Citizen Smith Works for the BBC, and He’s High

The latest exposures at the rotten heart of mainstream media and its addiction to lying.

JUPPLANDIA

In George Orwell’s 1984 the main character, Citizen Smith, is a responsible functionary of the totalitarian regime. He has a job which exists solely because of the nature of the regime that rules the society he lives in, the Britain that has become Airstrip One. Orwell’s warning has of course become of the great cliches of political discourse, but it is nevertheless a great work and worth returning to. Not every aspect of it proves to be correct in term of mordant prediction of the future, and when compared with that other great dystopic vision of roughly the same period, Aldous Huxley’s earlier Brave New World (published in 1932, while 1984 hit bookstores 17 years later) we can see that the two together offer a comprehensive survey of totalitarian possibilities that neither wholly capture alone.

World War Two separates the two texts, and surely influences their different approaches. As Huxley wrote, Fascism, Nazism and Communism were all thriving but foreign, and war was approaching the rest of Europe but had not yet raged like an all consuming fire through the whole Continent. Complacency, wilful blindness, the distractions of mere sensation as doom advances, these could be said to be conditioning factors of the present from which Huxley was writing, whereas Orwell’s masterpiece came after the tank battles and the marching armies and could therefore be said to have been written in the ashes of World War II, already cooled into the civilisational divisions of the Cold War.

The great division between the two texts is on the nature of the tyranny to come. Orwell’s tyranny is one shaped by the War, it is one of a “jackboot, stomping into a face forever”. Ultimately, this is tyranny by pure force, both bureaucratic and militaristic. This is the coercive and obvious kind of tyranny, that which comes with thugs and orders, beatings and murders. The kind described by Huxley is much more subtle. It is a pharmacological and pharmaceutical tyranny, where drugs dull the senses and distract the mind, where the route to tyranny is through seduction and submission, through the gratification of base sensation at the expense of independent action. Orwell’s future beats people into submission and disappears those who do not comply. Huxley’s future offers them things that make them want to submit and which tempts them to self-erase, to disappear in a welter of mere sensation and pleasure.

It can, though, be tempting to over-emphasise these differences. Both men were too good as thinkers to present visions that were purely reductive or that offered just one explanation of how a society learns to obliterate individual liberty and enshrine totalitarian control. It isn’t just sex and drugs that upholds the World State, there is still a strong suggestion that, somewhere in a more hidden and removed fashion, overt violence may still be deployed on those that technological interference from prior to birth and social conditioning through distraction hasn’t pacified-the mysterious islands may be places where the World State uses direct violence, and of course The Savage Reservation, in keeping those state of narure barbarians out, would be too:

“Huxley’s dystopia in Brave New World is designed to function without overt violence, relying instead on pleasure, distraction, and psychological conditioning to maintain control. The society uses drugs like soma, casual sex, and mindless entertainment to pacify its citizens, ensuring they willingly accept their roles and remain content. Huxley argued that future totalitarian states would be more effective not through punishment, but by systematically reinforcing desirable behavior through nearly non-violent manipulation, such as infant conditioning and subconscious persuasion. However, some analyses suggest that while the surface of Huxley’s world appears free of violence, the underlying threat of coercion remains, implying that the system may still depend on the potential for violence to maintain order. This idea is encapsulated in the notion of the “Orwellian fist in the Huxleyan glove,” where the threat of state violence, though hidden, is still present and sufficient to enforce compliance.”

Conversely, Orwell isn’t so simplistic as to imagine or present that it is force alone and nothing else which maintains the dystopia he presents. The Five Minute Hate shows how people can be psychologically conditioned to desire and want an object of loathing, a human being transfigured into a symbolic representation of everything a regime despises (which is the role Donald Trump serves for many middle class people on both sides of the Atlantic). Propaganda serves as well as force and is in fact force applied to truth and coercion applied to Reality, and propaganda that rewrites history as it goes along is also rewriting the minds of those who consume it.

This is utterly fundamental to Airstrip One and Big Brother’s control. This is what Citizen Smith does for a living. People are not just disappeared in the sense of being seized at night and sent to some camp or imprisonment or marched off to be murdered in a cell. They are disappeared from the historic record. Everything they said and did and that was reported about them is erased. This memory holing concept is a far more prescient and powerful part of what 1984 says which is relevant to today than the militaristic, World War II obvious trappings of tyranny are. In a sense World War II blinds us to the subtler mechanisms of control even within overtly tyrannical systems. It’s NEVER just built on beatings and murders. The conditioning exists before that. The lies are required before that. The revision and editing of history, or of events as they happen, are the prerequisites of the troops, torture chambers, beatings and murders.

And Orwell knows this. He’d recognise just how much of modern media does what Citizen Smith does, editing, deciding, distorting events both of the historic past and the just passed news cycle. Control of language is as much the topic of 1984 as the use of violence is, because the first leads to the second, because political language is the building block of political violence. Back then, nobody used the phrase stochastic terrorism. Certainly nobody was saying “words are violence”- but Orwell WAS warning about that kind of phrase, that use of language. Orwell would have immediately recognised that it is true that some kinds of rhetoric are dangerous and signify a descent into tyranny AND that phrases like ‘words are violence’ (or words like misinformation and disinformation) aren’t a noble battle against thar, but the SAME THING, a battle for the control of language for the purposes of political violence and dictatorial power.

Cancel culture, selective reporting and deliberate omission(such as for example presenting the race of an attacker when it fits a narrative, and not doing so when it doesn’t fit that narrative), partisan and political redefinitions of common meanings (justice being replaced by ‘social justice’, equality before the law by Equality and Equity, colour blindness by an ‘anti-racism’ that is predicated on hating a specific race) all these things were predicted by the kinds of techniques the Soviets deployed and that Orwell brilliantly explored on his essays on political language as well as in concepts like memory holing and the details of Citizen Smith’s work. The memory hole is both the Soviet photograph that purged Communist leaders no longer appear in, and the contemporary mainstream media excising of scandals from the record of Barack Obama or collective complicity and silence on crimes by Democrats or refusal to be honest about black crime rates, Muslim terrorism, and demographic replacement and it’s consequences.

One might say that the whole of western civilisation, particularly the uniqueness it offered, the people who composed it, and the worth of its existence, is memory holed in all our lecture halls and university classes, as well as in so many mainstream media avoidances of truth on race, religion, culture, borders, crime, identity and mass immigration.

The discovery of a 19 page internal BBC document setting out in brutal and stark reality the extent of its fundamental dishonesty on a whole range of topics is not a story about a ‘liberal’ news organisation differing in opinion with a populist American President. It is much, much more than that. It’s worth presenting a summary of what The Telegraph investigation has uncovered:

“A 19-page internal document compiled by Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, has detailed widespread allegations of institutional bias within the corporation, leading to the resignations of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. The document, which was leaked to the Daily Telegraph and subsequently published by several media outlets, accuses the BBC of selectively editing a Donald Trump speech for a Panorama programme to falsely suggest he incited violence on January 6, 2021, by splicing together two separate remarks made 54 minutes apart and omitting his call for a peaceful march. It also alleges systemic anti-Israel bias in BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Gaza conflict, including the omission of stories about Israeli hostages and the repeated airing of pro-Hamas and antisemitic commentators , as well as censorship of gender-critical viewpoints on transgender issues, with the BBC’s LGBT desk reportedly refusing to cover stories that raise difficult questions about gender identity.

• Trump Speech Editing Allegations: The document claims the BBC’s Panorama episode Trump: A Second Chance? misrepresented Trump’s remarks by combining two separate statements, omitting his call for a peaceful protest, and adding dramatic music to create a misleading impression of incitement to violence.This editing has prompted calls for a formal apology from the BBC, which is expected to issue one early next week.
• Bias in Gaza Coverage: The dossier highlights a stark contrast between BBC English and BBC Arabic’s reporting on the Israel-Hamas war. While the English website published 19 stories about hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023, BBC Arabic published none, despite covering all stories critical of Israel. An internal review by David Grossman reportedly confirmed systemic anti-Israel bias in BBC Arabic, but no corrective action was taken.
• Transgender and Gender-Critical Coverage: The document alleges that the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues has been captured by a small group of staff promoting the Stonewall view of gender identity, leading to the censorship of stories involving gender-critical perspectives, such as the case of nurses in Darlington who claimed sexual discrimination and harassment.
• BBC Verify and Fact-Checking Failures: The report criticizes BBC Verify, the corporation’s anti-misinformation unit, for producing a “thoroughly wrong” report claiming car insurers were racist, undermining its credibility as a fact-checking body.
• Institutional Response: As of November 11, 2025, the BBC has not issued a public statement responding to the allegations in the dossier, though BBC Chairman Samir Shah has promised to write a formal response to MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee. The corporation has also not addressed the specific claims about the Trump speech edit or the Gaza coverage discrepancies.”

Let’s clarify what all of the above really means, because the process of memory holing the memory holing, of covering for the just exposed crime, is already underway. Former and current BBC staff and their political and media allies are already scrambling to ignore the fact that the BBC lied and that its own internal analysis discovered massive breaches of its own supposed standards of basic integrity, professionalism and ethics in the presentation of news and the separation of news being reported as fact from opinion being honestly offered as a subjective viewpoint.

First, these aren’t just allegations. The BBC and its defenders have not been able to claim that it’s untrue that the BBC doctored footage of Donald Trump to excise peaceful comments and to falsely present him as inciting violence. None of them are even referring to whether it’s true. The evidence is in the footage itself and its incontestable. The footage does splice together different comments to present an entirely different meaning. Now you CANNOT do that innocently or accidentally. You have to choose where to clip the film, and which other bit of film to connect it with. And they did it in a way that presented the OPPOSITE of what the unedited and unclipped film in their possession actually showed, the OPPOSITE of the reality they had filmed.

The grounds on which they defend this are truly pathetic, such as this:

Think about the reasoning there. It’s not a scandal because nobody at the time noticed we were lying. In other words, we are being told not that that they didn’t lie and accusations of lying are false, but that them lying was perfectly OK because it was a really, really successful lie.

Ever wonder why so many people in the UK hate Donald Trump but when you question them on why everything they assert is untrue, uninformed, references no confirmed facts and expresses nothing but emotional loathing and propagandistic slogans? THIS is why. BBC lies on Donald Trump were very very successful lies. Nobody complained because almost everyone assumed that the BBC wasn’t delinerately splicing and editing footage of J6 to invert the truth. Only those of us who were better aware of the nature of mainstream media and of the BBC, as well as better aware of the policies, words and actions of Donald Trump via not being entirely dependent on mainstream media, knew enough to distrust such presentations.

And that leads us to the source of these revelations. Michael Prescott is not a Trump supporter. He’s not an alternative media podcaster. He’s not an outsider with a grudge, a Trump official or appointee, a follower or ally of MAGA. He’s not a rightwing influencer, a ‘Far Right extremist’, or any of the usual labels applied to silence independent voices and people who expose mainstream media dishonesty. He’s a fully respectable, fully credentialed person, from within the same system, the same class and the same profession as the rest of the BBC (or ITV, or C4) media staff and from which BBC defenders are drawn as well.

You can’t smear and demonise him in the easy way middle class people who weren’t born in an Islamic dominated Luton get to smear and demonise Tommy Robinson. You can’t sneer at him being a ‘citizen journalist’. Michael Presscott spent 17 years as a mainstream media professional, including as chief political correspondent and political editor at The Sunday Times. He’s Oxbridge educated and followed an almost textbook route from university to journalism to high level corporate PR (where all the affluent boys and girls who don’t go into politics directly tend to end up).

The situation then should be very, very clear: The BBC committed the grossest imaginable ethical crimes as a news provider. The BBC is functioning by a level of bias and a level of disregard for truth, professionalism and integrity, for FACTS and HONESTY in reporting, where splicing and editing footage to present a lie was considered perfectly normal.

And it was a pretty important lie too. This was the BBC doctoring evidence to support an international media effort to get Donald Trump impeached and imprisoned. It’s documentary presentation could well have ended up as a reference in impeachment and imprisonment efforts against Trump, and directly mirrored the J6 Committee editing and splicing footage of J6 to try to bring Trump down and justify draconian and tyrannical treatment of J6 protestors. People were imprisoned unjustly on the basis of such a distorted media and political depiction of what happened. Protestor deaths that should in all probability be understood as State murders and police brutality were excused by the distortion of footage regarding J6. An incredibly questionable and I’d say certainly stolen election result was buttressed and confirmed by the mainstream media lying about that and about J6 (separate but connected topics, I’ve gone into the many reasons why all the evidence confirms 2020 was stolen multiple times).

Even if you think Trump was wrong, I’m wrong and the mainstream media were right on 2020…there is absolutely no disputing the established facts that the J6 Committee selectively edited footage and buried and destroyed evidence as well, and there is as well now no disputing that the BBC did the same.

All of these people, politicians and journalists alike, lied by omission, lied by distortion, and lied by using propaganda techniques described in 1984 doing the same kind of things Citizen Smith did for a living. That is what has been exposed, and that is what Orwell told us is the classic behaviour of totalitarian regimes.

And he was right.

Now the defences we see of the BBC double down on those original totalitarian acts and those original lies. Because AGAIN they distort reality with lies, and again they deflect from how dangerous it is that mainstream media should think it’s perfectly normal to splice footage to smear the US President or, even MORE insanely and dangerously, that it’s perfectly normal to hire Hamas members and the families of Hamas leaders to create BBC news content.

Trying to present the exposure of their, frankly, crimes, as a Trump led “rightwing assault on the BBC” simply adds even more shameless bias to that which has gone before, and even more distortion and lie to an organisation steeped in and stinking of both.

When the leader of a British political party rushes to change the narrative on the BBC’s exposed actions to a story about defending ‘Our BBC’ from Donald Trump, or when the departing BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness insists her “hard working” journalists have done nothing wrong even as she departs in disgrace, we see a refusal to face what BBC actions really mean.

Citizen Smith is still denying that he is Citizen Smith, redefining and distorting his OWN history as events unfold, justifying, deflecting, editing, omitting. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist, of course, ‘Our’ Citizen Smiths don’t struggle with the dimly remembered stirrings of conscience, with human feelings of disgust at what they are doing or what the regime demands of them. They don’t feel dirty when the Two Minute Hate focuses their most bestial desires and their most savage instincts and they don’t feel shame about the clipping and editing of history and events to exclude facts and present fictions.

They just feel that they are put upon hard working professionals, unfairly dismissed, or that their friends and political allies have every right to lie about their enemies and political rivals and call that ‘news’. Of course, if they had ever presented what they were doing as opinion, opinion that didn’t present itself as fact, they might have indeed have had such a right. A person can select for emphasis, and must in any written text. Everyone will have a point they want to make with any political piece. Satire and Philippics aren’t bound by literal truth. But the news should be, because the news claims to be literal truth. As soon as you say this is an objective report, these are to the best of my knowledge facts, this is not my view of the world but what actually definitely happened….then millions receive that presentation on that basis. Combine that with editing and splicing the thing to portray the exact opposite of what it originally said, or hand it over to terrorists to produce, and you are doing something deeply vile and poisonous. Defending and deflecting AGAIN only compounds and deepens your loathsome dishonesty….and perhaps reveals a pathological inability to ever get back to reasonable boundaries of behaviour and reporting.

Our progressive leftist leaders, politicians, journalists and news organisations do what Citizen Smith did for a living, but they do not do it as victims. They aren’t caught in the system, feeling trapped, being fearful, the way Orwell’s main character was. For them, the presentation of lies, the enjoyment of a status connected to those lies, the virtue of discarding old virtues…all these are, in a far more Huxleyan sense, the soma of their existence. They are addicted to the lies they find pleasurable, and that is their morality….while the exposure of truth about their nature and their actions is like depriving an addict of his drug. They intend to distract and confuse us, but they are users of their own supply.

https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/citizen-smith-works-for-the-bbc-and

The BBC licence fee is now a tax on stupidity

SEAN WALSH

HAVE you handed over your annual BBC tribute money yet? If so, what were you thinking of?

Panorama’s cheap digital conjuring trick, its ‘footage’ of Trump agitating for violence in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, was journalistic malfeasance of the sort we’ve come to expect from a corporation which has long been at war with its own Charter and principles of governance.

I understand that the incumbent President of the United States isn’t for everyone. But why is the antagonistic commentariat so unimaginative in its subversions? The Trump phenomenon – the dancing, trolling, quips and mugshots – has an enchanting overall aesthetic. There is an artistry to Trump that makes him a generational political talent. He deserves to be traduced far more creatively than this.

His critics are entitled to criticise the performance, and restrict coverage to the highlights, but not to editorialise vindictively. If you’re going to bowdlerise a Trump ‘weave’ it would be better manners to do it in a way that doesn’t have him saying the opposite of what he did in fact say. And if you are going to do news in the style of a bad homemade video, at least don’t get caught.

The BBC does news in that postmodern way. Things no longer happen or do not happen in its universe. There are no events. Instead, there are narratives. Some of which are helpful, others of which are offensive to the homogeneous liberal sensibility and are therefore problematic. When you think about the world like that, it doesn’t much matter to you that your reporting is a lie because you’ve already given up on truth anyway.

The BBC’s Trump forgery reminded me of that thing Channel 4 does every Easter when it cannibalises the Gospel accounts of the Passion to ‘prove’ that Jesus faked his own death and was never in the tomb at all but spent three days shacked up with Mary of Magdala. All very predictable; all very dull.

The BBC claims it’s impartial. That might not be a lie as much as self-delusion. The Romans thought that institutions have personalities, in which case the national broadcaster has over many years done a Kenneth Widmerpool and turned into a risible leftist crank. And it’s in the way of cranks to get cranky when their crankiness (invisible to them) is pointed out by the rest of us. This pathology of denial was recently described on these pages by David Keighley.

The public broadcaster might take itself to be the deposit of a secular Magisterium, or the official and objective biographer of the national life, but this is nonsense. Its journalists agitate for a culture of repudiation – of history, Christian faith and the settled decencies of the English-speaking peoples.

The idea that there can (or even should) be an ‘impartial public service broadcaster’ is at best a creation myth, at worst a useful but intellectually confused conceit. There is no such thing as ‘impartiality’ in reporting or in anything which uses language because as soon as we start speaking, we are in the business of value judgement. If there is such a thing as an objective ‘view from nowhere’, it’s already reserved for God.

Conservatism is empirical and radical. There is nothing in conservative philosophy which requires the conservation of failure. The BBC is incapable of self-correction at this point: you might as well toss a self-help book at an alcoholic and accept his promise to read it and cure himself. What the BBC needs, for its own sake, is an intervention.

That could and now must come in the form of mass civil disobedience and non-payment of the licence fee, which is now a tax on stupidity and a violation of natural justice. Why should you be required to pay for services you would never use? The BBC funding model is protection racketeering by statute. Even the New York Mafia don’t demand money from people in the Bronx as a tax on properties they don’t even own in Queens.

Civil disobedience becomes an obligation when laws have gone badly wrong and the people against whom it is enforced have no other mechanisms of objection. It is the opposite of the masked-up and increasingly ubiquitous thuggery of the Islamist-Left mob coalition. Breaking a bad law, in plain sight and in expectation of personal consequences, shows a respect for the concept of law in general.

So, if a few years ago you’d tragically fallen for another Establishment scam and were duped into muzzling your face, now’s the time to redeem some spiritual credit. And if you happen to be visited by a BBC enforcement officer, as recently happened to me, you can always throw some of that BBC black box accountability stuff right back at them by promising to launch your own internal investigation into whether you ever ‘livestream’ (whatever that means).

The pressure groups haven’t worked. It’s time to go Trumpian and impose tariffs on the dysfunctional universe which has the nerve to call itself the British Broadcasting Corporation. The public service broadcaster has come to despise the public it’s paid to serve. You really want to help it with that?

www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-bbc-licence-fee-is-now-a-tax-on-stupidity/

 

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