Blatant propaganda
James Delingpole
Affitner Cambridge Spies I really hadn't cant to spend another week ranting about how utterly crap and leftie the BBC is. Unfortunately, fate decided otherwise. There I was, innocently lying in bed watching TV on Sunday night, fully intending to do this week's review on the (dullish) Mary Archer documentary and Paul Abbott's busy new conspiracy thriller, when suddenly I found myself in the middle of a Panorama report so tendentious, so sixth-form-Dave-Spartish, so eye-poppingly partisan that I had to turn to my a-bit-more-left-wing-than-me wife and say, 'Tell me. Is this really as bad as I
think it is?' Yes,' she said. So what could I do?
The report was about America's NeoConservatives and asked whether this 'unelected, right-wing political group' (as the Radio Times chose to call them, presumably borrowing the phrase from a BBC press information sheet) had 'hijacked White House foreign policy'. Panorama called the programme The War Party.
Now there are lots of interesting questions that beg to be asked about the NeoCons, such as: How far is their war-lite strategy responsible for the current shambles in Iraq? Are they putting as much thought into nation-building, reconstruction and diplomacy as they are into violent regime change? But I didn't get the impression that reporter Steve Bradshaw was much interested in such subtleties. Rather, he was on one of those tabloidstyle missions where your editor has already written the headline and you simply have to twist the facts until they fit. The headline went something like: These mad, evil, right-wing, rampantly pro-Israel bastards are out of control and they want to blow us all up.
For most of the people who work at the BBC, this must indeed seem the only possible line any sensible, right-thinking person could take on the Neo-Cons. The problem is, it isn't quite borne out by the facts. Yes, the Neo-Cons probably are biased towards Israel and they are generally of the Right. But as one of their number — Professor Eliot Cohen of the US defence policy board — put it, their philosophy is essentially a benign one: a synthesis of 'rather old fashioned realpolitik with a certain kind of American democratic idealism'.
This, though, was ever the way of the Left. Whenever it encounters a philosophy it disagrees with or lacks the imagination to understand, it caricatures it so as to make it seem not merely misguided but wicked, extreme and deranged. So, for example, when one Neo-Con talked about military action against North Korea, the impression that the programme gave was not of a strategist trying to figure out the least painful of many awkward alternatives, but of yet another Dr Strange love hell bent on taking us closer to Armageddon.
Sometimes, Bradshaw's efforts to smear the Neo-Cons were so crude they smacked of Soviet-era propaganda. On his desperate trawl for dirt, he visited a gaggle of peace protesters, a left-liberal journalist, the Syrian embassy and the Islamic Institute — the equivalent of asking Herod to comment on a scheme for new improved babycare — and, unsurprisingly, found someone to snarl that Neo-Cons were 'a gang like the Mafia'.
Then Bradshaw put this accusation to lots of Neo-Cons, presumably working on
the principle that if he showed himself saying it often enough, the slur would carry more weight than the inevitable denials. This ruse was rather badly sabotaged, however, by the sublime reasonableness and courtesy with which these evil Don Corleone figures replied.
'I usually have a response to statements like that but I don't understand the statement. I don't know what power to intimidate we have,' purred Richard Perle. 'We're the very opposite of the kind of clandestineness one observes with the Mafia. What rubs people wrong about us is that we're so upfront and audacious in saying things that go against the grain,' said former leftist turned Neo-Con Joshua Muravchik. And it wasn't just what they said but the way they said it: this didn't sound like sinister evasion or double-speak but like the sincere response of enthusiasts genuinely committed to the moral integrity and rightness of their cause.
Yes, of course, I'm biased here. I've no doubt that I'm far closer to the Neo-Con persuasion than Bradshaw is. But, then. I don't work for a state-funded current affairs programme. If Panorama is to be trusted to inform us on the inside stories behind important world events, we need to be sure that it will handle them with integrity, honesty and open-mindedness — none of which was much in evidence in the slanted, slimy, insinuating, Bashiresque piece of media-studies-GCSE reportage we saw on Sunday.
And another thing: for heaven's sake will you BBC heads of department stop boring us rigid with those pompous, deeply unconvincing letters telling us why it is you're not biased really. We don't need spin, we need corrective action.
Previous page
