Nemesis for the BBCNick Land / text
P. 1
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120711090144/http://blog.urbanomic.com/sphaleotas/archives/Shan…
Nemesis for the BBC
By Nick Land
Shanghai Star. 2004-02-05
Since this opinion piece will struggle to maintain even a hint of objectivity or
detachment, let me confess immediately: I loathe the BBC. One of my great
joys as an expatriate Briton is the absence of this media institution from my
daily life.
The distance of half the globe now insulates me from its patronizing,
distorted, reactionary "news" broadcasts, its disgraceful TV tax, its tedious
bourgeois entertainment programming, its insufferable self-righteousness and
its arrogant public announcements. Everything rotten about the UK and its
smug, pampered, blithely ignorant and dishonest "chattering classes" is
distilled in the BBC. When the BBC howls in pain, I exult.
Let there be no doubt about it, right now the BBC is howling in pain. In the
wake of the independent Hutton inquiry, which lambasted it unambiguously
for its appalling journalistic standards, institutional corruption and ideological
bigotry, its two top leaders have been forced to resign, its already dismal
reputation has plummeted to new lows, and the enlightened few who aim to
privatize this sick public corporation when its charter comes up for renewal in
2006 are sharpening their butchering knives. Even in deeply conservative
Britain, those hoping for a modern, open, responsive, honest and truly
progressive media culture now see a glimmer of hope ahead.
From its inception the BBC has been an organization quite explicitly
dedicated to promoting the tastes, opinions and interests of the British antimarket elite: the privately educated, well-connected and well-accented
classes who assumed control of the country's post WWII command economy.
In the battle pitting enterprise and opportunity against established privilege
the BBC has never wavered in its support for the latter. Its tone is consistently
condescending - even sneering - as comes naturally to the complacent
beneficiaries of unearned power, untested by commercial reality and deeply
resentful of the possibility that ordinary consumers might use the market
place to allocate influence and rewards in society.
When Margaret Thatcher - Britain's Deng Xiaoping - fought to overturn
decades of economic stagnation, anti-market dogma and fossilized class
privilege in the UK during the 1980s, the BBC launched an unremitting
propaganda effort against the reforms. In the late 1990s, as it became clear
Tony Blair was determined to defend certain aspects of the Thatcher legacy in particular the introduction of opportunity and competition into Britain's
bastions of elite power - he too entered the BBC's cross-hairs.
Because the BBC aligned itself so completely with the self-serving power of
closed elites, Tony Blair's US-style theme of meritocratic social mobility however half-hearted it remained - was an intolerable provocation. Driven
apoplectic by the Bush-Blair relationship, the BBC cast aside even the veneer
of journalistic neutrality, lining up behind the crude smear-campaign of their
correspondent Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan's wild accusations of government
"lies" have now been judged to be recklessly irresponsible lies themselves,
leading via the suicide of a government scientist and the ensuing Hutton
inquiry to the organization's present encounter with nemesis.
Wholesale privatization of the corporation would now be the fitting solution. It
will take a Rupert Murdoch to clean out these Augean stables. I hope they get
one soon.