BY PAUL T HORGAN
In all the furore following the revelation that senior BBC executives can’t get away with slandering the President of the USA without being forced to resign their jobs, it does seem as though people have forgotten that the BBC is stuffed to the gills with media professionals skilled at spinning a news story to their advantage.
People may be excused this error, since for the most part the BBC’s ideology and its blatant pushing of it at every opportunity, even when grossly inappropriate, would suggest that it is an amateur propaganda operation given the blindingly obvious nature of its slant in every single programme.
For example, I understand (I stopped paying for the TV Licence in 2020 so do not have a first-hand view for obvious legal reasons) its recently-cancelled daytime soap Doctors actually had a segment where a character was almost breaking the fourth wall to lecture viewers on the latest aspect of woke ideology while scolding another character, one written to be as deliberately unwoke as possible, for breaking one of these new rules.
But media professionals is as media professionals does. The BBC is on the ropes, big-time. So the media-pros have got their DARVO on.
For the uninitiated, DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender’. The big issue is how the BBC, in its flagship current affairs programme, doctored a long speech by Donald Trump made on the 6th January 2021 to make it appear he was inciting the audience to march on to Capitol Hill and cause the mayhem that actually followed. The BBC did this by welding together two unrelated portions of the speech that had actually been delivered almost an hour apart. The ensuing scandal surrounding the BBC led to Tim Davie, the Director-General, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of News, to resign. Turness should have quit when it was revealed that a documentary made in Gaza had strong connections to Hamas, and also mistranslated some dialogue to make it appear less anti-Semitic than it actually was. But she didn’t, which may tell us far too much about what the BBC thinks of British Jews, as if we did not know this already.
But the DARVOing is happening on the BBC News website, on the BBC’s premises, and also, surprise, surprise, in The Guardian, which had a defensive and defiant comment piece on its website within 2 hours of the resignations being announced. Well, not so much of a surprise. It is, after all, the newspaper where the BBC places most of its recruitment adverts, and also the newspaper bought in the largest quantity by the BBC for its staff. I can’t see many people openly reading the Daily Mail on the BBC’s premises. Well, not for long before a bepierced rainbow-dyed-hair harridan swooped in to deliver a shrill lecture on the wrongness of it all, that is.
So let’s drill down on that DARVO…
Deny: It was all a mistake. An accident in the editing suite. There should have been a greater indicator that there were two fragments. This is easily debunked. When extracts of a long piece are put together, it is normal for both of them to be substantive in their own right. The second portion of the extracts (about fighting) could not make much sense on its own, and it was its recontextualisation with the previous exhortation to march on to Capitol Hill that caused the problem. The absence of any graphic, such as the now-customary white flash to imply the passage of time, shows it was intentional. Media professionals would not make such an error, and no media professional has owned up to making this mistake for the simple reason that they would not last too long in the profession if they did. It was not an accident. It was deliberate.
Attack: It’s all Robbie Gibb’s fault. No, not the late Bee Gees singer. Mr Gibb sits on the BBC Board, but he also has strong connections with the Conservative Party, having been Theresa May’s Director of Communications in Downing Street. Gibb has been the subject of attack by numerous leftists, and his major crime seems to have been trying to preserve some balance in the BBC’s news reporting. By the standards of the leftists, who worship at the altars of Trans, Hamas, Biden, and the NHS (obviously), this is seen not so much as heresy as apostasy. So Gibb is now enduring the rhetorical equivalent of a public stoning, and by that I don’t mean sitting outside one of those specialist cafes in Amsterdam. If Gibb were to step down as a result of the scandal, the scandal would be written off as an internal spat, a head for a head, boardroom politics rather than a fundamental issue with the BBC’s professional standards.
Reverse Victim and Offender: Both Davie and Turness have quit, but both of them say there is nothing wrong, nothing to see. They are the real victims here, rather than the chief perpetrators. The BBC is apparently otherwise brilliant in their worldview. Turness has openly denied there is “institutional bias” in the BBC. There was just a ‘mistake’ and those at the top have to carry the can, boo-hoo. So the real offenders, the external company, October Films (‘October’ as in Winter Palace?), that created the fabricated clip, and the internal BBC editors who missed the fabrication, get to carry on. The narrative being pushed by the BBC and The Guardian is that this is actually a right-wing coup taking place. Numerous pieces have been written by the BBC following the above narrative. The BBC has been the innocent (well, almost innocent) victim of specified (Gibb) and unspecified (take your pick) right-wing forces. The BBC needs to be saved from this predation, lest it be pecked to death. The ‘coup’ narrative is being pushed relentlessly by the media professionals who are adept at spin.
Even Private Eye is in on this narrative.
Whither proper satire?
In other news, Ian Hislop, the Editor of Private Eye, is paid tens of thousands of pounds per episode by another of those independent TV production companies that is contracted to the BBC to appear on ‘Have I Got News For You’
This full-on media onslaught started on Monday, and shows no sign of stopping. Once again the BBC is in denial and is coming out fighting.
But I have only been talking about the Trump edit so far.
The trigger for the untimely exits was a memo authored by Michael Prescott that was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. Prescott was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board for three years before leaving in June. His crime in the eyes of the BBC nomenklatura was to have once been a journalist working on The Sunday Times, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Satan, as he is known in BBC circles (probably). The memo was leaked because the BBC Board (which included Robbie Gibb, but that does not seem to be important somehow) refused to take action on the concerns he raised.
In addition to the Trump edit, there was also the issue that the BBC News organisation had an ‘LGBTQ’ newsdesk whose role seems to have been to filter every news report that covered anything remotely connected with the alphabet soupism. The consequence of this was that news stories that depicted the ideology in a bad light were suppressed, and also that language was forcibly but quietly modified. How very Pravda.
People noticed this. Male rapists and those convicted of other violent offences were described as ‘women’. This was not unique. Numerous other news organisations do the same. The rationale for these ambitious journalists may have been that they had to keep to the new orthodoxy if they would ever have a chance of securing a job at the BBC. But the problem lay in the visuals not matching the description, and the disconnect was obvious, but not ever explained properly. The BBC for years have clearly ignored the consequent complaints.
This takes a serious direction when it comes to child rape. Stephen Ireland was the founder and most high profile member of the LGBTQ advocacy group ‘Pride in Surrey’. When he was arrested, charged, tried, convicted and jailed for the offence of raping a 12-year-old boy, the BBC treated this as a local news story, rather than a story requiring national attention. The story was buried.
Ireland was not the only leading member of a ‘pride’ organisation who has been convicted of child rape. These ‘pride’ organisations are barely regulated beyond the general registration processes for all organisations irrespective of purpose, and, considering that they may be a vector for vulnerable adolescents disturbed about their desires and presentation, the opportunity for, and thus risk of, child sex abuse must be considerable. Yet the BBC does not seem inclined to investigate these ‘pride’ organisations from the perspective of child safety.
But the BBC does have form in this area. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a national moral panic regarding paedophiles attacking children, as well as using their authority to groom them for sexual purposes. The typical offender depicted was white, male and aged over 30. The BBC, despite having a robust regional news organisation, failed to report on the Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs that were operating at exactly the same time. When the mugshots of the offenders started appearing on the BBC News website, no significant mention was made of ethnicity until this was pointed out in an episode of the BBC’s own Newswatch in about 2009.
The BBC seems to have started learning its lesson. In the last few days, its reports on the issue of Darlington nurses who were disciplined for refusing to share a changing room with a transwoman, have seen a noticeable change.
A week ago, the term ‘born a male but now identifying as a woman’ would have been spiked by the BBC’s LGBTQ newsdesk, as would have been the term ‘female changing room’. No other news organisation has such a newsdesk, and there is no good reason why the BBC has to have one. There are bad reasons, and this may explain why GB News’ audience share figures now beat audience figures for the BBC’s own news channel. People want proper news, unfiltered by newsdesk-representing minority sectional interests. The BBC News website also has far too many stories about drag queens. Drag queens are simply not that interesting. Perhaps this volume of work is used to justify the existence of the LGBTQ newsdesk. They are keeping themselves busy by creating news when there is no other work.
And this is also before the third strand of criticism of the BBC’s factual output, which concerns its coverage of the Middle East, where Israel are seen as the Bad Guys for their predictable response to the devastating attack of October 7th 2023, which was a full-on military campaign. The focus there is on the BBC’s Arabic service, which clearly believes it needs to retain audience share by ‘going native’ and aligning with Arab prejudices. So in its Arabic service it was pandering, while in the UK services it was aggressively imposing its own views. The logical schism is only explicable by the fact that cheerleading Hamas in Arabic, and promoting LGBTQ issues in the UK are ideologically consistent. But the BBC is apparently not guilty of ‘institutional bias’. The visuals do not match up with the rhetoric, just as the image of a man does not match up with being described as a woman.
The BBC’s spinners are fighting like crazy, and they may get their way. Gibb may have to step down as a form of ‘balance’ for the fall of Davie and Turness, but he shouldn’t. Gibb was doing his job. Davie and Turness weren’t, unless their job was always to promote a narrow left-wing worldview, where everything LGBTQ is virtuous, men are women when they want to be, and Palestinian Arabs are without exception the victims and never the authors of their own misfortune by the commission of atrocity on innocent Jews.
This is all at a time when the BBC is having to negotiate the renewal of its charter. The current charter runs out at the end of 2027. I think it can be said that the decade 2017-2027 has not been the BBC’s finest. In fact it has arguably been the BBC’s worst.
The BBC has not adequately demonstrated how it can improve. The rationale behind charging the TV Licence was obsolete even in 2017. Finance through compulsion would be politically toxic after 2027, and could cost a government the General Election when added to Sir Keir’s other failings, assuming he is still Prime Minister in 2029, which now seems open to question. A non-Labour government will probably not wait until 2037 to do something about the BBC and its financing if the replacement for the TV Licence is another form of taxation.
What we have seen here is the consequence of the end-times orgy I have previously written about, where the staff in an organisation facing inevitable doom will abandon standards and professionalism and indulge themselves while they can. Slandering Trump, worshipping at the altar of alphabet soupism, and cheerleading Hamas are all signs of this.
Time is running out for the BBC, and going full DARVO will not delay it one bit. It may instead accelerate things.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.