I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing.

A handy compilation of a few horrors:

–   Sneaky use of inverted comma qualification to suggest a phony detachment/objectivity

–   blandly reporting Islamist extremism as if the dilemmas these evil people face are normal

–   breaking its own rules against advertising by advertising communist babes

–   using plucky sporting metaphors to describe tyrants

–   simply making things up at the height of a crisis to boost ratings and by implication damn reformers

It is beyond debate that the BBC does this not because there is a secret nerve-centre of Leftists controlling output, but rather because the whole intellectual culture of the organisation tilts in a specific way to make many reporters and presenters simply unaware of the crude biases they are showing.

Take two new examples.

Here is an especially chilling one. Paul Crook worked for 30 years(!) at the BBC World Service describing his life in Mao’s China. His communist parents themselves get horrendously persecuted. But he doesn’t lose faith! And he gets a nice fat space on the BBC World website to propagate his own humiliation (my emphasis):

We thought my father would be released within a few days, in a few weeks. We had all been educated to think that things were getting better all the time, but sometimes there would be mistakes. One of the slogans at that time was: ‘You should trust the Masses, and trust the Party!’ 

… My mother was repeatedly summoned for questioning and eventually she too disappeared…

We were anxious about what had happened to our parents, but we weren’t eaten up by anger or worry, as we were brought up to believe that if you were innocent then this would be proved in due course.

Meanwhile my parents’ friends gave us care and encouragement, and the official position towards young people whose parents were in trouble was that they could still be educated ‘to take the right path’.

… In the end my mother was freed after just over three years of lock-up on the university campus. My father was released from prison after five years, much of it spent in solitary confinement. He and my mother were later exonerated of any wrongdoing, and received an official apology.

My parents were never physically abused in all the time they were locked up, but it was a trying time, to say the least. They were sustained by their belief that all this upheaval was part of an attempt to create a better society… 

Like many of my friends I grew to be rather sceptical, to be critical of what people’s stated intentions were, and what their grand visions entailed.

My father said when he was locked up, he did think it was a mistake and wondered how he could clear his name. When he came out he found that many of his Chinese colleagues had gone through very similar experiences.

And he was reconciled to the fact that the leadership was making an earnest effort to get rid of these abuses. He had lost five years of his life in prison but he didn’t see why he should change his ideals.

Isn’t that staggering? Imagine the BBC giving all that space to a slave who had ended up being brainwashed and describes how his slavery was ‘all for the best’?

This family have been relatively lucky in not being murdered by the Mao regime, yet they also suffered mightily for nothing. And they still retained their ‘ideals’ and their belief in the leadership’s ‘earnestness’ in stopping ‘abuses’.  No sign at all of any thinking that the sort of undemocratic elitist system they believed in might inevitably create such crimes?

*pauses, lost for words* 

What sort of evil ideas did wretched Paul Crook emit into the world’s airways on UK taxpayers’ money during his long years at the BBC World Service?

That example shows furtive pro-communist propaganda. This next one shows furtive anti-market propaganda: Has Western capitalism failed?

Note the fact that this very question is asked. The five ‘experts’ are indeed all prominent enough and give a range of more or less coherent responses. Indeed, they even manage to find a sassy Ghanaian entrepreneur who praises ‘Western capitalism in its truest form’ as well as Lord Desai:

Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism – risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work – all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan – the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.

Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence – continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth – and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.

We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast. If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.

Socialism died 20 years ago – capitalism lives on. It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means – it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don’t work very hard, we will lose our importance.

Against them are pronouncements comparing capitalism to slavery, and mystic meanderings from Professor Tim Jackson:

Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. Yet question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival…

Living well is about good nutrition, decent homes, access to good quality services, stable communities, satisfying employment. Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the word, transcends material concerns. It resides in our love for our families, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, our ability to participate fully in the life of society, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.

Which takes us back to Communist China. Where the regime imposed poverty upon almost a billion people, but where now, thanks directly to capitalist growth, prosperity and freedom are now advancing strongly.

So the real question for the BBC is: Has Western socialism failed? Since most of the people living even now on less than $2 a day are the victims of governing undemocratic regimes which in one way or the other Western socialism has feted for decades.

Will that question ever be asked prominently on the BBC website?

No.