August 6, 2020 - 3:00pm
There’s no denying it. Many of our publicly-funded institutions have a problem with diversity — viewpoint diversity, that is.
They’ve become political monocultures, in which those who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy (Leftist, liberalish and Remainery) may seriously damage their careers.
On Monday, Matthew Goodwin wrote about the problem in academia — citing the research that demonstrates it’s not just a figment of the Right-wing paranoid imagination. Not that such proof is needed. Cancel culture is just too blatant right now for any reasonable observer to pretend this stuff isn’t happening.
Therefore those who run our universities, broadcasters and arts bodies can’t dodge the issue any longer. They must either justify the ideological closed shops they preside over — or do something to challenge the groupthink.
If they opt for former, coming out loud and proud as activist organisations, then they must be funded accordingly — i.e. not from the public purse. If, on the other hand, they want to retain the privileges that come with their status as public institutions then they must show that they’re willing to reflect and respect the values of the whole nation, not just the metropolitan middle class.
The BBC knows there are limits to what it can get away with. The Corporation’s notoriously biased comedy output, for instance, now features some non-standard issue voices like Simon Evans on The News Quiz and Geoff Norcott on The Mash Report.
And yet, there’s a danger here of ‘Rightwashing’ — i.e. institutions pointing to a small number of licensed dissenters, hoping we won’t notice an underlying culture of ideological conformity. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that Evans and Norcott are token presences. On the contrary, they’re the star turns of the shows they appear on. Which they’ve had to be. There’s no easy, PC clap-lines for them — they’re constantly skating on thin ice, testing and teasing young, liberal audiences with ideas that aren’t supposed to be heard, let alone enjoyed. That these performers do get laughs is testament to their wit and subtlety.
So, yes, of course, they get airtime — because why on Earth shouldn’t they? However, true viewpoint diversity will only be achieved when the broadcasters promote Right-wing comedians who are every bit as predictable and charmless as their least talented (and ubiquitous) Left-wing equivalents.
In a context where viewpoint diversity does exist, you not only get the best that each side has to offer but also the worst and everything in between. That’s collectively true of our newspapers and think-tanks, but not in academia, broadcasting, theatre etc where the Left enjoys a near-monopoly on mediocrity.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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Subscribe‘They must either justify the ideological closed shops they preside over ” or do something to challenge the groupthink.’
Good luck with that. You might as well ask Adolf Hitler to fund a synagogue. All you can do is simply throw out your TV (I did it 20 years ago) and have nothing to do with these broadcasters and newspapers etc. Thanks to the internet there are many other far superior options.
IMHO the wonderful and terrible thing about the internet is that whatever opinion you have, it is now possible to find somebody in agreement with you. Until we confront cancel culture itself, though, I fear the madness will continue.
My grandson and his friends are fans of the Goon Show from the 50s.. They are 11 year olds. I asked him why do you find it so funny and listen to the CDs over and over.
He said because they are all idiots and always say they are idiots. He likes the voices and the complete silliness of the stories. I suppose it is now timeless . I don’t think the political comedy has lasting appeal.
Unfortunately the only power we have to drive change at the BBC is to cancel our TV licence, I have already done so along with thousands of others, still it’s not enough, millions need to do it.
I cancelled mine 12 years ago, because of Sachsgate.
It’s not just the inherent left wing bias but the banality of a huge proportion of the comedians and panel show staples. Compare them with the avowedly Left wing comedian Alexis Sayle who brilliantly savages both Right and Left equally with intelligent, witty, incisive satire.
I knew the era of good and sometimes great Radio 4 comedy shows was over the day they started calling themselves ‘the home of comedy’
I used to wonder if I had mistaken the time and was listening to Any Questions by mistake.
Hardy was actually quite witty when he had people like Alan Coren to keep him in check. It was only latterly that he turned into an activist, presumably at the request of the producers.
Yes, the defining characteristic of most modern comedians is that they are not funny. Perhaps the two worst so-called ‘comedians’ are to be found on BBC Radio 5Live. I can’t remember their names but one of them is Welsh. Really, it is utter, utter garbage.
You’re right about Alexis, it’s strange to think he’s now old school.
Sayle is an avowed socialist, and where he “savages” the Left, it’s been because they were not lefty enough – he publicly stepped back from savaging about the Labour party during the Corbyn years.
Alexei Sayle is an extreme Far Leftist. He’s also competent, smart, and often quite funny. The average BBC Centre-Left comedian is not.
When you can only point to two conservative comedians, I don’t think we’ve got any where near the stage of being able to say this is just ‘right washing’. I think we are very much at the stage of still having to be grateful for small mercies, or better still, not taking any notice of any of these organisations at all.
At one level all this lefty nonsense doesn’t matter. ‘The Shoe Maker and His Daughter’ which tells the real life stories of a several generations of Russians during the Soviet era is worth reading to understand the phenomena of how middle class families are always conservatives, even when they are loyal, paid up members of the Communist Party. We are human beings not human sayings and what we are is revealed much more truthfully in what we do and how we choose to live. Middle class people survive by being in with the in crowd, which at the moment is left wing. Our public broadcaster keeps them entertained by reassuring them and letting them know the right things to think and say in order to maintain their social status. But however much lip service ambitious, well paid middle class people pay to Communist ideology, however much they laugh and sneer at the working class right, traditional ideas and bourgeois attitudes as long as they live quiet, moral, settled lives, marrying, bringing up children, reading, travelling, eating good food etc they are conservatives. And I’m pretty sure working class people don’t care about BBC comedy out put at all.
The deterioration of BBC comedy into endless inane references to things like “Donald Trumps orange skin” – and worse still – studio audiences that somehow continued to find this kind of constantly repeated content to be funny, was pretty much the last straw for me.
Can someone please let me know when/if the News and Comedy returns to its old more nuanced and balanced self – so that I can risk watching some of their output again …
Geoff Norcott is always wheeled out as the comedian that disproves that all BBC comedy is leftist – but GN, as funny as he is, is essentially playing a character. The audience is invited to laugh at (not with) his observations because he is depicted as an unreconstructed Faragiste, a cartoon Brexit untermensch, a figure of fun because his opinions are SO outrageous (despite them actually being the majority view the last time we asked).
Even a man like Ian Hislop, who made a career out of having a dig at the establishment, has become – since the referendum – the sneering face of on-air remoanerism. (To clarify: I have no problem with Remainers, I might disagree with them but theirs is a perfectly justifiable position. Remoaners, on the other hand, refuse to enter into any serious debate (certainly any good natured debate) with those of their countrymen who happened to think differently to them. All they can do is sneer and throw insults. Ian Hislop is very much one of that cohort.
Once a satirist has picked sides and only attacks the ‘Other’ he ceases to be in any way relevant. It has made HIGNFY unwatchable and Private Eye unreadable. And that is the biggest problem with the current state of British satire and comedy – it has taken sides.
Pick any comedy panel show – be it HIGNFY, Mock the Week, The Now Show, Last Leg, any terrestrial channel comedy panel show, and try and find any that goes against the ‘liberal’ orthodoxy. There isn’t a single one.
One or two comedians dare to kick against the traces – but only in stand-up and only once they’ve made an unassailable name for themselves, because they know it comes at the cost of a lucrative TV career. You can only establish a successful stand-up career at the moment by building your name up on such comedy panel programmes.
If any booker actually had the balls to book a comedian who came out with a whole anti-EU schtick, or made fun of the infantile XR carnival of no-marks, or possibly mocked any aspect of identity politics or the current accommodations towards “woke” culture wars – they would guarantee firstly that that the comedian never got booked again for that show and secondly that the booker would be hauled in front of the commissioning editor the next morning for an interview without coffee.
Neither the booker, nor the guest – if they value their careers – dares to step outside the liberal consensus. To do so would be to get a flavour of what it would be like to be accused of heresy.
Another strange thing is that we all still refer to this as the “liberal consensus”. It is, surely, the very antithesis of “liberal” thought. What could possibly be more authoritarian than promoting a narrow worldview and punishing and shaming anyone who dares to think outside it? One of the favourite insults when castigating the right is “Orwellian”, do they honestly not see that the tag could be far better applied to this insistence we all adhere to the orthodoxy or face the consequences?
The satirists of the 1960s, 70s and 80s would hang their heads at the neo-puritanism, the homogeneity of today’s crop of comics. Actually none of those people would even get the gig nowadays. The head of BBC comedy commissioning proudly stated that the Python crew would never be hired today, because who wants more Oxbridge educated white men? Right on! Who cares if they’re funny, just don’t let them be well educated and white!
The current panel show regulars who infest our screens may tick all the right boxes, might fulfil all the right quotas, might make fun of all the approved targets and avoid making fun of all the ‘protected victim groups’, but some of these ‘comedians’ (to stretch the definition almost to breaking point) fail in one rather important area – THEY ARE NOT FUNNY. (Has anyone, honestly, ever actually belly-laughed at anything Nish Kumar or Holly Walsh have ever said? Or a hatful of – evidently forgettable – others)
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty who are talented, plenty who are funny, but for all their supposed “edginess” there isn’t one who’d dare admit to an unapproved political viewpoint.
The BBC is a failure and full left wing, woke bias. Defund the BBC without delay, let their left wing audience pay.
I think you are a little unfair to the likes of Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, or Flanders and Swan. They were highly sophisticated, learned even, whilst also being laugh-out-loud amusing to those who had never heard of Gammer Gurton’s Needle.
Ah, I was thinking of the Home Service and Light Programme. We never had one of the television machines – and indeed never have done, and still do not.
It’s not just the BBC comedy that has a bias problem. Everything that is broadcast looks and sounds like it has gone through the same checklist. Enough bame actors? Tick. White male bad guy? Tick. Softly spoken nice female victim? Tick. Politically correct story line? Tick. On and on it goes with variations on the same theme over and over again. Just look at what the BBC did to A Christmas Carol – nuff said!
The BBC walks a fine line, and you could definitely argue it doesn’t do it very well, but I’m not sure it’s as cut and dried as this article makes out. If you spend any time reading the Guardian discussions, not that I’m necessarily recommending that you do, you’ll find it’s despised by those that consider themselves to be on the left as well, and denounced as an untrustworthy Tory mouthpiece.
That it gets attacked like this from both sides seems to me an indication that it’s not one or the other. But perhaps it is proudly in the middle somewhere, espousing a particular set of views, rather than really diverse.
I think individual programmes could be accused of strong left-wing bias; but the opposite could also be claimed. There was, for instance, some evidence a few years back that Question Time audiences were being packed deliberately with right-wingers, including some whom most people would consider extreme.
I don’t actually watch much BBC output these days, but when I do, my general perception is that it’s basically still a Blairite outfit. But I’m much less worried about its ideological bias than about the appalling decline in its level of intellectual sophistication since I was a boy back in the 1990s.
On the BBC’s Question Time (January 2020?), Lawrence Fox’s answer to a question regarding Meghan Markle and racism gained obvious wide support from the show’s audience. https://www.youtube.com/wat….
Lawrence Fox has been subsequently pilloried by much of the MSM and
Channel4 News (and various caustic Guardian writers), plus threats
have been made over his future acting career opportunities.
Unsurprisingly, some of the other Youtube clips of this section of the programme have also edited out the enthusiastic audience clapping support for Fox.
I don’t know of any ‘evidence’ but I suspect whoever was gathering it was doing so during the Blair years when the audience were asking awkward questions of Labour ministers.
Unlike BBC comedy shows I think QT is scrupulous with getting the balance of its audiences right. Unfortunately it doesn’t always do this for its panellists.
The Guardian represents the ruling Establishment. The non-Establishment Left are understandably not huge fans. The ruling Establishment views are very narrow and exclusionary; they certainly exclude most Labour Party members.
If only that were true, life would be so much more enjoyable. Unfortunately the country is run by Dominic the disrupter and Gove, largely for the benefit of a bunch of hedgefund shysters and housebuilders who prop up Party finances, aided and abetted by all the MSM apart from The Guardian, the BBC and the Daily Mirror.
OK…
I agree. I do think BBC news and ‘political chat shows’ are biased – which is arguably the worst place for it to be biased as news surely should be the one place for objectivity to be sacrosanct, and history programmes are becoming increasingly woke in subject matter and tone. However elsewhere I don’t think there is a massive problem. Tracey Ullman has done some very funny anti woke sketches for example and much programming is neutral. It’s news where I have the biggest problem. I don’t want news reporters giving their opinions and ‘calling things out’ I want them to report facts so I can make up my own mind thanks very much. That’s where the Beeb has really been getting my hackles up recently. Even on the odd occasion they do the right thing they seem apologetic about it or cave to pressure from a few very vocal activists. It has to stop or justification for the licence fee really will become untenable.
Just because the BBC is not left enough for some activists, and occasionally has some token non-orthodox coverage, does not alter its overwhelming bias which has now corrupted even its jewels like drama and nature documentaries. Production values have gone up steadily, but the content value has diminished to the point where it has been months since I have bothered to tune in to BBC TV for anything.
here’s the rebuttal (below) to the original telegraph report. Seems the generalisation might in fact be overstated. Subject matter can influence perceived political orienation, too… For example, while an academic might be left wing supporting come voting time, that doesnt mean they share “lefty” views on everything, and simialry might not influence their teachig at all e.g. computer scientist. But, a computer scientist could influene programming in a very “right wing” way by suggesting behaviour modelling based on gross sterotpical attitudes of say a labour voter would then write a programme predicting choices based on “essentialisms” that don’t even exist outside of our own world views sterortypes and stupid pschology psychomtetrics… but pat on the back professor, science have proven that lefties by more vegan food than rihties… its all coming across as very americanised childish dichotmoy of seeing the world…well at least in my opinion. https://www.theguardian.com…
After many redrafts and editing, this is all it distilled down to for me…. I personally would pay about £5 pcm subscription for the BBC + a 50% voluntary surcharge to give the elderly a free licence. The producers would soon get the message about their biased programming when the revenue dried up. The problem can be seen all the time in shows where the narrative is more important than the facts… did the film crew inadvertently drive the walrus over the edge?
Leftwashing is the biggest problem in our country. Leftists have done nothing but tear up and tear down this country. Leftists keep us poorer and more divided due to arrogance and ignorance which go hand-in-hand.
I don’t buy this ‘rightwashing’ and all its corollaries at all.
“the prevailing orthodoxy (Leftist, liberalish and Remainery)”.
Brexit is happening. There is a Tory govt with a large majority (it is a myth that the govt is bringing in socialist-style spending – they had no choice in the face of CV. Forget about Johnson, that man has no ideology other than his own ego). The printed press is overwhelmingly right wing/conservative. If society’s prevailing orthodoxy was as the writer says so, the above would not be true.
Cancel culture (the culture war) is something that is being played out in academia and on the internet by trolls. It is largely a US import where the Con/Lib divide is far beyond anything we have have here, the very singular issue of Brexit aside. Occasionally it bleeds out into the world of celebrity.
I have to say I do detect a whiff of paranoia from those of the right, whatever that means anymore and it is far too looser a term but for convenience here it will have to do. They are inventing enemies. Of course there is opposition to the prevailing realities – Brexit, the unsavoury rhetoric that emits from much of the printed press in the UK, the conduct of elements within this particular Tory govt, as well as the policies of the previous Tory govts of the last decade. Yet the right behave as if it is they who are at the wrong end of the stick. It is the classic play of perceived victimhood. The oppressor takes on the character of the oppressed. As i said, they invent enemies – the BBC becomes some sort of brainwashing monstrosity (in truth, the biggest problem the BBC has is that most of its output is simply crap); academia is some petri dish fomenting cultural marxism; and of course, top of the list of enemies is ‘the other’, and top of that list, ‘the immigrant’. And so it begins, yet again.