SUNDAY CRIMES

26-02-2007

The Stirrer's webmaster Andy Goff is still recovering from a Sunday spent reading Rupert Murdoch's ever-expanding organ.

The Sunday Times should really be renamed The Weekend Irritant. However, reading it is de rigeur for us quaffing news bunnies.

I find its obsession with celebs about as interesting as shoving stale kippers down my trousers and its famous Rich List positively nauseating, but the few good regular columnists - Jeremy Clarkson, Simon Jenkins and even, occasionally, that zero of 2nd May 1997 Michael Portillo - to be sufficient compensation.

One feature this Sunday that made really wonder why we buy it was titled “The Pain of being a Tory at the Beeb”, by a former Radio 4 Today programme reporter Robin Aitken.

He was complaining that the BBC is politically biased to the left and that on occasions when he questioned this bias he was shunned - by former head Greg Dyke and on downwards.

Aitken is a fan of Thatcherism, but felt the BBC didn't accept it as a political creed.

In short, he claims the BBC cannot be trusted because, despite its mantra of impartiality, it has a “… set of well defined political beliefs, distinctly inclined to the left”.

He goes on: “There is no central diktat, for instance, insisting that all employees believe that George Bush is an idiot and that the American religious right threatens world peace. But you would find few BBC people who would dissent from such views”.

Later, he describes the anti-Thatcher bias as “jaw-dropping” and how in 1984 after covering the Conservative party conference in Brighton, at which an IRA bomb nearly did for government of the day, a colleague said to him, “Pity they missed the bitch.” A photograph of the Grand Hotel in ruins is captioned “Some of Aitken's colleagues celebrated the Brighton bomb.”

Excuse me Mr Aitken!

Surely the BBC's staff are chosen from the same society which we all inhabit. Surely, therefore, it will reflect a cross section of views from the aforesaid society.

Aitken even claims the alleged anti-war stance of the BBC reduced the slim chance that military action (in Iraq) would prove effective …”the BBC's suasion was committed from the outset to proving that the war was a disaster and Tony Blair a liar (just think what effect that had on opinion both in Britain and around the world)”.

The fact he worked there for 25 years and, one presumes, was paid pretty well for his services shows that the BBC was more than able to encompass people with right wing views.

Reading the article made me wonder how it was he kept his job for so long.

History has proved, after all, it is obvious that George Bush is an idiot, Tony Blair is a liar, the American religious right is a threat to world peace, the Hutton enquiry was a whitewash, Andrew Gilligan was right (the dossier was sexed up) and the war was a disaster. The BBC was right. Ergo, Robin Aitken is wrong.

He ends the piece by recommending the BBC should start hiring journalists from the right “not as a token presence but as part of the mainstream”!

Well how, in the name of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy and Richard Milhouse Nixon, do you do that?

Of course, through witch hunts!

Robin Aitken has the bright idea of using 2% of the BBC's revenue (he describes this as “a tasty £60m”) to fund a Fox News style network as a counter balance to the Marxists in the BBC.

This man is either having a laugh or is living in David Icke world - or maybe it's Blair World.

If anyone takes Robin Aitken - a man of whom Greg Dyke asked “Who was that f****r?” - seriously, they should be certified!

The time Aunty couldn't be trusted by us licence fee payers was when she rolled over and exposed every orifice to be shafted by Blair and his cronies over the Gilligan affair.