HAVE you handed over your annual BBC tribute money yet? If so, what were you thinking of?
Panorama’s cheap digital conjuring trick, its ‘footage’ of Trump agitating for violence in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, was journalistic malfeasance of the sort we’ve come to expect from a corporation which has long been at war with its own Charter and principles of governance.
I understand that the incumbent President of the United States isn’t for everyone. But why is the antagonistic commentariat so unimaginative in its subversions? The Trump phenomenon – the dancing, trolling, quips and mugshots – has an enchanting overall aesthetic. There is an artistry to Trump that makes him a generational political talent. He deserves to be traduced far more creatively than this.
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.
The BBC claims it’s impartial. That might not be a lie as much as self-delusion. The Romans thought that institutions have personalities, in which case the national broadcaster has over many years done a Kenneth Widmerpool and turned into a risible leftist crank. And it’s in the way of cranks to get cranky when their crankiness (invisible to them) is pointed out by the rest of us. This pathology of denial was recently described on these pages by David Keighley.
The public broadcaster might take itself to be the deposit of a secular Magisterium, or the official and objective biographer of the national life, but this is nonsense. Its journalists agitate for a culture of repudiation – of history, Christian faith and the settled decencies of the English-speaking peoples.
The idea that there can (or even should) be an ‘impartial public service broadcaster’ is at best a creation myth, at worst a useful but intellectually confused conceit. There is no such thing as ‘impartiality’ in reporting or in anything which uses language because as soon as we start speaking, we are in the business of value judgement. If there is such a thing as an objective ‘view from nowhere’, it’s already reserved for God.
Conservatism is empirical and radical. There is nothing in conservative philosophy which requires the conservation of failure. The BBC is incapable of self-correction at this point: you might as well toss a self-help book at an alcoholic and accept his promise to read it and cure himself. What the BBC needs, for its own sake, is an intervention.
That could and now must come in the form of mass civil disobedience and non-payment of the licence fee, which is now a tax on stupidity and a violation of natural justice. Why should you be required to pay for services you would never use? The BBC funding model is protection racketeering by statute. Even the New York Mafia don’t demand money from people in the Bronx as a tax on properties they don’t even own in Queens.
Civil disobedience becomes an obligation when laws have gone badly wrong and the people against whom it is enforced have no other mechanisms of objection. It is the opposite of the masked-up and increasingly ubiquitous thuggery of the Islamist-Left mob coalition. Breaking a bad law, in plain sight and in expectation of personal consequences, shows a respect for the concept of law in general.
So, if a few years ago you’d tragically fallen for another Establishment scam and were duped into muzzling your face, now’s the time to redeem some spiritual credit. And if you happen to be visited by a BBC enforcement officer, as recently happened to me, you can always throw some of that BBC black box accountability stuff right back at them by promising to launch your own internal investigation into whether you ever ‘livestream’ (whatever that means).
The pressure groups haven’t worked. It’s time to go Trumpian and impose tariffs on the dysfunctional universe which has the nerve to call itself the British Broadcasting Corporation. The public service broadcaster has come to despise the public it’s paid to serve. You really want to help it with that?
