Like the rest of the liberal media, the BBC has been having a bit of a Downfall-style crisis over Donald Trump’s victory.
The helpless, ranting rage stage of its grief is yet to come; at the moment, it’s still going through the flailing disbelief phase – as I discovered when I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Media Show.
Ostensibly, I’d been invited on to offer my views on how the mainstream media had managed to call the election so badly wrong. If you’re a Breitbart reader, the answer has long been obvious: because there’s a vast constituency of people out there who don’t feel remotely represented by the MSM with its smug, metropolitan, liberal-left bias.
But I didn’t get the impression that my BBC interviewer was much interested in my opinions. What he wanted to do was demonstrate to listeners that I was some kind of rabid loon whose deranged rantings they could safely ignore.
This became obvious when he asked me whether or not I believed that President Obama had been born in the USA.
I was so taken aback by the naked absurdity of this leading question that I thought he was joking at first.
The interviewer’s name was Paddy O’Connell and whenever I’ve heard him on radio, I’ve always found him to be a pretty agreeable sort of cove: nicely spoken, privately educated, mild-mannered. Not obviously a rampant foaming Corbynista…
Yet here he was not so subtly implying that I was one of those loony conspiracy theorists – a birther – who believes that Obama wasn’t born in the USA and therefore was never eligible to be president.
“Well, yeah,” I said evenly. “I mean I haven’t personally seen his birth certificate but…”
I like to think it would have been pretty obvious to any sane person listening that I was joshing Paddy slightly here.
I mean, it would be one thing if I’d ever written articles making such a claim. But Birtherism is really quite an extreme and loopy position, not a mainstream right-wing one, even among Trump-voters. Surely, I thought, this respectable BBC interviewer can’t be trying to smear me quite so blatantly.
But yes he was.
“Right, so you’re not sure whether or not Obama was born in America”, said O’Connell, triumphantly, as though he’d just successfully lured me into the most incredible elephant-size trap.
WTF?
I’m perfectly happy with the way the rest of the show went. I got my points across well enough and I don’t think in the end many listeners will have been taken in by O’Connell’s bizarre and blatant muck-raking.
What fascinated me, though, was that even on a harmless afternoon radio programme about the media the BBC’s bias could be quite so shameless.
There’s a school of thought that says the BBC and its liberal MSM fellow-travellers are so intellectually corrupt we shouldn’t even engage with them. I totally respect this “fuck ’em” approach, as advocated by the likes of Vox Day and Mike Cernovich but it’s just not for me.
I’m English and – much as I’m aware of its glaring faults – the BBC is part of my culture. Sure one can rail against it but it’s not about to go away any time soon; and because of its quasi-monopoly on broadcasting in Britain, it remains a vital way of reaching the widest possible audience. Ducking out of its programmes just because they’re a bunch of lefty wankers trying to shaft you at every turn is not only cowardly but it does a disservice to all those listeners who’d quite like to hear an alternative viewpoint now and again to leaven the relentless PC worthiness.
Also, I don’t buy the argument that one should be combative all the time. I love the YouTube video of Milo destroying that BBC reporter and I’ll happily engage in this sort of thing myself, as I did when I had a go at Yasmin Alibhai Brown. But if you’re always on the offensive, always irritably calling the BBC out on their devious ways, you run the risk of coming across like a peevish crosspatch. Sometimes, I think it’s better to let them hang themselves with their own rope and just be amused and “whatever” rather than obviously pissed off.
But the broader significance of my experience on the Media Show is this: just because our side has won, first with Brexit, now with Trump, doesn’t mean it’s about to get any easier.
On the contrary, the frustrated liberal-left are going to be feeling extremely bitter and vengeful and are going to do everything in their power to blacken the reputations and twist the motives of people who voted Brexit and people who voted Donald Trump.
As Vox Day notes here, the liberal media is already trying to reclaim the narrative in its selective coverage of anti-Trump protests:
This same process of creating a news cycle is presently being utilized in New York and other cities where “anti-Trump protests” are taking place. The purpose is to create the idea that Trump is “unpopular” and he is an “illegitimate, failed President” even before he takes office, and thereby eliminate the traditional honeymoon period enjoyed by a newly inaugurated President and obstruct his initial efforts.
So the BBC and the rest never will discover the answer to why it is they got this presidential election (and Brexit) so badly wrong because they don’t want to listen and even if they did it would make no sense to them.
In the mindset of the BBC, as in the minds of all right-thinking media organisations, the reason Trump won and the reason Britain voted Brexit is that knuckle-dragging morons who should never have been let anywhere near a polling station somehow escaped from the madhouse and went and ruined everything.
Perhaps you’re one of those bad, bad people yourself. I hope you feel very ashamed.
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