BBC reputation deservedly in freefall

Media smear merchants fail to extinguish The Light

- RICHARD HOUSE

I GREW up in a household that seemed to have no doubts about the veracity and quality of BBC journalism.

BBC radio news and the the Home Service (that became Radio 4 in 1967, when I was 12) were on in our home all the time.

And woe betide my brother or me uttering a single word while the 6 o'clock news was on the radio; and my dad, after a hard day's manual work, was glued to it as we ate our evening meal together in dutiful silence.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the naive scales fell from my eyes about the BBC. One early recollection I have is when one of my great heroes, Tony Benn, used to brilliantly call out the bias of BBC interviewers during live interviews (meaning that they couldn't edit out Benn's courageous exposing of their bias) one of the earliest examples of 'fearless speech' that I can recall.

At the time, and even during Jeremy Corbyn's era, I used to see this as a simple left/right issue, and that the BBC was inherently C/conservative.

Now I see it rather differently. It's not about left and right, but about establishment and anti-establishment. That is, Benn wasn't demonised by the media, including the BBC, because he was left-wing per se, but because he called out establishment abuses of power.

That is, to use the jargon: the BBC was and is institutionally biased against anything or anyone challenging the mainstream establishment narrative. And I think the same goes for Corbyn - and perhaps, even, for Liz Truss (see the article by lan Fantom in The Light issue 31).