Media Lens facebook
8th Jan 2016

Mark Doran on the latest BBC scandal, giving some historical perspective:
===
As early as 1926 — the time of the General Strike, and a mere four years after the foundation of the BBC in its original form — the die was being cast. Once the strike had begun, John Reith (the BBC’s General Manager, later Director General) did not merely ‘sympathise’ with the government, but worked actively to assist it and to oppose the striking workers. Reith refused to allow the leaders of the labour movement any opportunity to put their case to the nation, denying them access to the airwaves until after the strike was over; at the same time, the anti-union speeches of Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were not simply broadcast by the BBC, but were actually written by Reith himself. Nor was this an example of a broadcaster being ‘strong-armed’ by a determined government: Reith’s own diaries from the time of the strike make it perfectly clear that ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ were nothing but high-sounding words disconnected from the reality of the organisation. As he wrote in his entry of 11 May, 1926:
'They [i.e. the Cabinet] know they can trust us not to be really impartial.'
Now, you may point to the amount of time that has passed since then, and say that a lot can change in 90 years — and I wouldn’t disagree in the slightest. In particular, I would point to the change wrought by a decades-long process that, by now, is more or less complete: the corporate enfoldment of the ostensibly ‘democratic’ state. What this means is that the description of the BBC that I provided above requires to be slightly re-written: the BBC is now a state-corporate propaganda apparatus disguised as a quasi-autonomous public service organisation.
===
http://markdoran.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/close-it-down-2/