According to an article in Thursday’s Daily Telegraph, long-time BBC Radio 4 presenter, Jim Naughtie, believes that the emergence of new TV channel, GB News, has presented the head of Britain’s ‘communications regulator’, Ofcom, with …
the biggest problem he’s ever faced.1
Why? What, pray, is the basis of this claim?
Well, apparently, it’s a fear of bias - supposed misinformation or disinformation on the part of GB News, that is. But, in the same article, Mr Naughtie is quoted as saying:
I think the idea that you could sort of pull the wool over the eyes of the population at large by saying - ‘We’re going to have a proper political discussion of this, the only thing is that the four people involved in it all have the same view’ - I mean, people just aren’t going to watch it.2
Two thoughts come to mind:
If it is the case that “people just aren’t going to watch it”, the issue will presumably resolve itself without the intervention of the head of Ofcom or anyone else? Which is to say, it’s a non-problem.
Mr Naughtie’s statements imply a belief on his part that the BBC is impartial and, presumably, virtuous above reproach in this regard. And yet, and yet, many people would say that that is not true or, even, that it is a porky pie of extremely generous proportions.
Indeed, an absolutely excellent review - in my opinion, obvs! - of the BBC’s position is available on YouTube. It is made by the New Culture Forum (which, like GB News, is another of those pesky new outfits that is not in favour of the liberal, D.E.I. consensus) and featuring two ex-BBC employees - Rod Liddle and Robin Aitken. As Rod Liddle says at one point (approx 12’ 45”) in response to a query about the BBC’s lack of impartiality …
… it doesn’t believe it’s political, Robin. It simply believes it’s civilized.
Aha, that would explain it. Anyway, the incident seems to me to be a clear demonstration of a scary phenomenon: the damning, by a biased party, of another party on the basis that that other party is biased.
There’s a name for that. Hypocrisy. And, interestingly enough, hypocrisy was a prominent feature of earlier social change.
Two centuries ago, in 1825, a single-page cartoon titled The Progress of Cant, by Thomas Hood, mocked the mood that caught on at that time - a pious mood of earnest morality and faith. Historian Ben Wilson describes the cartoon:
The Progress of Cant mocks the hollowness and hypocrisy of improvement and modernity. Under the cover of philanthropy and virtue, the ragtag people take the opportunity to kiss, flirt, fight and steal unobserved. A Quaker in a bonnet wears a dress made by the female prisoners in Newgate; she is parading her philanthropic desire to reform fallen women and her support for Elizabeth Fry, but she herself is half housewife, half hussy, clearly out on the streets to catch the eye of a man. … The beadle is trying to conceal an erection. A fat boy is about to buy a pie with the money he has been collecting for charity. A jockey beating his broken-down nag proclaims “Martin for Ever” in celebration of the man who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.3
No wonder Lord Byron angrily declaimed that time as The Age of Cant.
The question is, are we going through the same, or similar, convulsions, now? The answer, I suggest, is ‘Yes!’ All of the intentional definitional confusion and virtue signalling about race and sexuality; all of the linguistic and social convolutions; all of the rewriting of history - it all amounts to hypocrisy on stilts.
Or is it all yet more sinister? Well, may be. If an essay by Niall Ferguson titled The Treason of the Intellectuals, published by The Free Press in December 2023, is right, we are in far murkier territory than ‘simple’ hypocrisy.
Asking the question, ‘How did Adolf Hitler achieve his dominant position?’, Ferguson skillfully identifies parallels with the situation in pre-WW2 Germany, with particular reference to the demonization of Jews. One simple but startling point that he illumines is that antisemitism and the ejection of Jewish academics created career opportunities for non-Jewish people.
Maybe the parallels with today are all too clear! Was the worst antisemitic outrage since the Holocaust - the Hamas-sponsored attack of 7th October 2023 in Israel - ‘Never Again’ happening all over again?
I’ll write more on this in future posts but, for now, just think about the fact that the social justice virtue signalling, Newspeak and bias of our current Age of Cant truly are potentially lethal for our societies.
Admittedly, that’s not a happy note on which to conclude a Happy Friday post, but things are what they are.
Thanks for reading.
Image: Shutterstock.
GB News has given Ofcom chief ‘biggest problem he’s ever faced’, Anita Singh, Daily Telegraph (25 January 2024)
Ibid
Wilson, Ben. The Making of Victorian Values: Decency & Dissent in Britain 1789-1837 (2007)