The rotten culture at the heart of the BBC

Damian Thompson

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph


Please, don’t tell me that the BBC didn’t know. Everybody who moved in those circles knew. Just because an old man is “one of us” doesn’t give you licence to brush over the disturbing truth about him. But that’s what appears to have happened.
When the death of the historian Eric Hobsbawm was announced this week, BBC reports noted admiringly that his works were “shaped by his commitment to radical socialism”. The fact that this commitment extended to ideological support for Communist mass murder was obscured and excused. “He was too shrewd, too open-minded to pursue a narrow Marxist approach in his work or his politics,” explained a correspondent.
Yes, and Sir Jimmy Savile was too shrewd to exploit underage girls. Or so the BBC was still implying until an ITV documentary on Wednesday forced it to confront the testimony of Savile’s accusers.
I’m not suggesting that Hobsbawm’s support for Marxist terror (he once said that the deaths of millions would have been justified if Communism had succeeded) was morally equivalent to the alleged rape of teenage groupies. Hobsbawm was an important scholar, and apparently a charming man.
But a single mindset lies behind the BBC’s readiness to turn a blind eye to the dark sides of these two men, one of them an apologist for tyranny – the late Prof Norman Cohn once told me how shameful it was that Hobsbawm wasn’t held to account – and the other, it seems, a child abuser.
On the face of it, the BBC’s panegyric to Hobsbawm simply reflects its persistent Left-liberal bias. For a recent example, look at home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani’s tweets about terror suspect Babar Ahmad’s campaign against extradition to the US; to say that Casciani appears to support the campaign is putting it mildly. And then there’s the continuing scandal of the employment of Old Left activist Paul Mason as Newsnight’s “impartial” economics editor.
But ask yourself: why can we do nothing about this apparent bias? Why is the BBC’s alignment with the politics of the Guardian so entrenched? The answer goes beyond questions of Left and Right. The bias is sustained by a culture of entitlement that – with licence-fee negotiations several years away – appears to be as strong as ever.
It’s true that the word “entitlement” has been flung around a lot recently – understandably, given that it oozes out of David Cameron, George Osborne and, as we now know, the wretched Andrew Mitchell. But it could equally be applied to Britain’s public sector, of which the BBC forms a well-nourished part.
Anyone who has complained to the BBC about bias is used to the experience of being flicked away like dandruff on a Whitehall mandarin’s suit. Likewise, executives felt no qualms about pulling the plug on an investigation into Savile’s alleged paedophilia because, as some have suggested, it would spoil its Christmas celebration of a man who, despite the foul rumours circulating around him, had been one of their most valuable properties. Did they do so because they didn’t believe these sexual assaults happened? Did they feel that tabloid scrutiny was beneath the dignity of the institution?
The BBC should remember that, when the Catholic Church was unable to answer similar questions, it lost the support of many of its most devoted adherents. Bias is one thing, but you can’t swat away allegations of covering up apparent paedophilia, however strong your sense of entitlement. I’m beginning to wonder if the licence fee will be killed not by commercial pressure but by the gruesome, cackling ghost of Sir Jimmy Savile.