers don't like um you will lose the readers um what did you make of the of the the scandal we're still sort of seeing unfold before our eyes that the bashir scandal i mean that is um well let me ask you what do you think that tells us about the bbc when the bashir scandal um finally completely broke and we got the dyson report tim david the new director general um of the bbc who i believe is sincere in trying to restore impartiality was interviewed on the today program and he said some good things but i thought he made a bad mistake because he said um that the bbc investigates itself more than any other media organization in the world which is a very very strange thing to say about something which has taken 25 years to come out so for a quarter of a century theoretically it did investigate itself because it had an original internal inquiry at the time but actually it didn't and it's pretty clear that it deliberately didn't and it's pretty clear that in 2016 when it re-hired martin bashir it was not repentant um about the whole thing and indeed it may possibly be trying to cover up something about martin bashir or keep him quiet by rehiring him so um the truth about self-investigation i mean yes he's right the bbc is obsessed with process and it incessantly has inquiries about this out in the other but when it considers that its vital interests are at stake um it has a brilliant way of glossing over whatever that problem is so the jimmy savile case would be another very important one and the typical reasons why it would gloss over would be the protection of a box office success such as jimmy savile or the protection of its own reputation such as bashir or the obsession with a scoop which is also to some extent bashir and there is a potential conflict between the charter of the bbc and scoops not complete of course but one of the things that often happens with the scoop is that you have to obtain it very fast and by very unusual means now the bbc obviously shouldn't rule that out but the danger with such groups is that they suspend the f the ethics of your process which are particularly important in a life license feeing situation and that they make you exaggerate the importance of what you've got so that you don't apply a um calm news judgment to it and i think both of those things were going on in that case and it is very very very iniquitous what happened i mean it's particularly iniquitous in relation to the monarchy and the royal family because the unspoken deal almost a spoken deal is because the bbc is the national broadcaster it always broadcast all state occasions involving the monarchy uniquely and has a trusted role in all of that it would therefore you would expect deal with the authorities properly and fairly and it must be remembered that when diana was gave this famous interview she was still royal she hadn't yet divorced uh the prince of wales and she was protected by the royal system in terms of private secretaries press secretaries where she lived everything um and they chose to conceal the whole thing from buckingham palace and all the system um so they were breaching trust in that respect and they were completely forgetting their role as a national broadcaster you you can't there's this constant desire in the bbc to have it both ways um and this of course breaks trust do you think that there's a suggestion there of a sort of incipient republicanism within the bbc no i wouldn't say there was inception no doubt some are republican what i think there is is a sort of sneer about patriotism so you have absurd i mean it really did turn out to be true that the bbc was trying to get rule britannia out of the problems for example i mean just ludicrous i mean i don't regard this as a deeply important story because the fundamental thing about the prompts is music not um patriotic display but there's a long tradition of the last night of the proms it's very popular it's absolutely fine um it's not hostile racist or anything like that it's jolly and the idea that the the british broadcasting corporation should be trying to slough this off pretending it wasn't um it's just ridiculous and that's the sort of thing it's not um some very ideological political agenda about we we should be a republic it's not sort of careful marxist uh stuff it's it's a sort of snobbery um and an embarrassment about the idea that we should be proud of our country and um and particularly we should show we're proud of our country it was george orwell who said wasn't it that uh english intellectuals are you know would be um more embarrassed to stand up for god save the queen they would be to etc um so tell me this you mentioned tim davey and he has been saying the right things hasn't he about restoring impartiality and there seems to be a reform program that he has in mind do you think the bbc is reformable well there are two separate questions about reform in the bbc um one is the sort of question of how does it behave and be run and all that sort of thing and the other is whether you get rid of the license fee how is it financed um which relate but are different and i do believe that the license fee will was always wrong but was enforceable and now it's still wrong and it's not enforceable so it will have to go i mean it's lasted a very long time longer than i expected they're very clever at perpetuating it and it's only recently that licensee for you i think it was last year perhaps the year before that license fee revenue fell for the first time um but it must go um because of technology because the whole younger generation doesn't buy television licenses all that sort of thing it will go it's just a question of when um and how you construct the sort of financing way out of it nobody has really yet worked out though i think tim davies something he's thought about quite a lot um then there's a question of how should they behave and it seems to me that if you justify some unique advantageous system of financing whether it's a license fee or something else there and here mr dave is quite right impartiality is the absolute key to it because what is it otherwise that you bring to the party that you can't get that you can't guarantee any other way and how can you make demand that everybody pays for it if what they're getting is not is in fact partial just so obvious such an obvious moral point it seems to me completely indisputable and that me does mean that there are constraints on the type of journalism that you can do which are different from the constraints on me at the daily telegraph or whatever that it's because of the fact that people have to pay for it and also that it's supposed to serve everybody so um not only by being impartial but also um trying to cater for the right range of interests and occupations and regions and um and i don't think most bbc people at the top really think that way they sort of try to most of them but actually they don't they're more carried away by what they care about and the way king's aim is always to put the novelist used to project this he said what people are obsessed with in the bbc is what he called how does it go how will it go down at the club meaning what will my colleagues think about it um uh not um what will the viewers think about it and you i mean i always amuse me the bbc uses the word brave when talking about themselves which shows confirms it's very much a program they will say is brave is one which runs no risk at all within the organization for the person making it because it they will he will be congratulated by colleagues because it'll be about you know how awful um boris is or something like that um and um you know or exposing something which we all know is bad um like racism um or being very challenging in your questions to a conservative minister or something like that um that's brave i remember picking this up years and years ago i was invited to a religious broadcasting conference um and everybody there was from religious broadcasting mostly from the public sector um except for me and one or two others and they kept saying this was in the late 80s and they kept saying how brave they were because on all these religious programs they made programs which was were in favor of aid sufferers um and the implication being they were defying a sort of massive um anti-gay um consensus which um uh you know was really putting them at risk but there wasn't that massive anti-gay consensus and there was a there was very widespread compassion for age sufferers and it wasn't brave it might have been right but it wasn't brave to um make these programs and in fact what would have been brave in a religious program would be if they got on a sort of tub thumping um damn damn sodomy um type character who um you know i don't think such people are good people but you know that that would they could put that religious position that's religious broadcasting if you like because you would never get that you'd never ever get that now that would have been suppose you'd have one personal thought for the day who said actually um uh you know if people didn't have gay sex they would they wouldn't get aids um and god condemns it and all the rest now that would have been very unattractive but brave and um and do you see what i mean they kept thinking what courage they were saying but they in fact led very protected lives um it's interesting you talk touch on the religious issue because we interviewed um someone from a small charity called aid to the church in need yes very good yeah um and um he was talking about a specific concern of his which is that the bbc seems to give very little attention to put very little effort into the persecution of christians in countries like iraq or in pakistan where some terrible things have happened yeah i just wondered if the same thing strikes you too i i am very struck by um the extreme sensitivity about what might be called islamophobia and the lack of interest in the plight of christians in persecuted countries i think it's very marked actually and while i think it's absolutely right to be very careful about being unfair about any great religion i think it does prevent first of all the christians are suffering in many of these places and this is unheard their cries are unheard and secondly i think um there are definitely new situations in which the bbc doesn't tell you what's explained what's going on because it's frightened of saying something which might offend in their view of hen muslims and i've noticed recent examples of this what's happening in africa where um islamist violence has been described in other ways and i and i noticed for example that there was a lot of kidnapping this was i think earlier this year of um children in nigeria and when this was first reported on the bbc i noticed specifically that they didn't mention the possibility of an islamist motive and so there was talk about criminals or ransoms or sort of thing um and it emerged later reported in other sources that it was indeed boko haram i think and um that it was a religious emotion which by the way doesn't necessarily exclude ransom because islamists believe in ransom as a religious duty in some situations um and gradually what tends to happen in those situations the bbc ends up reporting but anyone's got the cover from other people doing so and similarly it's reporting on mozambique recently where they were chopping off the heads of people on the beach uh islamists was a bit like that though it got to the truth a bit quicker but you know it's um you can see that hesitancy and i and back home you can see it so um this teacher who had to leave the school in batley um because he'd shown the uh pupils the charlie hebdo cartoons all the sort of presumption of innocence was not given to him his motives were called in question it was suggested that he might be islamophobic or you know incredibly ill-judged or something like that and they didn't make the inquiries about who these people are who are attacking him which and i looked some of it up and you could see that the under this a rather thin veneer of charities very small charities you would find people who are putting forth very extreme views who were imams or sort of um that sort of thing um uh condemning the man so they're very uninvestigative of you know they love investigation sometimes but not of things like that and what do you think explains that i mean this sort of this um as it were this protective attitude towards islam and yet this indifference to verging sometimes even on hostility to christianity what explains that well whatever explains it it's not that many people on the bbc are muslims because not many of them are um and it's not because they wish to advance islam in that sense um i think it's a combination of um fear um of being accused really of racism because often the whole question about islam is seen in race terms which is quite wrong but it is um and also of a assumption of who's bad in the world and who's good and this is becoming more explicit now with critical race theory which is itself racist because what it what it know so for example a thing put out by cambridge university vice chancellor last week made this clear that um what he called whiteness was actually bad in itself which seems to me that is a racist theory i mean that's like saying that's like the south african apartheid theory the other way around um and um therefore and i think the bbc sort of some vague inarticulate way subscribes to something like that so unless proved otherwise the white person particularly the white man is guilty in any situation if all you can see is you know one brown person or one black person and one white person who's guilty it'll be the white one and that's where they start of course they don't always come to that final conclusion i mean they're not completely crazy but that's how they start and that's why for example they capitulated abjectly to black lives matter after the death of um george floyd in all their coverage was entirely uncritical of black lives matter and treated it as the authentic expression of all blacks really and indeed of all right right-thinking people um and therefore you know when they started knocking down statues and having rats and all that sort of thing no effort was made to work out who are these people what's their ideology whom do they represent um they're they're right and you sort of and often within the bbc staff organizations that sort of thing are now very powerful and often seem to dictate content which should surely be decided by editorial not by staff organizations um uh insist on one way of looking at it and so again though the bbc gradually this unscrambled a bit over time and they've said a little bit more about um about this essentially their their coverage of black lives matter has been unilluminating and biased but isn't it extraordinary that an organization which is i think still one of the largest if not the largest employer of journalists in the world should have such in curiosity about something so salient to to to to to to to our society today yes and i think there's a lot of very able and well-informed people in the bbc and i think a lot of them do feel oppressed by this in fact i know they do because i sometimes talk to them um they might not share my particular obsessions and political views i don't know but they but they a lot of people them want to be fair and they also have as you say intellectual curiosity but but bureaucracies operate by fear to a very large extent and what they're frightened of is being accused of something like islamophobia much more than they're frightened of being accused of buyers um and so they do have very uninquiring minds it comes back to something i'm saying about my objection to them in the thatch thatchers was simply not explaining um i would also say this about the after events everything that's gone on since um 911 that i've had very few some very good people who have done something like this like john ware for example but on the whole the distinction between islamism and mainstream islam is never properly explained on the bbc and therefore in some curious way the bbc is fulfilling the right-wing view that the sort of uneducated right-wing view that all muslims are extreme because the people it gets on all the time are pretty extreme and um and um there's no actual interest in the theology of islam the differences between different um sects and parts um the more quietest spiritual traditions of sufis and so on and so on um it's it's um it's just we let's get a muslim let's get a muslim on and of course which muslims they get on the whole the ones who shout the loudest um which if you think about it that is a racist idea you don't say let's get a white man on um you don't even say let's get a christian on you'd say you probably say let's get a bishop on or an anglican bishop on or a catholic bishop on or something like that um so you get absolute misrepresentation and the misreputation is very great but it's done out of a misunderstanding which is actually rather unsympathetic to islam john pontifex of acn said that this was a matter of what he called religious illiteracy yes and that of course is a much wider problem than the bbc there's a general religious illiteracy um i remember a um a white christian friend of mine immediately theoretically christian friend of mine in the media was given a um for her child a a little catholic kiddies book um with pretty pictures and things like that and it say it said um at one point pray for as soon as as sinners now and at the hour of our death which is of course from the ave maria and she said why does they have to mention why do they all go funny these religions why do you have to mention death in a book for children and had no idea this is the main prayer of catholics and um and um so it's a very widespread problem and bbc is not alone in that but given its immense resources this is another of my frustrations only the bbc because of its huge journalistic resources could do these things in depth actually in modern times they're the only organization who could and they don't um finally let's just look to the future a bit um we've got the advent of this news station gb news two things in general terms do you welcome that and do you think that it might conceivably have an impact on the bbc well i certainly do welcome gb news and i welcome um all sort of entrants to the market from wherever they come um i don't look forward to the sort of slugging match if that's what it becomes like fox news versus cnn or something like that because i don't think fox news spread i mean it suddenly spreads more heat than light but um it must surely be better if there is competition um and out of competition not always not every time not necessarily quickly but on the whole comes something better so the bbc perhaps in reacting to if if gb news is a success perhaps the bbc will come to look to its own lights and perhaps set about competing on that new territory which gb news maybe gathers to itself um you have to get a lot of scale to compete with the bbc on these issues and because we because of our broadcasting system if you break through to that scale you come under the same bureaucracy and you start to move in the same circles and you repeat the same attitude so actually sky nowadays and itn itv rather are not super different from the bbc they have many similar problems and they behave in a similar way and channel four in particular is quite preposterously biased though it's um uh it's theoretically under the same impartiality rules so um i think the problem now is you have a sort of big television establishment which is dominated by the bc bbc but it's not solely the bbc and then you have minnows coming in from the outside who are genuine competitors but very hard for them to get the scale so um i don't expect some sort of great breakthrough about that soon what i think will definitely happen but quite when is that the fundamental monopoly about the money will will go um as conservatives we're supposed to want to conserve things and we want to conserve institutions do you wish to i mean are you one of those who could be brought round to thinking that the bbc should be abolished or do you take the view that it is such a valuable cultural resource in the country that it must be reformed and we must work hard to achieve that um i think it would be fair given the importance of the bbc in british history and the way many aspects of it are still admired and enjoyed to give it a chance so um therefore i was pleased when tim davey was appointed rather than thinking wouldn't it have been better if they'd appointed an extreme lefty and then we could the enemy would have been in more plain sight do you see what i mean i wish him well um uh it may be possible to at least to make the bbc better before it eventually breaks up um worth a try um but uh it can't really last and probably it would be better not invented because it's a fundamentally monopolistic idea and it's as the technology has changed it's become that's become clearer and if you think of it in other forms of expressions suppose you'd only had the british publishing company and that had to maintain that only the british publishing company could publish a book um and and it could publish as many books as it like because they get the money anyway and whatever book it wanted and no other books you could immediately see that um this was wrong this was an affront to freedom and a suppression of creativity and for all its definite historic virtues that's what the bbc is it's an affront to freedom and a crush of creativity and um you notice and though i said just now that the big competitors tend to be too close to it in some sort of way this isn't soldier of things like netflix so one of the big things that was always said about the bbc was um you know you can't have these marvelous drama series if you can't get all the money in front of the livestream turns out not to be true at all you can have very very good drama series in other ways of uh reaching people such as modern technology so um i don't sort of hate the bbc root and branch at all but i think it it betrays its duties and i also think it is a model which is out of date lord more thank you [Music]

Channel: The New Culture Forum

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Length: 45min 4sec (2704 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021