I used to admire the BBC. Back during the Cold War I considered the BBC and in particular the BBC World Service to be as accurate as a state news organisation could be. It was often the case that the BBC’s line on various stories was considerably more accurate than either Voice of America or Radio Moscow and certainly much more trustworthy than Albania’s Radio Tirana which possessed very powerful and easy to hear shortwave transmitters.
Back then and for a time after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the BBC could still be mostly relied upon to cover stories with reasonable degree of accuracy. Sadly that’s not the case now. The BBC is a mess. It has squandered its once admirable reputation in favour of being a propaganda station for the liberal/left current in British politics and it shows in its output. Rather than tell the British nation’s story as it is, warts and all, or to cover foreign news with as much accuracy as possible, the BBC is not the home of propaganda promoting the cult of Trans, deranged Jew haters, jihadist terrorists and destructive far left policies. It is no longer to be considered as ‘our’ BBC but instead as a mouthpiece for a relatively tiny number of middle class leftists and their often odd and dangerous obsessions. It has become the modern day equivalent of the old Radio Tirana pumping out narratives rather than news and political opinion rather than observed political facts. Imagine if Enver Hoxha, the former dictator of Communist Albania had been given access to a modern day broadcasting and media empire and I’m afraid it would look far too much like the current BBC.
I’m not the only person to notice the decline in the BBC and the decline in the number of people who are willing to trust the BBC or to fund it through the licence fee. Jim Chimrie a political commentator on the X platform has written a piece that chimed very much with my thoughts on the current state of the BBC. You can find the source for Mr Chimrie’s piece via this link https://x.com/JChimirie66677/status/1991847898825232890 and I have pasted the entirety of this excellent article below as part of this blog’s From Elsewhere strand. Here is Mr Chimrie’s piece.
“A Billion Pounds Lost – And a Nation Walking Away The BBC has just confessed to losing more than a billion pounds in a single year. Millions of households have cancelled their licence fees. Two million enforcement visits yielded almost nothing. The public isn't forgetting to pay – it's walking away. That's the story behind the numbers, and it's far more serious than anything the BBC will admit. Because there comes a moment when a nation stops arguing with an institution and simply withdraws its consent. Britain has reached that point. You don't lose that kind of money through clerical mishaps; you lose it because trust has died. And trust, once spent, does not return because the BBC sends more officers to knock on doors. The BBC can blame "evasion" all it likes. It can scold the public about fairness, brag about audits, and pretend its enforcement is "efficient, fair and proportionate." None of it matters. A broadcaster that once held the country together now finds itself shut out – literally – by millions who no longer want to hear its voice. The harder it pushes, the clearer the truth becomes: people aren't opting out of the licence fee. They're opting out of the BBC. This is a moral reckoning. A state-backed institution that doctored a President's speech, amplified Hamas propaganda, edited reality to fit an agenda, and buried stories that clashed with its ideology has forfeited the right to call itself impartial. It behaves like a political NGO with a broadcast licence – preaching, filtering, choosing sides – then acts wounded when the public rejects the sermon. Bias wasn't a glitch. It became the culture. And that rot hollowed the BBC from within. The numbers are the verdict. Younger viewers have vanished. Older viewers feel dumped in favour of TikTok gimmicks and ideological posturing. The leadership has collapsed. The scandals keep coming. And the funding model – the sacred cow of the establishment – is now bleeding out in front of them. The BBC still clings to "universality," but universality cannot be enforced. It has to be earned. A broadcaster that treats half the country as a problem to be handled cannot claim to speak for the whole. A broadcaster that demands loyalty while showing none has no future. The licence fee rested on a covenant: we fund you; you tell the truth without fear or favour. The BBC broke that bargain. The country is now breaking the licence fee in return. This isn't decline. It's consequence. A once-trusted national institution, captured by an ideological caste, has finally met a public that refuses to be captured with it. The BBC can call it evasion. The Government can call it reform. But the truth is plain: the public has delivered its verdict, and it rings louder than anything the BBC can broadcast. The age of deference is over. And the BBC, for the first time in its history, is being forced to live in the country it helped create. "This is a moral reckoning. A state-backed institution that doctored a President's speech, amplified Hamas propaganda, edited reality to fit an agenda, and buried stories that clashed with its ideology has forfeited the right to call itself impartial."”