Jeremy Paxman tells the truth about the BBC

I remember the time when the BBC was looked upon both nationally and internationally as the quintessence of rectitude in every department of broadcasting. But now, alas, such is far from being the case. Only recently the BBC has been heavily fined for lying and organising phone-in scams to make money and dupe the public. This even happened on Blue Peter, the children’s programme. You cannot sink much lower than that.

Not that it’s necessary to engage in outright lies to give a distorted or wrong impression. The BBC are now skilled in telling just half the truth and a half truth is, by definition, half a lie. Take, for instance, the oft quoted figure, beloved by the BBC, that 1 in 4 women can expect to suffer domestic violence in their lifetime. Now this comes from a government report and is probably true, but only a short distance away from that fact, and in the same report, is the fact that 1 in 6 men can expect to suffer domestic violence in their lifetime. But the BBC conveniently always forgets to include that fact, so that listeners and viewers and left with the impression that it’s only women who suffer domestic violence.

A few years ago, in an undercover investigation into parents harming their children in hospital in order to gain attention to themselves as grieving parents, a film was made of 31 parents actually doing this. There was one grandmother, one father and 29 mothers, all engaged in this activity. In the BBC news report about the film they stated that “31 parents” had been filmed and then went on to show parts of the film. The first person shown was the one and only father, the second was the one and only grandmother and the third and last was one of the 29 mothers thus giving the impression that all three had had equal responsibility in this. The fact that it was, by a long way, mainly mothers who abused their children in this way was never mentioned. Doubtless it was the feminist  influence in the BBC that inspired such a one-sided and dishonest treatment of this serious matter.

Many people in the UK, and probably in many other countries also, are asking why this fall from grace. I think the answer is that the staff at the BBC are a mere shadow of their predecessors and have become sloppy, touchy-feely and politically “correct”. This shows up many times during the day in sloppy and incorrect English, poor grammar and pronunciation which is “Hey! Please yourself!” 

But the root cause of this is the fact that over the last couple of decades the BBC has been infiltrated by feminists who have worked their way up through the ranks and are now in positions of influence – and not for the better either.

A well known personality of long and considerable standing at the BBC, Jeremy Paxman, the Newsnight presenter, recently upset some of the BBC feminists by saying that it is men, not women, who are being discriminated against at the BBC. He even named five female executives as examples: Jana Bennet, director of BBC vision, Janice Hadlow, controller of BBC 4, Dorothy Byme, head of news, current affairs and documentaries at Channel 4, Jay Hunt, controller of BBC 1, and Dawn Airey, soon to be chief executive and chair of Five.

In an interview at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Paxman said: “Do I think it’s a man’s world in television? That is the most ridiculous question I have been asked all week. The worst thing you can be in this industry is a middle class white male. If any middle class white male I come across says he wants to enter television I say give up all hope. They’ve no chance.”

Of course feminists rushed to attack Paxman for what he said; so what’s new? But many of the public, who are forced by the government to pay their licence fee to the BBC every year, mainly white middle-aged men, have supported what Paxman said and have condemned the constant politically “correct” approach of the BBC to broadcasting as unjust.

Not that Jeremy Paxman is the only one to criticise the BBC in this respect. The former newsreader, Michael Buerk stated a while ago that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” has gone too far, and men were now little more than “sperm donors”. 

It seems that the BBC has few admirers these days and many critics. Of course the main trouble with the BBC is that it is so overfunded by the licence fee so that the staff are featherbedded to a ridiculous degree. They can, and do, ignore public opinion. I have written to criticise them on many occasions and only get back the usual anodyne reply with the final paragraph saying that the BBC values my comments. The only trouble is they never do anything about them but carry on in their predictable fashion repeating the same sexist mistakes.