Does Mr Murdoch’s ambitious newcomer have a chance? Commercial radio has not posed a significant threat to the BBC’s dominance in this sector since the corporation’s monopoly control of the airwaves ended in 1973. Recently, however, less precisely targeted competition from Global Radio’s LBC has shown that sharp presenters, such as Nick Ferrari in the breakfast slot, have the ability to chip away at Today’s dominance. Later in the day, LBC’s Eddie Mair, a former presenter of Radio 4’s PM, hosts an equally ambitious drivetime show. Can Times Radio, which is aimed straight at Radio 4’s jugular, perform better? On launch day, the omens sounded good.

On first listening, it is immediately apparent that the new 24-hour station is firmly rooted in the editorial tradition and resources of Britain’s most prestigious national newspaper. It has access to Times reporters, columnists and correspondents, several of whom present shows. Times Radio also has its parent’s newsgathering network of journalists in Britain and around the world. This is not on the same scale as the BBC’s global resources. But a BBC correspondent must serve five network radio channels, BBC Television News and BBC News Online. Times journalists are dedicated to their newspaper and its bespoke radio station and provide a rich supply of original material.

And Times Radio has an advantage that no previous commercial station has dared attempt: it runs no advertisements to interrupt its programmes. Revenue comes from sponsorship and sale of subscriptions to The Times and Sunday Times. So, this is not quite David versus Goliath. And there is a crucial ideological dimension that further enriches Times Radio’s appeal.

Bound though it is by obligations to impartiality, BBC Radio 4 struggles to escape the impression that it errs on the “woke” side of the culture war. As a young journalist on the Today Programme, I learned that though I enjoyed the passionately progressive Guardian, our listeners preferred a range of newspapers including the conservative Daily Mail. If this lesson is still taught, too few at Radio 4 are paying attention. BBC radio’s flagship news and current affairs programmes frequently sound fixated by identity politics.

Times Radio offers a less tribal tone. John Pienaar, one of several impressive recruits from the BBC, explains. “We want to hear ideas. We want to give people time and space to explain the thinking behind what they believe.” Pienaar, until February the BBC’s Deputy Political Editor, presents the new station’s drivetime show.

Aasmah Mir, another high-profile recruit from the BBC who, alongside Times Radio’s launch director Stig Abell, presents the crucial breakfast show, explains: “Listeners want to be informed. They want to hear different perspectives. They do not want to hear people just kick ten bells out of each other.” The accomplished veteran of Radio 4’s Saturday Live adds that Times Radio exudes “warmth, authority and flexibility”. Mir and Abell, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and now executive editor at Wireless Group, take the battle straight to Today’s doorstep on weekday mornings between 6am and 10am.

Gloria de Piero, a former Labour MP, co-presents the Sunday morning political show, G&T, with Tom Newton Dunn, former political editor of the Sun. De Piero explains that Times Radio should appeal to voters in “Red Wall” parliamentary constituencies of the type she once represented in Parliament. These are previously Labour held seats in which: “Those voters who changed their votes for the first time will decide the future of this country.” Such voters abandoned Labour in part because they concluded that it represented the opinions of middle class, metropolitan progressives rather better than it represented them.

So, like its parent newspapers, Times Radio will give airtime to the broadest available range of incisive intellects. Subscribers already admire the ideological spectrum spanned by a stable of columnists that includes: David Aaronovitch; Gerard Baker; Philip Collins; John Kampfner; Rod Liddle; Libby Purves; Janice Turner; and Jenni Russell. Newcomers from the BBC should find it refreshing.

For Stig Abell, including articulate progressives, acerbic critics of progressive orthodoxy and perspectives in between, is a defining purpose. Times Radio is designed to attract listeners who find BBC Radio 4 culturally monotheistic. Tom Newton Dunn says: “There is a gap in the listening market for something that isn’t polarised.” On launch day, that gap persuaded the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to submit to interview by Abell and Mir, live in the peak breakfast time listening slot at 8:10am. Mr Johnson has made no secret of his enmity for the Today programme. If Times Radio can attract a substantial audience, the Prime Minister will have a new way to address thinking Britain.

Abell is clear about the ambition. “Our aim is to embody the best principles of the newspaper, to host opinions from a broad range of sources. Times Radio will avoid the polarised discourse that dominates online. It will not be boringly contrarian.” He is determined to demonstrate that diversity has more than one meaning. Times Radio, he says, will always strive to challenge orthodoxy of Left or Right with “an intelligent, different opinion”.

Eschewing cultural polarisation will not be sufficient to make Times Radio a success. For that, it must rely on great presenters and a range of programming that takes advantage of the Times’s first-class coverage of foreign affairs, business and sport as well as politics. My first impression is that it is welcome and necessary, but it will have to be consistently excellent to hold my attention. Today is in the process of appointing a new editor and the BBC knows serious competition when it sees it. Times Radio is the first really serious competition Radio 4 has faced since it easily overcame the launch in 1983 of BBC Television’s Breakfast Time and ITV’s Good Morning Britain.

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Public service broadcasters ought to study the large and often impressive academic literature on how sects manipulate and control believers. For they are under attack from three of the most potent and most cultish forces in British society: Scottish nationalism, Euroscepticism and the far-Left — or as we must now call it, Her Majesty’s Opposition.

The political faithful dream of a glorious future: a Scotland free of English tutelage, an England free of the domination of Brussels, a Britain free of greed and poverty.  Like the great religious dreams of the past, these causes take over lives. But all present formidable difficulties. In political as in religious cults, believers must be insulated against doubts. The most effective method is to blacken the outside world, and make alternative sources of information appear like the Devil’s seductions that tempt the godly into darkness. As Professors Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth put it in their study of political sectarianism: “There is only one truth — that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate”.

The initiated can never see sceptics as just foolish or misguided, let alone as reasonable people asking legitimate questions. To maintain the unity of the faithful they must be damned as malicious. The outside world is no longer a place where sensible people test their theories. It is a contaminated space, a land full of traps, set by enemies, who mean you only harm. Paranoia and hypersensitivity follow. You can see them everywhere.

Broadcasters are the natural targets. The public gets its news overwhelmingly from television and radio (which is why complaints about the power of the press are so anachronistic). They respect them because what they hear is true overall. I can say this with some assurance because the sheer tedium of following the impartiality rules drove me out of television. When you make a television documentary, you must check every fact, as you always should. But then every criticism must be put to the target of your scorn. Their answers, however evasive or dishonest, must then be broadcast. The results of this exhausting process are often bland, but I will say this for it: the documentaries are trustworthy.

Panorama made one on Jeremy Corbyn. It did not have the space to cover his endorsement of Putin’s imperial ambitions.  Nor, like the rest of the mainstream media, did it emphasise the hypocrisy of a modern Left that says it believes in justice for minorities and women, then allies with the misogynists, homophobes and racists of radical Islam. Nevertheless, within his limited remit, Panorama’s John Ware asked hard questions. What did Corbyn’s supporters expect it to do when their man wants to be prime minister? They expected adulation, was the short answer. And when they did not get it, they bombarded BBC with complaints. The programme was an “establishment smear”, and a “hatchet job”. They were inside the cocoon of their cult and anything that disturbed their tranquillity had to be the result of a conspiracy of reactionary forces determined to protect the hated status quo.

A few days earlier, Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative backbencher, was lambasting the BBC for asking businessmen and women their views on whether Britain should stay in the European Union during Radio 4’s Today programme financial news round-up at 6:20. That is 6:20 in the morning. The hypersensitivity is as striking as the obsessiveness of a man who monitors the airwaves when the rest of us are asleep and finds a plot. The notion that nearly everyone involved in international trade wants Britain to stay in the single market cannot be tolerated. The fact that they come on the radio in the early morning and say so is not a fact at all, but evidence of a conspiracy against freeborn Englishmen and women.

Last year we had the Scottish National Party organising demonstrations against the BBC and demanding that it sack its political editor for asking a clumsy question at a press conference as reporters occasionally do. With Scotland already looking a little too close to a one-party state for comfort, the SNP makes no secret of its wish to get control of BBC Scotland. When and if it does, I wonder how often we will hear those difficult questions about what currency an independent Scotland will have.

Scientologists call non-believers “suppressive persons”. They are filled with harmful intentions, and must be fought without mercy. Spend too long with them, and they will have you believing that a malign force inspires anyone who speaks out of turn. Every television interviewer has noticed that Corbyn quickly cracks under questioning. He has lived in a far-left world where, whatever its divisions, no one except the corrupt, the “Zionist”, the “tool of neo-liberalism” raises the arguments a broadcaster would put to a left-wing politician as a matter of course. As he emerges blinking from the Left’s version of the Church of Scientology, he cannot accept, or even talk to, the heathens around him.

It is easy to condemn cultishness and easier still to mock, but you had better get used to it. New media technologies allow people to live in enclosed intellectual spaces, where prejudices are not only reinforced but heightened. You only read online newspapers and blogs that tell you what you want to hear. You follow an Owen Jones or a Louise Mensch on Twitter, who never once forces you to question your beliefs, or accept that your opponents are not always liars and frauds. What the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein nicely called “enclave extremism” is an observable psychological phenomenon. Put people together who share a strong view, and the differences between them vanish. Peer pressure pushes people further to the right or left; it makes their nationalism stronger, their religion more fervent. The web allows not a few hundred, in a church or at a political rally, but hundreds of thousands to convince themselves that their cult is the one true path.

The essential task for journalists and writers today is not to fight this or that ideology, but to resist the spirit of an age which proclaims that doubt is profane, and argument the ploy of a malicious conspiracy.

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There followed two decades of retirement, ending in his death two months short of his 100th birthday in the Star and Garter military rest-home in Richmond. Freeman resolutely refused to write his memoirs, give interviews about his life, or co-operate with would-be biographers (“I will give you no assistance whatever, on the other hand I will impose no impediment or sue you for libel.”) This was a wise decision, in my view. It presented his career as self-explanatory, and left the biographer with all the additional labour necessary, unhampered by any interference from Freeman himself.

Hugh Purcell has done his work well and thoroughly and presents his account less than six months after John’s death. He has studied official papers, when available, and consulted all the people who knew John, especially Norman Mackenzie, colleague and friend for over half a century, Anthony Howard, one of his successors as editor, and Henry Kissinger, who provides a fascinating, unpublished account of Freeman’s dealings with President Nixon. He has fresh and sometimes startling facts to present about nearly all of Freeman’s “lives” and this book has, for me at least, something new on almost every page.

John Freeman was one of those rare creatures who was both a man of action and a cerebral analyst. He delighted to identify a problem, and the way to solve it, and then acted swiftly. The nature of the problem did not matter, so long as it was important and capable of intellectual remedy. But once he had solved it he quickly lost interest and wanted to move on. If a fresh problem failed to emerge, he changed his job. He saw life as a vast corridor of separate chambers and each time he left a room, having tidied it up first, he shut the door firmly behind him.

John always talked in complete sentences. He had a gift, a genius, for clarification. Those who knew him superficially called him “a cold fish”. That is wrong. The word for him was “cool” (in its old sense). He was capable of very strong feelings. In 1955 I was an editor at the French magazine Réalités and part-time Paris correspondent for the New Statesman. John came over to Paris to invite me to join the NS full-time, to replace R.H.S. Crossman as writer on foreign affairs. “And while I’m here I will investigate the Paris Metro to see how far its virtues can be embedded in the London Underground.” I was given a tiny office on the editorial floor, which I covered in maps of world city-centres, “for use in street riots”. Next door was a big office shared by Mackenzie and Colonel Aylmer Vallance. When Aylmer got cancer, John used to visit him every day, taking him a gift, until he died. Not long after, he came into my office, sat down, and burst into tears. “I’ve just been told my wife has inoperable cancer,” he said.

Such outbursts were notable, though rare. John has been criticised for his treatment of his third wife, Catherine Dove, who was one of the author’s chief informants, and John comes out of the account here as insensitive, with a low threshold of boredom. That is not quite right. Catherine was a hugely forceful personality, which expanded exponentially in the Washington climate. John’s transfer of his affections to her social secretary was his bid for freedom and also the reason why he resigned from the ambassadorial job after two very successful years. He needed the stimulation of problems but he also required calm in his private life. His last wife, Judith, gave him that. Thus the axiom “Freeman changes his job and his wife every few years” was a smart-aleck simplification of a very complex trajectory.

The largest slice of John’s life was spent in broadcasting, either as interviewer or as a mogul. Of his Face To Face interviews three-quarters were superlative successes. He brought Edith Sitwell (“a mobile high altar”) into brilliant and sacramental life. He transformed Gilbert Harding from a snarling bully into a pathetic and tragic hero. He fought a rapier duel with Evelyn Waugh, both at the top of their sardonic form. The meeting with Carl Gustav Jung, the only one to take place outside the studio and preceded by a meal at which Catherine Dove was present, became a piece of history.These famous interviews are among the very few from that epoch which have been preserved and are available to the public. They are part of TV legend and enable everyone to judge for himself a central episode of John’s life. His spell as a mogul lasted much longer and was largely uncovered until Hugh Purcell reconstructed it. His account presents Freeman at his superb best: the cerebral man of action. I recommend all to read it attentively.

In John’s retirement I used to paint him an elaborate birthday card every year, and in return he sent me a handwritten letter. His handwriting did not vary over more than half a century: firm, clear, upright and instantly recognisable. I went to his funeral service which was in character, almost ritualistic, but fundamentally secular, and with a eulogium conspicuously absent. I was a friend of John’s for exactly 60 years, and I think he was the greatest man I have been privileged to know. Purcell has produced, on the whole, a fair and full account, and I am grateful to him.

The post The Greatest Man I Ever Knew? appeared first on Standpoint.

I did not want to leave this column, however, without looking at one of the great cultural forces of our country, and the uncertain future it faces. The appointment in May of John Whittingdale as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was at once interpreted as spelling upheaval and doom for the BBC. Mr Whittingdale is a long-standing critic of the licence fee: not so much, I think, for ideological reasons but because he recognises that technological developments in the last 25 years — satellite television, the digital revolution, the internet and high-speed broadband — make the assumptions we had about the nature of the delivery of a television service, and how it is paid for, redundant. Unlike many secretaries of state catapulted into jobs, he actually knows an enormous amount about his portfolio, having chaired the House of Commons select committee on what is now his own department for the last decade. If one looks at the reports the committee has made on this subject there are no threats to end the licence fee; but there are clear intimations that things cannot go on as they are. This may not be Armageddon for the BBC, but when the charter is renewed next year it may be on terms unlike those imposed in the past. The BBC, which already has a big commercial arm, may be called upon to develop it further, and to become used to less public money and fewer resources.

At this stage I should declare an interest. I have had the good fortune over the last few years to make numerous programmes for Radio 3, which I believe (irrespective of any involvement I have with it) to be the finest cultural radio network on the planet. In this era of internet radio one can test that for oneself. In my experience of Radio 3 it is staffed by producers of the highest calibre, with rare intellectual gifts in both speech and music programming. Making programmes with such people is an absolute delight and immensely creative. I know I am not alone in thinking these things. Any government policy that led to a diminution of Radio 3’s quality or reach would be an act of vandalism and insanity. Nothing in the private sector could match it — dip into Classic FM for ten minutes if you doubt me — and its very existence is the perfect example of what public service broadcasting should be. It fulfils the Reithian ideal of informing, educating and entertaining. The quality of this country’s civilisation would fall if anything happened to it.

There is no doubt the BBC is going to be reformed, but there is a real danger when it is that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water. There is much the corporation now does that is, or could easily be, replicated in the private sector. I would contend that when it does replicate what is privately provided there should be a business case for its doing so. I suspect that even in the post-Clarkson era Top Gear would be a programme that would sell around the world still, and bring in money for the corporation. So too would many of the dramas that are put out. But if the BBC is trying to ape the private sector and failing to do so commercially successfully, then it should not even try.

It is those things vital to the nation that the private sector cannot do — such as Radio 3, but also a substantial part of what goes out on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra — that the BBC must be encouraged further to develop. Similarly, on television there should be documentaries of a truly enlightening nature — as, from time to time, there still are — of a tone and expertise that the private sector simply seems to show no will to put on now. Television may not be a superior medium to radio, but it is one that does not inevitably have to behave in a way of which Lord Reith would have been ashamed.

Many Tories object to the BBC because of what they see as its institutional leftism. The weekend after the general election a number of newly-elected or re-elected MPs, who had not watched the BBC’s coverage of the unpredicted Tory victory because they were at their counts, sat down in front of their digital televisions and watched recordings they had made of the evening’s programmes.

Many of these felt that aspects of the coverage reflected first of all a sympathy with their political opponents, and exuded a disbelief that the Tories could possibly be winning. I watched the coverage live and, with the exception of one or two unfortunate misjudgments, felt it was reasonably objective. It has, however, become the latest stick with which to beat the corporation, and it will be used.

The BBC may have become an overmighty subject. But it has an important function still in our society, doing things the private sector either will not do, or will do only in a grotesquely inferior way. And I see no reason why the state should not, for strategic reasons, have a broadcaster. It is also enormously popular with the public, something its critics forget. It certainly needs reform; and I am sure Mr Whittingdale will see that that does not mean evisceration.
 

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Most French newspapers and magazines may look at this unfortunate fortune with envy. So there is still a market, they may think. Some of them certainly think so, as they try to spawn new ventures, and, among them, the Left has been the busiest. Two new left-wing online titles have met great success: Rue89, launched in 2007, and Mediapart, which gained its popularity during the Bettencourt affair in 2010. In the family of glossy cultural magazines, there is now XXI, a successful quarterly full of cartoons and long articles; Le 1, a weekly born a year ago; and most recently Society. In 2012 the Huffington Post launched a French version. There is also Charles (a reference to De Gaulle?), which deals with the interesting stories behind politics. They are supposedly non-partisan, but culturally they are on the Left.

After the success of Rue89 and Mediapart, the online route became very fashionable and another website, Atlantico, appeared in 2011: it now has more than 3.5 million unique visitors per month. Presenting itself as a general audience website, it denies being on the Right, but its views and most of its contributors are definitely so. It is pro-market and socially conservative, but not in a very deep way. A new print daily, L’Opinion, which most people consider to be right-wing, claims merely to be free-market and socially liberal. Fortunately there is still Causeur, a print and online monthly founded in 2007. Causeur fights for “anti-political correctness”, sometimes in a comic manner, as when it published its “Manifesto of the 343 Bastards”, in which famous men admitted they used prostitutes and criticised a proposed law against soliciting. Causeur’s greatest asset is to gather writers from Left and Right. But it is essentially anti-free-market, because, as often in France, it thinks that being culturally conservative means you have to praise state intervention.

This trend is not an exception. Both in the US, with Jacobin (I didn’t know the name could be claimed by anyone outside France), Strike!, n+1 and The New Inquiry, and in the UK, with The White Review and very soon Salvage, the Left leads the trend, while the centre-Right has created only one magazine on either side of the Atlantic in recent years: Standpoint, in 2008.

Does it mean that the Left is bolder and more interested in ideas and culture? Is quantity better than quality? What is certain is that in France, media and politics never really change: the “intellectuals” remain socialist, the Right doesn’t want to admit it, and nobody is properly conservative—intelligently pro-market and intelligently socially and culturally conservative at the same time. And for sure Charlie won’t help with that.

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After the stunning election victory on May 7 these deeply felt frustrations, so long held in check, may well boil over. It so happens that the future of the BBC is on the political agenda because of next year’s decennial charter review. And the Tories, no longer inhibited by pusillanimous Lib Dems, and at last in a position to follow their own instincts, believe with some justice that they weren’t dealt with even-handedly during the election campaign. Grievances include coverage skewed in favour of Labour on the BBC’s news website, and Andrew Marr’s coruscating interview of Mr Cameron, whom he interrupted some 23 times, and wrongly accused of having written that fox-hunting was his “favourite” sport. (Ed Miliband, by contrast, was treated much more indulgently when interviewed by Marr, who in his days as a newspaper columnist happens to have been a strong Labour supporter.) Some Tories also resent the BBC’s invariable assumption on all its news programmes that a hung parliament was the only feasible outcome of the election.

These gripes might still die away. Indeed, the commentariat, which got the result so wrong (I do not exempt myself), takes it for granted that the political sound and fury over the next five years will be generated by the European Union, Scotland, the Human Rights Act and welfare cuts. These are doubtless highly contentious issues, but mightn’t the BBC also be explosive? I ask because if David Cameron had scoured the wide world to find someone who disapproved of the Corporation, he could scarcely have found a fiercer critic than John Whittingdale, a former private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, who has been unexpectedly plucked from the back benches and his role as chairman of the Commons Culture Committee, and made Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. His appointment didn’t go down well with some anti-Tory numbskull in the BBC press office, who retweeted a message highlighting Mr Whittingdale’s opposition to gay marriage and his support for foxhunting. This was hurriedly deleted.

Of course, once the bitter memories of the campaign have faded, Mr Cameron’s enthusiasm for shaking up the BBC might falter. He is not one of nature’s radicals, after all. But the choice of Mr Whittingdale must tell us something. Only last October the Thatcherite veteran questioned the long-term future of the annual £145.50 licence fee, suggesting it was “worse than a poll tax”. His Commons committee produced a report on the BBC’s future three months ago which warned that the licence fee is “becoming harder and harder to justify”.

Isn’t it obvious to everyone save myopic BBC employees and narrow-minded Guardianistas that in the new media world the Corporation and its antiquated funding arrangements stand in need of reform? I don’t doubt it retains some strengths. It is one of the few national institutions that remind us we are British, which may explain why it has got up the noses of the Scottish National Party. And despite much dumbing down it still has pockets of excellence, some which might struggle in an entirely commercial environment. Its virtues should be defended. But the BBC as an entity has become too powerful as an arbiter of cultural values and too dominant as a source of news.

The Left bangs on about the “evil” power of Rupert Murdoch and of the Daily Mail, but the BBC dwarfs them as a news provider. A 2013 report by Ofcom suggested that the BBC accounts for 44 per cent of people’s consumption of news, taking into account television, newspapers, radio and the internet. Murdoch’s national newspapers, including the Sun, speak for just 4 per cent. Other surveys have put the Corporation’s share higher. It is true, of course, that tabloid newspapers are more explicitly propagandist than Auntie, even when she is pulling out the anti-Tory stops. But the BBC has the sheer numbers. Moreover, its spectacularly well-resourced website is alleged by national newspaper publishers to have hastened the decline in print circulations, while the Corporation’s extensive coverage of local news is plausibly said to have had a similar effect on the dwindling sales of local newspapers.

Proving that the BBC abuses its enormous power by leaning to the Left, and sometimes giving Tories a hard time, is quite easy. Its historical tendencies in this direction were conceded by Mark Thompson, its then director-general, who said in 2010 that there was a “massive bias to the Left” when he joined the BBC in 1979, which was directed against Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. He suggested that this bias has ended but did not offer any reason as to why it should have done so. The BBC attracts the same sort of journalists (8,000 of them at the last count, more than in the whole of Fleet Street) and generally leaves them to their own devices. Indeed, Mr Thompson seemingly implied that they continue to have their political blind spots. In July 2011 he wrote in a magazine article that “there have been occasions when the BBC, like the rest of the UK media, was very reticent about talking about immigration”.

If the Tories can reasonably consider themselves hard done by during the election, UKIP is entitled to think it was taken to the cleaners by the Corporation. Despite Ofcom’s decree that it should be treated as a “major party” on the same basis as Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, it was regularly tacked on to the end of BBC political reports, and sometimes entirely ignored. In one television debate Nigel Farage was barracked by a BBC-selected audience that appeared predominantly anti-UKIP. When grilled by Newsnight’s Evan Davis Mr Farage was treated as though he was batty or an extremist or both, though when Mr Davis came to interview the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, he was full of smiles and reassurance.

By way of further supporting evidence, let me point out that the editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz, is a former deputy editor of the Guardian, its political editor hails from the same newspaper, and its economics editor was previously an economist at the TUC. Ask yourself whether it is imaginable for the editor and political editor of the most important current affairs programme to have worked for the Daily Telegraph, or for its economics editor to have cut his teeth at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The answer is obviously “No” — as it is equally inconceivable that an ex-Tory cabinet minister would be appointed as the £300,000-a-year “director of strategy and digital”, as the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell was in 2013. The same point can be made about the centre-Left participants who monopolise the Beeb’s satirical and culture shows. Sometimes it seems as though Tony Hall, director-general, as well as its head of news, James Harding, are ’avin’ a larf.

I don’t doubt there are many fine journalists working for Auntie who strive to be neutral and objective, and often succeed in being so. But with a few exceptions they are what they are — metropolitan, conventional members of the slightly left-wing cultural elite, wary of Tories and their strange antediluvian beliefs. Appointing right-wing BBC chairmen or director-generals won’t affect the direction of travel, as Margaret Thatcher discovered in the 1980s. It is surely instructive that almost every BBC journalist to whom one talks is convinced that the organisation is even-handed.

Any attempt by Mr Whittingdale to tinker with its governance will make little difference. Replacing the BBC Trust with something like the old governing body but with a more authoritative chairman is a positive but hardly revolutionary idea. Equally, decriminalising licence-fee evaders — their cases are clogging up magistrates’ courts — would be a welcome move, but it won’t lead to a transformation of the BBC.

Something more radical is called for — the slimming down of the Corporation so that it concentrates on doing things which the market cannot be relied upon to produce. Whole swathes could be sold off over time: most of BBC1, BBC3, Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 5 and local radio. Needless to say, Auntie would fight such proposals like mad. She is refusing even to contemplate a £100 million offer for BBC3, which is being shoved online to save money. In other words, the BBC won’t even sell a minority, little-watched television channel in order to preserve it in its existing form. How much more will it squeal and struggle to hang on to its prize assets!

In the real world Mr Whittingdale can’t simply instruct the Corporation to flog off parts of itself. There would be an outcry, and he would be returned to the backbenches in short order. But he can squeeze the BBC by reducing its licence fee, forcing it to consider selling off chunks of its sprawling empire. And he can also make clear that the days of relying on a tax, paid for by all television viewers regardless of whether or not they watch the BBC, are numbered. The Corporation’s future should be subscription charging. Let the market determine the scope and nature of its offerings. The government’s responsibilities should be limited to protecting those channels — Radio 4, perhaps, and Radio 3 — which the market might not embrace, though it is perfectly possible that it would do so.

The BBC as it is presently constituted is on the wrong side of history, as Tony Hall should be clever enough to see. Not only is the licence fee morally indefensible in a multi-channel world, forcing people to pay for programming of which they watch little or nothing at all. It is also increasingly impractical. More and more viewers are looking at BBC channels exclusively on their laptops, tablets and mobiles. About 1,000 households a day are said to be opting out of the licence fee for this reason. It is technically difficult, as well as potentially controversial, for the BBC to make them pay up, and no prosecutions have yet been brought against people who watch programmes in this way. If the practice grows, the Corporation’s income will haemorrhage even without Mr Whittingdale applying a squeeze.

Does anyone believe that the BBC will report even-handedly on Mr Cameron’s forthcoming renegotiation of our EU membership, or the package he eventually obtains? There will be scare stories galore. One recent example: on BBC1’s Ten O’Clock News on April 7 economics editor Robert Peston (a seemingly ardent Europhile) declared that the think-tank Open Europe believed “the worst-case outcome is significantly worse than the best-case outcome of [Britain leaving the EU]. So they would say the costs massively outweigh . . . well, not massively, but they outweigh the potential benefits.” In fact, Open Europe predicts broadly similar costs and benefits.

John Whittingdale certainly faces an enormous challenge, which might be described as the unfinished work of Margaret Thatcher. He may turn out to be a theorist who lacks the courage or the political nous to get his way. Or — more likely, I would think — he could be reined in by a naturally cautious David Cameron.

Alternatively, he may start a revolution which ends up with a smaller and less overmighty BBC funded by people who want to use its services. If Auntie then continued to show an anti-Tory bias, we could at least say that that is what its subscribers wanted.
 

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In 2003, Miller, a senior investigative reporter for the New York Times, was embedded in Iraq with US units searching for Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, the weapons in whose existence the Times, like most intelligence agencies and many nuclear inspectors, then believed. For 20 years, Miller had produced WMD scoops from the Middle East and Russia. Her investigative reports began with anonymous tips from government contacts. The investigative part was substantiating their reports. Miller’s “diva” colleagues did not appreciate her “sharp elbows” and “bigfooting” of office turf, but at least her bravery matched her ambition. She witnessed the aftermath of Hezbollah’s 1983 truck-bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, broke the story of Hamas’s fundraising in the United States, and inspected “decaying Soviet biolabs”. The Times’s reviewers praised her book on germ warfare as “the most important book of the year”, and her memoir of the Middle East as “a rich tapestry . . . as intricate as a Persian carpet”. In 2002, Miller was part of the team of Times reporters awarded a Pulitzer for their paper’s coverage of 9/11 and al-Qaeda.

For intelligence on Iraqi WMD, Miller relied on “sources who refused to be named”, and defectors procured by Ahmed Chalabi, the shady Shia exile who led the Iraqi National Congress. The Times endorsed the invasion; its editor, Bill Keller, preened as a “reluctant hawk”. Yet despite the promise on the Times’s masthead, not all of its news was “fit to print”. Miller had a hand in ten of the 23 articles that the Times disowned in 2004. Several of them began with tip-offs from the CIA, whose director, George Tenet, had assured President Bush that the case for war was a “slam dunk”. Miller repeated the CIA’s claim that, having tried to procure smallpox strains from ex-Soviet scientists, Saddam was working on “mobile germ labs”. She also reported the Agency’s “high confidence” that Saddam was importing high-strength aluminium tubes as “components of centrifuges to enrich uranium”.  

The absence of evidence for Iraq’s “Weapons of Miller’s Description”, and the plentiful evidence of American ineptitude after the invasion, damaged America’s global standing, as well as that other priceless asset, the reputation of the Times. Miller was accused of being a “closet neocon”, and a “credulous dupe”. The hard-left academic Juan Cole, who knows whereof he speaks, called her a “useful idiot”. In 2005, having just served three months in jail for refusing to identify a government source in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, Miller left the Times, bearing a pay-off and a grudge. She accuses her editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson, of scapegoating her.

This appears to be the case, but the Times’s collective sins of incompetence and credulity were also Miller’s sins. Instead of retaining the Duke of Wellington as counsel, Miller wishes always to apologise and explain. Her defence is a sustained plea of diminished responsibility. Her parents’ divorce made her susceptible to seduction by influential older men, especially those bearing career-enhancing gifts. She was never trained as an investigative journalist: the Times hired her in order to dodge an affirmative action lawsuit, and let her learn on the job. Steven Engelberg, the superior who had restrained her overstatements, took another position, forcing her to write her own articles. She never spoke with “Curveball”, the source of the mobile germ lab story. She would have investigated the aluminium tubes, had her father not distracted her by dying. The Iraqis “behaved like they had weapons”, and the “intelligence assessments” believed them. She was only following the story.

Yet Miller does not follow her own story. Her accurate articles are footnoted, with links so that we can admire them online. But her Iraqi WMD stories receive neither footnotes nor links. Having handicapped the reader, she exculpates herself by lawyerly quibbling over details that cannot be checked; so much for the legal spirit. Not that Miller is good on details. Her claim to have been “present at the creation” of the anti-American jihad in Beirut insults the hostages taken at the American embassy in Tehran.

Miller’s defence proves the prosecution’s case. The injustice lies not in the conviction, but in the sentence: Miller was no worse than her colleagues, and her editors shot an unpopular messenger. Miller tells that story — she buries her hatchets in the back, not the ground — but she misses its meaning. The real “story” here is not Miller, but the machinery of her rise and fall: an easy, corrupt collusion between anonymous politicians, eager journalists, and desperate editors.

The empty grandeur of the Times’s staff resembles that of estate agents who, familiar with desirable properties, assume the airs of owners. Miller was part of that vanity. She mourns the glory days of the open expense account and the closed shop: before the “pernicious” bloggers took over, the Ritz Carlton in Washington, DC embroidered her initials on its pillows. Proudly, she relates how, over dinner, she and her husband, the publisher Jason Epstein, convinced President Bush’s adviser Philip Zelikow that W.W. Norton would be the ideal imprint to publish The 9/11 Report. She seems not to understand that this scene might, like her Iraq reportage, exemplify the decay of public life.

“I don’t blame myself,” Noah Cross says in Chinatown. “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.” The Iraq disaster has incapacitated America. Four years after President Obama promised that “the tide of war is receding”, he is up to his ankles in Iraq, and in over his head with Iran. The “pivot to Asia” sank in the sand, and the blood-dimmed tide is rising. Intelligence, faulty or otherwise, is still in short supply. The story must finish before it can be written, and who now expects a happy ending?

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It had been remarkable for both its intensity and mendacity. Toby Young, for instance, a friend of and cheerleader for the Conservative ministers now in power, was the author of one of thousands of attacks on the corporation. If words have any meaning, his connections would make him a member of the elite, or at least its pet or servant. In his own account in the Mail on Sunday, however, he put himself forward as the tribune of the outcast, put-upon masses in their struggle against the “liberal metropolitan elite”.

I should admit that we have all  struck ridiculous prolier-than-thou poses on off days when we didn’t know what else to write. And Young is correct to say that the liberal metropolitan elite is real and powerful. (I should know. I keep trying to join but they won’t have me.) But then he went from being a poseur to something more sinister.

He accused the BBC of “squandering” licence fee payers’ money on biased pollsters, who upheld the left-wing narrative that the Tories had no chance of forming a majority governmen. Young forgot to mention that every opinion pollster for every media organisation was saying the same. He could not bring himself to admit that the very newspaper whose money he was taking ran polls predicting a hung parliament. Nor did he add that on the day of the election the Tory pollster, Lord Ashcroft, who was not when I last looked a member of the liberal elite, tweeted: “All the final polls so far seem to be showing a move towards Labour.”

Young damned the BBC for ridiculing Rupert Murdoch’s claim that the Tories would do slightly better than every pollster expected. It is a measure of the man that he left it there, and did not continue that Mystic Murdoch later downgraded his hardly optimistic forecast of 294 Conservative seats — in fact they got 331 — and said: “Maybe I guessed 10 too many for Cons”. His readers’ minds cleared of anything that might stand in the way of his conspiracy theory, Young demanded that the BBC be exposed to “commercial realities”.

I don’t pick on Young because he is an unusually prejudiced writer, but because his prejudice is so commonplace. You have to read the right-wing press to see how unrelenting the assault on the BBC is in England. You have to read Bella Caledonia or one of the other SNP blogs to see how Scottish nationalists ape English Tories. It’s not that the BBC deserves to escape scrutiny for its biases and faults, or for the many follies of its managers. Rather, you need to look at the cultish refusal to allow one good word to be said about the corporation, and at how this stifling uniformity reveals the emptiness of nationalist and Tory myths.

Conservative intellectuals are fond of Jonathan Haidt’s argument in The Righteous Mind that liberals do not understand tradition and therefore cannot tolerate conservatives. Haidt’s thesis is highly dubious — the American and European liberal-Left are suffused with traditions of their own. But when conservatives go on to say that the Right is more broadminded than the Left, they reduce Haidt to absurdity.

A glance at the conservative press shows you that dissent not only on the BBC but also on the EU is simply not allowed to exist. Even civilised conservatives, who deplore the dumbing-down of British culture, can never discuss in public what would happen to that culture if their allies succeeded in abolishing Radios Three and Four. Scottish nationalists boast that theirs is a warm and cuddly “civic” nationalism, yet they demand the sacking of BBC journalists who fail to show proper deference to their leaders.

The easy explanation for the group-think is that many journalists act like prostitutes, whoring out their integrity to whoever pays them. It is certainly the case that you cannot defend the BBC in most right-wing newspapers without running into trouble.

In his memoir Hack, Graham Johnson, who worked on the News of the World until the hacking scandal closed it, describes the Murdoch press as being like a dictatorship: “You learn to become a good functionary, a good corporate functionary. You learn to instinctively edit your ideas to fit the newspaper and the political views of the proprietor and the editors.”

But the usual complaints about mercenary journalists miss the point. The Scottish nationalists’ assault on broadcasters is led by political activists not commercial competitors. And in England the journalists most likely to go along with Hacked Off or demand the destruction of the BBC aren’t proper reporters but ideological commentators.

And therein lies the answer. Scottish nationalists and English Tories obsess about the BBC because they want it to be more not less biased. They want their prejudices confirmed, and if they can’t have that, they want BBC reporters to think once, twice, a hundred times before giving Nicola Sturgeon or David Cameron too hard a time.

Because the BBC is funded by a licence fee everyone must pay, because it is in the end a state broadcaster, fanatics from all sides know that it folds under pressure, which was why Tony Blair’s government attacked it with a ferocity it never displayed towards its opponents in the Tory press.

For all the sectarian fervour he has aroused, John Whittingdale is not saying he will end the licence fee. For all its attempts to intimidate journalists, the SNP does not want to close the BBC but seize control of it.

Scrupulous politicians know they must show restraint if free societies are to remain free. In London and Edinburgh unscrupulous politicians know that an “independent” broadcaster that can be threatened with cuts to its grants and bullied in a way no truly independent journalist would ever accept, is much too useful an institution to destroy.

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If Labour is not in power after the general election, you will hear many leftists blaming the Mail for their defeat. For more than a century, they say, it has pumped out thuggish attacks against every prominent liberal and leftist, and injected its particular venom—a paranoid poison—into wider debate. To its conservative readers, by contrast, the Mail is their shield against a world that would ignore their wishes, take their money and laugh at their convictions.

But it won’t be either a thug or a shield for much longer. As traditional newspaper readers die out, online journalism is the future. MailOnline is the most visited “news” site in the English-speaking world. Go there, however, and you will struggle to find the propaganda that drives the Left wild. There is no section at the top of its front page marked “opinion” or “comment” for readers who want conservative argument. Run your cursor past “News”, “Sport”, “TV & Showbiz”, “Fashion”, “Promos”, “Femail”, and—this must hurt—“Australia”, and finally at the far end of a list of 24 sections you will reach a tag marked “columnists”. Click on it and you find sports columnists, financial columnists and gossip columnists. Buried among them—like mossy tombs in a Victorian graveyard—are the remains of the right-wing pundits whose rages and laments boomed around the old newspaper.

In the past, editors knew little about what people read. Now they know precisely what readers want, and in the case of MailOnline it certainly isn’t the old left-baiting polemicists.

Publishers can measure how many people click on a piece, how long they look at it for, whether they make it past the first paragraphs, and then get bored, or stick with it to the end. They can tell where readers live and—because of their cookies in their browsers—their likely income and interests. (Have they been looking to buy a new car or maternity dress?) They use that knowledge to put customised advertisements in front of them. They can tell within minutes of publication whether an article is being retweeted, read and finished; whether, in short, it was worth publishing at all.

You would need Wilde’s heart of stone not to burst out laughing at the sight of right-wing propagandists reduced to irrelevance by the market forces they have spent their lives supporting. And if they were the only casualties of technological change, I would laugh too.

Unfortunately, there are two simple facts about online publishing which you cannot escape wherever you write or read. The only way for sites that offer free content to make money is from advertising. News sites therefore have to strain to attract hits. But even if they get the readership, and even if grateful advertisers recognise their achievement, web advertising revenue cannot compensate for lost sales and the near-monopoly control of classified advertising—for houses, jobs, cars and just about everything else—that newspapers and magazines enjoyed before it moved online.

Editors are chasing more readers for less money, and the way to make money is to attract as many readers and keep them on the site so they can soak up the ads. It doesn’t have to be lowest common denominator journalism—the Guardian is trying to become a global site for serious English-speaking readers—but most of the time it is. In America, Gawker, a tabloid site, and Forbes, a once serious business journal, are taking the logic of the new publishing economy to its obvious conclusion. They determine writers’ pay by how many unique visitors they bring in. At Gawker, managers tell trainees they will receive $5 per 1,000 unique monthly visitors—up to $6,000 maximum per month. If the hopefuls meet their targets after three months, they will allow them to stay. If they don’t, they’re out. The results are predictable. The last time I looked, the top piece on the Gawker site was: “What Happened to the Runner Who Shit [sic] Himself During a Half-Marathon?”

The system turns journalists into thieves and liars. Not the traditional journalistic frauds in the Jayson Blair/Johann Hari mould but liars who lie because lying is a corporate imperative. To get traffic, fewer and fewer news sites can afford to send out writers to find original content. So they steal from other news sites, or lift and repackage a YouTube video or Twitter exchange that may go viral.

In a confessional piece that deserved far more attention than it received, Luke O’Neil, a Boston journalist, described in Esquire how “the churn-and-burn pace of daily writing has led to my passing along some pretty sketchy nonsense”. He would steal and rebrand anything that might catch the passing reader: a preacher feeling up a waitress in an American café, a comedian who live-tweeted a break-up on an apartment roof, anything whatsoever about celebrities without  checking whether the stories were true.

He wanted the traffic. His employers wanted the traffic. Without the traffic, they had no income. If checking might endanger a story, then he wouldn’t check because he knew that if he didn’t steal the story someone else would take it, rewrite it and find a headline that would draw in passing trade. “That’s the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, ViralNova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out,” O’Neil concluded. “You don’t need to write any more—just write a good headline and point.”

You simply cannot describe what follows as journalism. There’s no original research and no original thought. The next logical step is for web companies to look at your preferences and interests and give you what they think you want if that is what it takes to keep you on their sites.  They will customise news as they already customise advertisements.  Google says that the company wants to look at your consumption of news, your search patterns, your mail and your posts, anticipate your intellectual and emotional wishes, and give you work which matches them, so that you need not read anything that would tax, unsettle or surprise you.

This is a dumbed-down future Daily Mail pundits should rail against. Except, of course, they can’t. Their editors would fire them.

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Five days into the New Year, the Labour Party issued a rapid-response denial to a terrible smear from the Tories. The tweet from Labour’s press team read: “p.44 of Tory dossier says Labour will cancel cuts to the arts budget. We won’t.”

As denials go, that’s pretty unequivocal. It says: the Tories punish the arts, we will punish them too. So, what else is new? The only thing remarkable about this cross-party spat is that the arts are being mentioned at all. Mostly, in an election campaign, the arts are raided for star endorsements, then marginalised, trivialised, infantilised and treated as an optional add-on to national life.

While Angela Merkel visits an exhibition of German culture at the British Museum and presidents of France cultivate close relationships with artists and musicians, the British political class confirms at election time (and most others) that it is the most philistine in western Europe.

Ask around Westminster and you’ll be told there are no votes to be had in the arts. As a result of this crude reasoning, the arts have been shoved into Whitehall’s lowest drawer, the absurdly named Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). If rumours are to be believed, the DCMS will be abolished if the Tories win the election. About time, too. It has done much harm and very little good to the state of British arts.

Fifty years ago this month, a date worth marking with a glass half full, the arts won a seat in Cabinet for the first time. Harold Wilson, remembering his old pal Aneurin Bevan, appointed his widow, Jennie Lee, as minister for the arts, in charge also of creating his pet project, the Open University. Lee was a close ally of the mistrustful Wilson. She was closer still to Arnold Goodman, the octopus-like lawyer who acted as personal solicitor to both Wilson and the opposition leader, Ted Heath. Goodman was also Jennie Lee’s lawyer, winding up Bevan’s estate and installing her in a flat directly above his own in Ashley Gardens, Westminster. Goodman and Lee dined together at his place every Sunday night. Friends viewed them as lovers, in all senses except the physical, an impediment presented by Goodman’s gargantuan girth.

Lee’s first appointment as minister for the arts was to make Goodman chairman of the Arts Council. Over the next six years, she convinced Wilson to treble the council’s grant. She got the money, Goodman spent it. Seldom has British government seen such bare-faced collusion—unsupervised and uncommented upon since Goodman kept the newspapers in check with frequent writs. Policy and personnel were sorted out over Sunday night supper at Ashley Gardens. The arts became a plaything of power.

Both Lee and Goodman may have had the interest of the arts at heart, but their complicity was injurious to clean government. It fostered sycophancy in the arts and it favoured fudge. The long-running incoherence of London’s South Bank is a Lee-Goodman legacy. Likewise, the multiplicity of London orchestras. Likewise, the never-ending wrangles over English National Opera. Goodman was a workhorse who left Jennie with a clear desk. Eventually, she took a senior civil servant to bed. “Don’t tell Arnold,” she urged friends. Theirs was a Louis XIV court in miniature.

When it ended, arts were kicked out of Cabinet in the penny-pinched 1970s and Thatcherite ’80s. Demotion, however, was good for the arts. Sitting below the political eyeline enabled the Arts Council to recover its independence and the arts institutions their vigour.

The return to Cabinet was a by-product of John Major’s election victory in 1992, a result so freakish that it freed the Prime Minister (by his own admission) from normal burdens of long-term planning and party debts. Major asked his major-domo David Mellor what he’d like to do next and the pair cobbled together a Department for National Heritage (DNH), embracing Mellor’s special interests in arts, media and sports. The last two interests conspired five months later to unseat Mellor; for the rest of its existence, the DNH was headed by soporific nonentities.

After Tony Blair’s election in 1997, everything had to be new and improved. The DNH was rebranded DCMS and assigned to the likeable Chris Smith, who was tasked with promoting a shortlived Cool Britannia. Smith and his successors saw to it that the Arts Council did as it was told. Its subjugation was ultimately enforced when a DCMS official, Alan Davey, was shuffled across to become head of Arts Council England by a Labour Secretary of State, James Purnell (both are now brother-executives at the BBC).

Under the Tories—Jeremy Hunt, Maria Miller, Sajid Javid—the DCMS has shown a stony face to the arts. The three parts of the hybrid departments have been pulling in different directions, and culture is, by a large margin, the least voteworthy of the three. Its degradation and devaluation have been visible for all to see.

The prompt and public abolition of the DCMS would be the best thing that has happened to the arts since Jennie Lee two-timed Arnold Goodman. Its existence has been oppressive. Leadership in the arts has been tamed. Conformity has replaced challenge. The heads of Covent Garden, the National Gallery, the National Theatre are pale shadows of once-robust predecessors. The Arts Council is a rubber-stamp. What to do with the doomed department? Media—essentially faster broadband and the sale of television franchises—should go to the Department for Industry. Sport and Culture belong in the Department for Education, where their skills can be harnessed to the national curriculum for the purpose of improving young bodies and minds.

The ideal place for the arts is to be as far from government as possible, and as close to the grass roots. The solution is at hand. Scrap the DCMS, liberate the ACE, privatise the South Bank and there’s a good chance we can bring about an overdue cultural renaissance.

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