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That Was the BBC
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14643 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
4,576 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
During and after the Second World War the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was an international byword for quality and probity. By charter independent of government, it was financed by a special license fee levied directly from the public. The consequent protection from commercial and most political pressures made it into a kind of mandarin among such organizations. During the thirties and above all during the war, the national broadcasting stations in Europe were attached to governments and taken for granted as mouthpieces of official propaganda. The Axis powers were particularly notorious for this, but no European power was thought to have clean hands in this respect. And yet the BBC, despite its own quota of wartime propaganda, was synonymous with truth in news and current affairs, and identified at home and abroad with the finest of Western liberal ideals--most of all in the fairness of its reportage. In the years after the war, with the emergence of television as a popular medium, BBC also meant the highest standards in serious entertainment, especially plays, involving--as in news and current affairs--a cool, just impartiality and a particular respect for the integrity of the writers who contributed to its quality drama.
All that, alas, was once upon a time. Today BBC News and Current Affairs is regularly under attack in Britain, and sometimes outside the country, for political bias. Alarmed observers of the British media have noted an antigovernment prejudice and, in foreign reporting, an anti-American slant that far exceeds the normal adversarial stance of responsible journalism, extending even to a willingness to play fast and loose with genuine matters of national security. Its drama has been attacked by viewers' pressure groups as salacious and violent, and by critics as dreary and overpoliticized, sometimes deliberately falsifying history for the purpose of making far-left-wing propaganda. Last year a scandal exposed the drama department in the act of trying to force an author to insert historical lies into a script, which, when the author refused, was suppressed after having already been scheduled for production.
The process leading to this deplorable situation has been gradual. As long ago as 1977, an official Home Office Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, chaired by Lord Annan, remarked in its report on certain worrying changes at the BBC. The report traced these changes back to the sixties:
The new mood expressed itself in a rhetoric of self-conscious unrest.... In the politics of perpetual crisis and strain... it was often hostile to authority as such; not mere authority as expressed in
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