The BBC in crisis

The news that Donald Trump was going to sue the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)  has led to the resignation of the director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and News CEO Deborah Turness. Trump’s legal team demanded that the BBC “immediately retract” the program Panorama and called it “false and defamatory.” The program spliced together two remarks by President Trump uttered 54 minutes apart to make it look like he was calling for violence in a speech on Jan. 6, 2020. You can see the deception for yourself in this 5-minute video. The chair of the BBC, Samir Shah, has apologized for an “error in judgment” over how the speech by Trump was edited. He still insists, against a growing mountain of evidence, that there is no systemic bias at the BBC.

But the evidence extends far beyond the BBC’s treatment of Trump to many areas ranging from climate change to Israel’s fight for survival. With regard to the latter, The Telegraph has revealed that BBC Arabic has been forced to correct two Gaza stories per week. As a result of digging by David Collier and a report in The Telegraph, the BBC was forced to pull a documentary on Gaza called “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone.” It purported to be an objective documentary about ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, but it was revealed that the 14-year-old narrator actually was the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas government. The former director of the BBC, Danny Cohen, has accused the BBC of “egregious” anti-Israel bias.

On climate change, The Telegraph is now reporting that the BBC is preparing to launch an investigation into its climate coverage. In 2020, the BBC pulled an anti-meat documentary after complaints from farmers. An entrenched pattern has developed in which the BBC splashes far-left propaganda all over the world using its powerful platform built by previous generations on decades of objectivity and journalistic excellence. Then, once push-back becomes too strong, it issues a strategic apology and pulls the offending material. But by this point the damage has been done. Nobody is fired and left-wing bias is never rooted out, so the pattern repeats endlessly.

It is not just a series of mistakes or coincidences or errors in judgment. This institution has been infiltrated by far-left radicals who are spending down its credibility to further their anti-Western, Marxist agenda. The longer it goes on, the more obvious it is that Trump’s cry of “fake news” is true. The credibility of the BBC is being systematically eroded and those in authority appear to be either unable or unwilling to prevent it from being destroyed. This is tragic. The death of yet another trusted institution is a cause for mourning.

The crisis at the BBC is a general cultural crisis caused by bad philosophy gaining control of hearts and minds in the academy over the last two centuries. This generation of journalists came of age in the 2000s and was educated within a K-12 and college ethos of postmodern relativism. During the 19th century, Western universities gradually lost confidence in the power of human reason to know reality through the senses. After Kant, we supposedly could never know things in themselves. But in the 20th century, Western universities gradually lost confidence in the existence of stable realities like the existence of two sexes. The most cited thinkers today are the sophists Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, who define human freedom as the power of will to reshape nature in any way we want. It turns out that when you deny the knowability of reality it is easy to go on to deny reality itself. A culture that is denying reality is lurching toward total collapse.

The way the far-left subversives have been using the BBC reflects their postmodern belief in truth as a flexible construct to be manipulated by the human will to attain ideological goals. The BBC is useful to them as a platform to convince the public to let the ideologues have their own way. When it is no longer useful as a platform, it will be left to rot.

A couple of high-profile resignations won’t fix this problem. A new commission of inquiry won’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Nothing will fix the problem except our cultural elites rejecting bad philosophy and recovering the philosophy generated by a Christian culture and then rejected in the Enlightenment. Yet that requires a revival of Christianity itself to motivate people to revere the truth no matter what. The crisis at the BBC is really the crisis of the apostasy of the West.