PC Beeb
From Colin Broughton
Sir: Rod Liddle is right in suggesting that the fiction of the BBC’s impartiality should be addressed by more openness (‘BBC staff’s views should be open’, 29 April). The bias of the BBC is far from ‘gentle’. On the contrary, its all-pervasive political correctness reaches from news reports and current affairs programmes into every nook and cranny of its output, including the plotlines and characters to be found in the soaps. This amounts to a blatant manipulation of truth, in which reality is presented in a warm glow of leftist wishful thinking.
However, Rod Liddle doesn’t go far enough. Rather than simply letting individuals in the BBC express their real opinions, which — given the natural leftism of the humanities and sociology graduates who go into the media and, in particular, the BBC — is not going to much widen the ideological spectrum, why not get rid of the organisation altogether? There might have been an argument for what is effectively a state-run broadcasting system once, but in an era of many TV and radio channels it is as anachronistic as any other state-owned industry post-Thatcher. Individual channels could then adopt overt political stances, like the print media.
Colin Broughton Theydon Bois, Essex
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