Julie Burchill,
Spiked, June 8, 2024
“As with many people who don’t care for Jews, the BBC also likes to fawn over Islam – a clear example of Orwellian doublethink when one considers how dismissive it is of Christianity.”
I’m keen on the radio. When I used to stay over at other people’s places, my first thought on finding that there wasn’t a radio in my room was: ‘Why do you hate me?’ These days I tend to stick to Radio 4 Extra. I don’t think I could stand yet another attempt by the regular Radio 4 to shoehorn critical race theory into Bells on Sunday.
Radio 4 long ago became a captured institution, up there with the NHS and the Church of England. It employs only those who toe the party line on everything from breakfast to Brexit, climate change to cross-dressing. This is surely responsible for the astonishing loss of audience over the past few years – down 1.2million in the year up to May 2023, and fading by the day.
This being the case, I can’t say I’m on tenterhooks to hear the much-trailed Radio 4 series, Orwell vs Kafka, the first episode of which airs on Saturday. It’s presented by Ian Hislop and Helen Lewis, buddies from that BBC TV smarm-fest, Have I Got News for You. The aim is to discover why the words Orwellian and Kafkaesque are still so resonant today – and to find echoes of these horrifying dystopias in the real world. The pair are of one mind, I’d wager, on all the issues Radio 4 needs its boxes ticking on, so it sounds like a dreary set-up right from the start.
I guess they won’t be examining the Orwellian and Kafkaesque qualities of the BBC itself. At first glance, I would say the former is more in evidence. There’s the regular Two Minutes Hate sessions on the BBC’s politics shows for those loathed ‘populist’ leaders. There’s BBC News’ amping up of hatred towards Israel – Emmanuel Goldstein to Britain’s Oceania – seen most grotesquely in its over-heated reports from Gaza. Perhaps most egregious was its live reporting of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza City in October. The BBC blamed it on Israel but in actuality, it was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket ‘misfire’. The deputy chief executive of BBC News, Jonathan Munro, subsequently admitted that the BBC reporter’s ‘language wasn’t quite right… The correspondent was wrong to speculate about the cause of the explosion of the hospital.’
… [To read the full article, click here.]
