Almost simultaneously with Frank Deford’s speech at Notre Dame saying that PBS has become “an American BBC” (he meant it as a complement, folks), the head of the BBC admits to the Beeb’s “massive” left-wing bias. Here’s Deford in his Red Smith Lecture in Journalism:
As newspapers fail and as magazines and television news shrivel before the Internet, we can take some consolation that National Public Radio — which is least the victim of the new competing technology — has ascended to an eminent position in serious journalism in this country. It has assumed the role, perhaps, that Newsweek or Time or any number of important newspapers used to fill alongside the New York Times. NPR, I believe, truly has become an American BBC.
And from today’s UK Daily Mail:
BBC Director General Mark Thompson has admitted the corporation was guilty of a ‘massive’ Left-wing bias in the past.
The TV chief also admitted there had been a ‘struggle’ to achieve impartiality and that staff were ‘ mystified’ by the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
But he claimed there was now ‘much less overt tribalism’ among the current crop of young journalists, and said in recent times the corporation was a ‘broader church’.
It should be noted that Deford isn’t comparing PBS to the new “broader church” version of the BBC, but to the old massively lefty-biased BBC that all liberals know and love.
