Another problem with Radio 4’s Today Programme
(Shutterstock)
The BBC is facing a growing crisis. It can’t compete for sports rights, or at least not for the sports that most people want to watch. It is being outgunned for drama by the new kids on the block – Amazon, Netflix and Apple TV among them. And, finally, there is the self-inflicted issue of political bias.
For years Radio 4’s Today programme has chosen celebrity Guest Editors in the days after Christmas to offer new and interesting perspectives on the day’s news. Previous choices have included David Dimbleby, Prince Harry, Angelina Jolie, Sir Lenny Henry and Stephen Hawking. How could this possibly go wrong? In the BBC under Lord Hall, of course, anything is possible when it comes to bias and so it has proved with last week’s Guest Editors.
The problem came with who the Today programme chose: Grayson Perry, Baroness Hale, George the Poet, Charles Moore and Greta Thunberg. A cross-dressing celebrity artist, the President of the British Supreme Court and darling of Remainers, an environmental activist, a Black poet and rapper, who recently turned down an offer to become an MBE, citing the British Empire’s treatment of his ancestral homeland, Uganda, and the conservative biographer of Margaret Thatcher. Can you spot the odd one out?
The most striking contrast was, of course, between the programmes edited by Greta Thunberg and Charles Moore. Thunberg, predictably, chose items which supported her views of the environment, from Thought for the Day to an interview with her father and a conversation between herself and Sir David Attenborough. The most interesting item by far was the 8.10 interview with Mark Carney about the need for the financial sector to act faster on climate change.
The rest of the programme, however, was wearily predictable, without any real attempt to debate the new environmental orthodoxy. At one point, co-presenter Sarah Smith announced that the interview with Thunberg’s father was “absolutely fascinating”. Perhaps listeners could have been trusted to make their own judgment about this. Some might have wanted to know far more about who funds Greta Thunberg’s travels, what her sister feels about the activist’s stardom, what the family live on and so on. If they were interested in these questions they were clearly out of luck. Not so much “absolutely fascinating” as failing to ask some obvious questions.
The programme guest edited by Charles Moore was the most interesting for one simple reason. Moore set an agenda far removed from the shared consensus of the BBC’s flagship programmes, from Today to Newsnight. Moore’s programme was a startling reminder of how cosy the consensus at the BBC has become. The Today programme “preaches” to its listeners, Moore argued. “What I am objecting to is preaching,” he said. “The BBC has decided to be a secular church and it preaches and tells us what we ought to think about things. So it tells us we shouldn’t support Brexit and we should accept climate change alarmism and we have to all kowtow to the doctrines of diversity.” How did the BBC’s best-known programmes become so narrow in its orthodoxies?
What was striking about the BBC’s selection of Guest Editors was that four out of the five come from the cultural Left, perfectly reflecting the assumptions of the BBC itself. Moore was the only one of the five who is passionately opposed to this consensus, the metropolitan bubble inhabited by so many BBC producers, programme editors and channel controllers. Who would call one out of five balanced broadcasting especially in the immediate aftermath of a huge Conservative landslide victory?
It is time for an independent inquiry into bias at the BBC. Not just its news coverage but its cultural output too. Ideally, the BBC should launch such an inquiry itself, but after the fate of the famous Balen Report on the BBC’s coverage of Israel, perhaps they can’t be trusted and it will have to be handed over to Parliament or independent figures appointed by Parliament
