The BBC Is the Voice of Western Self-Loathing

The dispute over the British broadcaster’s butchering of President Trump’s words is a telling sign of the times.

MICK HUME

he ongoing conflict between U.S. President Donald Trump and the BBC—Britain’s publicly funded broadcaster—is one of the most revealing political scandals of the age.

We now know beyond doubt that the BBC deliberately doctored a speech by Donald Trump, editing together separate passages that had been spoken almost an hour apart, in order to promote the falsehood that the U.S. president directly incited violence in Washington on January 6th, 2021.

As an outraged President Trump said to Nigel Farage when the Reform UK leader visited him in Florida, “Is this how you treat your closest ally?” The BBC has belatedly and half-heartedly been forced to apologise to President Trump, which has not stopped him from threatening to sue them for billions any day now. Watch this space, as the newshounds used to say.

This is more than a parochial UK story. The BBC is not only the institutional spokesperson for Britain’s liberal establishment but also an international voice of all globalist oligarchs.  Now the media elitists who love accusing the Right of spreading ‘disinformation’ (i.e., expressing opinions they don’t like) have themselves been caught out broadcasting serious disinformation about the U.S. president, dressed up as documentary fact.

There is more at stake here than a personal showdown between the populism-hating, Trumpophobic snobs of the BBC and the U.S. president. The scandal reveals the mindset of Western liberal media elites who believe that, because they are ‘on the right side of history,’ they can do no wrong.

So yes, the BBC might admit it mistakenly (!) misrepresented Trump’s speech. But really, they clearly believe that was justified in order to show people the Greater Truth About Trump—that he is a neo-fascist demagogue. Since what Trump actually said on January 6th—encouraging his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically”—did not fit that script at all, it had to be rewritten, didn’t it?

Two BBC bosses might have resigned after the butchering of Trump’s words was exposed in a leaked dossier. But it is clear from everything they have said and done since that the BBC is only truly sorry that it has been caught out.

The resigning head of BBC News went in to say goodbye to her team and was reportedly cheered by all news staff when she told them to keep “doing BBC journalism.” That is, carry on pumping out their biased news coverage as if nothing had changed or was going to change.

Then it was revealed that the prestigious annual Reith Lecture, named for the BBC’s founding father Lord Reith, is to be delivered by a Dutch intellectual who has compared the electoral success of Trump in America and Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK to the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, calling them both “a bit fashy.”

Even the unprecedented official apology statement that the BBC issued to Trump was not really an admission of guilt at all. The BBC statement admits only that “our edit unintentionally created the impression … that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”

Does anybody outside the BBC elite and their media apologists really believe that they “unintentionally” edited together two parts of the speech, words actually spoken nearly an hour apart, to give such an outrageous impression?

The leaked dossier which blew the whistle on the distorting of Trump’s words also exposed systematic anti-Israel bias in BBC coverage of the war in Gaza and frequent BBC censorship of voices criticising trans ideology. Are we supposed to believe that these everyday practices of political prejudice are “unintentional”, too?

That those issues have featured so prominently in the BBC’s distortion of the news is revealing. It confirms that this scandal is not just about President Trump and individuals at the top of the BBC. It reveals a much wider problem of Western self-loathing within the liberal elites.

The BBC has, of course, always had its own prejudices. From its foundation just over a century ago, the BBC was always known as the voice of the British imperial establishment, often accused of pro-Tory and anti-Left bias, especially in times of crisis.

It is memorable that, when the English novelist George Orwell wrote 1984, his dystopian novel about a totalitarian society, he based Big Brother’s propaganda machine, the Ministry of Truth, on his experience of working at the BBC during the Second World War.

In a perverse way, the BBC is still the voice of the establishment. But the establishment institutions of the UK and the West are now ruled by woke left-liberal elitists instead of the old-school ruling class. Rather than being a mouthpiece for imperial pride, the BBC now acts as the voice of Western self-loathing, expressing high-minded contempt not only for populists such as President Trump and the masses who support them, but for the values, knowledge and history of our entire civilisation.

Thus the BBC naturally worships at the altar of the trans cult, which denies basic biological and scientific foundations of a civilised society in its determination to bend the truth to its ideology. The BBC, set up to educate and inform, stands accused of frequently censoring critics of trans ideology in order to re-educate the British public in the ways of correctthink.

And of course, the BBC has been the most prominent international critic of Israel in its existential war on Hamas. As we have often argued here, that war is the frontline in the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism. In refusing to label the genocidal Islamists who staged October 7th as ‘terrorists,’ repeating Hamas black propaganda as fact, and twisting every event to paint Israel in the worst possible light, the BBC has deserted the side of civilisation. The British Barbarism Corporation is a disgrace to the name of journalism.

And the culture war is far from over. Amidst its humiliating dispute with President Trump, the BBC still has many supporters within the UK and Western liberal establishment. Despite being exposed as arguably the biggest source of disinformation on Planet Media, Lisa Nandy, the Labour government minister responsible for broadcasting, still described the publicly funded BBC as a “light on the hill for people here and across the world.” In a disgraceful campaign of conspiracy-mongering, Labour Party voices have been more concerned to accuse BBC board member Sir Robbie Gibb of staging an imaginary right-wing plot against the BBC than to admit the corporation’s institutionalised problems.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK announced this week that, once elected to government, it will scrap the licence fee that funds the gargantuan BBC and insist that the corporation sticks to impartial news coverage. Nemesis could be coming for the Orwellian elites in Broadcasting House, and it can’t come soon enough.

*