Monday, October 30, 2006

The BBC's Other Bias

There's an old story about a philosopher and an actress who meet at a party. The philosopher asks the actress 'would you sleep with me for $1 million ?'. 'Ok' says the actress. The philospher then says 'How about $10 then ?'. The actress is enraged: 'what do you think I am ? Some kind of prostitiute ?', and the philosopher says 'well, we've already determined that, now we're just talking about the details''.

I remembered that story when I heard about the latest happenings at the BBC. In a move sure to shock millions, it's been revealed that some senior BBC staff are opposing plans to move some departments north:

[BBC director general, Mark Thompson]is fantastically supportive of the move, but at the same time there is enormous resistance to the idea from the highest levels in the BBC, despite the obvious political advantage of moving to the north," the source said.

"These people are in incredibly powerful positions and are absolutely committed emotionally to stopping it from happening.
So here we have an organisation that's the epitome of Liberal PC, morally equivalent, multi-culti, 'who are we to say' drivel, but they're comfortable having senior management who won't move north, 'cause, y'know, it's full of those people. A better example of the essential snobbery at the heart of Liberalism you will not find.

But there's something more here. The BBC disavows charges of cultural and political bias by claiming that their critics are all hyper-partisan loons. Well, OK, but now we have a form of bias where we really can measure it objectively. There it is: the BBC insists on basing virtually all its operations in the most expensive city in the known universe, even while zealously defending its right to rake off the TV tax from oop north. More to the point, the objective BBC has, objectively, done nothing about this. The BBC is happy having executives who openly discriminate against a large chunk of the country. So much for all their pretty talk about their integrity. The BBC is fine with bias in principle, they're just quibbling about the details.

No comments: