Alright, enough is enough.
I've been an ardent Radio 4 listener since I was a child when every day our entire family would sit down to dinner with the Archers.
(How did Mum
do that?)
Since then, however, we've seen the gradual implosion of a once-great institution.
We've endured its endlessly bloating bureaucracy, its constant fawning to fame, it's craven pusillanimity before power,
all overseen by an increasingly ineffectual leadership who nevertheless reward themselves and their cronies with ludicrous payoffs,
their incomprehensible infatuation with Apple products at the expense of any support for open-source standards or Android services,
not to mention the constant battle with their incompetent "A thousand clicks to get to listen to anything" website.
I can take a joke as well as the next man, and sniggered along with the rest of the country at their choice of a cross-dressing potter to present this year's hallowed
Reith Lectures,
though I do find it hard to take the unremittingly sycophantic Sue Lawley spending the first five minutes of each lecture
breathlessly rhapsodising the Reith Clown's frock and choice of eyeshadow.
As an ardent feminist myself I have borne the slavishly politically correct, but painfully unfunny feminist comedy (apparently a contradiction in terms)
whinings of
Bridget Christie with equanimity.
I've accepted the gradual deterioration of the flagship
Today programme into a
sound-bite-generating slanging match, conducted not so much as to inform the listener or present honestly the opinion of the interviewees,
but solely in the interests of scoring a controversial headline.
I've put up with BBC reporting being increasingly prostituted as a blatant mouthpiece for manufactured outrage and PR agents' product placement
and the sad decline of Radio 4's current affairs programme
PM into a pathetic
talk radio show
featuring comic routines more appropriate to a Radio 1 DJ's posse than any collection of self-respecting journalists.
But finally we come to what might just prove to be the
defining current event of our time
- a story of world-shattering impact,
a story that may well decide the legitimacy of our secret services,
the trust we place in our Governments, the regard we hold for American values, and the future of our communications infrastructure:
Edward Snowden's astonishing revelations of the NSA's inveterate spying and data capture program that appears determined to record and retain every on-line action conducted by every single person on this planet.
Forever.
And yet, from the BBC - barely a whisper. Hardly a mention. Not a story.
For me the line in the sand is drawn where our supine national broadcaster, acting as a slavish propagandist for a corrupt political class,
actively promotes their dishonest and self-serving position that any amount of spying, prying, or monitoring of their own citizens is simply not to be questioned.
That any discussion of it, any reporting of it can only serve to encourage terrorists, rapists and murderers.
A public information service which instead conspires to censor the news and suppress discourse.
Listening to news item after item in which the BBC consistently seeks to deflect attention away from Snowden's revelations concerning GCHQ's immoral and illegal practices,
and instead makes every attempt to collaborate in covering them up makes me sick to my stomach.
I gritted my teeth through last Friday's stuffing of their
Any Questions panel with establishment lapdogs to nod away the inevitable Snowden question,
but then in the supposed community response programme
Any Answers to simply pretend that the question of the NSA and GCHQ's disgusting betrayal of public trust
by engaging in wholesale spying on each and every one of us just never came up. Never happened. Nothing to see here. Is just fucking unacceptable.
The final straw, then, came this morning with the Today programme's blanket refusal
to address any of the issues surrounding a French complaint to the U.S. condemning their mass surveillance of a supposed ally
by simply passing off the entire affair as a diversionary political ploy by President Hollande .
Fuck You BBC.
Call yourself a news organisation? You're a fucking disgrace.
You can take your constant stream of threatening, intimidatory demands for monies for watching the TV I don't have and shove them up your arse.
Thank you interesting reading.
#3 – 18 December, 2013 at 12:31 pm
I know - but that bloody Radio4 just got right up my nose. It's making it through less and less of the drive to work.
Glad to be of pedagogical service!
#2 – 19 November, 2013 at 11:08 pm
What,no cooking? It's becoming dangerously close to blogging.
Enjoyed googling the word pusillanimity. "lacking courage and resolution : marked by contemptible timidity" ...now to use that is a sentence of my own.
#1 – 18 November, 2013 at 9:32 pm