¹⁷An honest witness comes out with the truth, but the false one with deceit…..²²The Lord detests a liar but delights in honesty

Proverbs 12:17 and 22 – The Revised English Bible

³¹…Jesus said, ‘If you stand by my teaching, you are truly my disciples; ³²you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’

John 8:31b to 32 – The Revised English Bible

⁶Jesus replied, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life……

John 14:6 – The Revised English Bible

¹Uphold my cause, God, and give judgement for me against a godless nation; rescue me from liars and evil men.

Psalms 43:1 – The Revised English Bible

A great deal has been said about the recent scandal at the BBC. There have been two replies by the ‘commentariat‘ ‘that have jumped out at me:

• The falsification of a film that resulted in President Trump appearing to say something that was never said, has been referred to widely as ‘an error’, not just by BBC employees.
• Some commentators have said that the rot set in at the BBC about 20 years ago.

Whilst reflecting on this recent event and the comments, I remembered that I’d written a piece about the BBC in 2019. I’m putting this piece up here now, as it gives a useful historical perspective on the current scandal. It underlines that the BBC has been guilty of falsifying films, so that they show an erroneous picture, on previous occasions. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell from ‘The Importance of being Earnest,’ to make one such ‘error’ could be regarded as misfortune. To make two looks like a deliberate falsification of the facts, rather than error.

And what the piece below underlines, is that the rot set in at the BBC far more than 20 years ago; I think a good case could be made that the Corporation has been going off the rails for more than 50 years. Anyway, here is my six-year-old piece:

The decline of many of our major institutions during my lifetime has been sad to witness. Perhaps none is a sorrier tale than that of the BBC. I would struggle to explain why this has happened; it may have been accelerated by the same factor as the decline of the Civil Service – a kind of uniformity of recruitment, leading to everyone sharing the same views about everything, and ‘groupthink’ taking over. I well remember the horror that was expressed when the BBC was reporting on the war in the Falklands, when the BBC tried to identify itself more with the Argentinian cause than with what they described as ‘The British,’ completely missing the point that, as a taxpayer funded organisation, they owed loyalty to those who were paying their wages. This lesson was not learned, so that by the time we got to the Gulf War, the BBC’s output led directly to the suicide of Dr David Kelly, when his contact with a BBC journalist ‘off the record’ was blurted out on air without his permission. That lesson was also not learned.

I fear that one characteristic that the BBC shares with the NHS is that it thinks it is absolutely invincible, omniscient and, much more worryingly, untouchable. This thinking has led to a dreadful decline in even basic standards of decency and truth in reporting, and as each instance becomes more blatant, so they believe that they can get away with making more and more outlandish and false claims. OFCOM, which is supposed to regulate the BBC, has actually become their greatest defender and tends to be staffed by ex-BBC employees. I used to complain to the BBC about some of their output. I gave up many years ago, when I realised that I’d raised three complaints over a year and hadn’t had a reply to a single one of them. They are anti-British, woke, pro ‘multiculturalism,’ climate catastrophist and anti-Christian on virtually any subject that you care to mention.

During the years of the Brexit debates, the BBC would pump out openly unbalanced Remainer-supporting reports, and had the same biased politicians on the same shows every day, with not the remotest semblance of an attempt to provide balanced opinions, as required by their Charter.  This was the point at which I became so upset, that I voluntarily withdrew from all BBC news. The BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme, that I’d listened to virtually every day since I was about 20, became such blatant propaganda, that I gave it up completely. The BBC is now a taxpayer-funded source of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, lies and the use of fear. The organisation is rotten to its very core.

This was underlined when a friend of ours became involved in a public spat with the BBC. His company had produced a film about the Queen, under contract to the BBC. The BBC asked for a draft tape of it before my friend had completely finished editing and this was sent off. The film container was marked that it was not to be used without the company’s specific permission. The BBC then put out a press release that they had an explosive piece of film showing the Queen losing her temper. They had deliberately portrayed the film backwards, to make it look like something that it had never been. They’d lied, cheated and falsified, in an attempt to discredit the Queen. When there was public outrage, the BBC blamed our friend’s company, who didn’t feel able to tell what had really happened, as they thought it would cut them off from their largest customer, the BBC, for ever. End of story? The BBC got away with it, as they have done often since.

This would not be so serious, were it not for the fact that since the Second War, the BBC has been regarded by people abroad as absolutely unbiased and reliable; in fact, the most reliable news source globally. The level of delusion they’ve achieved would have thrilled Goebbels.

Recently, Sir David Attenborough, viewed by the public as a national treasure, has been found guilty of pumping out a false narrative involving the death of walruses in the Arctic. He stated that this was caused by climate change. In fact, it was caused by the walruses being chased off the cliff by a group of Polar Bears. The error was pointed out by those who were present and had witnessed it happen. It didn’t cause the BBC or Attenborough to change their narrative. During COVID, the BBC’s daily outpourings have been so geared to raising the temperature of peoples’ fear, that they’ve almost certainly been guilty of causing many nervous breakdowns and quite possibly suicides.

Whilst I’ve been writing this section, I’ve been reading, by way of background to writing my memoirs, Richard Noble’s account of achieving the Land Speed Record and defending it in 1997 with the first ever speed by a car beyond the speed of sound. The record still stands today. At one point during this story, the BBC put out a report that the disagreements inside the ‘Thrust SSC’ camp were so intense that the driver, Andy Green, had walked out and gone back to the UK. The story first appeared in the BBC and it’s impossible to believe that it wasn’t invented by someone working for them. It was subsequently picked up by other media and pumped around the world. It very nearly resulted in the cancellation of the attempt, as some of the sponsors became nervous. It was a pure, unadulterated lie. Fake news.

Recently, we’ve had the revelations that BBC reporter Martin Bashir achieved an interview with Princess Diana before her death, which was agreed to only after he forged documents, in order to persuade her to give the interview. Senior people at the BBC signed this off and are still drawing their salaries, whereas they and Bashir should be in jail.

The BBC has lied, cheated, forged and falsified its way over recent decades. It stinks and is beyond saving. It has spread its lies and propaganda uniformly to virtually every other mainstream media company. It’s a tragedy, but it’s one that’s not going to be solved in a hurry.

If you want to discover why all media has gone the way it has, I think the advent of 24/7 news channels in the 1980s started the rot. If you’re going to fill the huge amount of time available, you can only do so with opinion, there’s not enough news. In no time the media started to give the impression that their own people were quite capable of giving opinions, so more and more came from in-house reporters, some of whom seemed to have no more understanding of the issues, than the guy who props up the bar in the local pub, pontificating about politics. This wouldn’t have been so serious, were it not for the fact that this coincided with media giving up investigative journalism almost completely. They now just mirror each other, and I find it extraordinary that none of them seem to want to investigate, for example, why it was that our country was so short of PPE for health workers at the start of the Covid saga, in the spring of 2020. Was no-one interested? When I first started reading and listening to the news, investigative journalism to the highest standards was the order of the day. Now it’s shunned, and it’s made our media not worth bothering with, as they all simply steal news headlines from each other, slightly change the words and pump it out as if they’d researched it themselves.

Based on these past events and many other similar ones that weren’t so well publicised, these matters which are of deep moral and ethical concern in one of our nation’s key ‘institutions’ will probably simply be ‘brushed under the carpet.‘

All of us who hold to Christian values need to add our voices to those who are calling for the BBC Licence Fee to be ended. This is nothing less than a choice – are we a truthful or a deceitful people?

Heavenly Father, you are the way, the truth and the life. Help our nation to fight for truth and the for the wholehearted rejection of distortion, deceit and lies. Amen