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The BBC's "Cultural Marxism"
The editor of the Daily Mail attacked the BBC's "cultural Marxism" and accused it of failing to take into account the views of the majority of British people.
Paul Dacre, who edits the popular conservative newspaper, was delivering the annual Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London's College of Communications. Dacre rarely makes public appearances, and so there was some anticipation among the UK's media classes as to what his subject would be.
Well, "target" might be a better phrase than "subject". Dacre wasted no time in laying into the Beeb, alongside other British media institutions like the Guardian, Independent and even the Times.
"BBC journalism is reflected through a left wing prism that affects everything - the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of the interviews, the interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated," he said , describing the broadcaster as "too bloody big, too bloody pervasive and too bloody powerful."
"...the BBC in every corpus of its corporate body is against conservatism with a small c. Which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons... said Dacre, "Thus it exercises a kind of cultural Marxism where it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning those values on their head."
His speech also took in what he describes as the "subsidiarat" - a group of mainly left-leaning media outlets that could not survive without intervention either from the government or from the assistance of more popular sister publications.
Anti-market rants in the Guardian, for example, are paid for by advertising on Auto Trader - not to mention the thousands of government job ads which appear in the newspaper's pages every year. Dacre added that the Times publishes columns supportive of feminism - but it survives with the help of The Sun, which publishes photos of topless women.
The reason they need "subsidies", Dacre adds, is because "Their journalism and values – invariably liberal, metropolitan and politically correct, and I include the pinkish Times here, don't connect with sufficient readers to be commercially viable."
While reporters on the left-leaning press invoke the public good, he says, they do it with contempt, as they are "patronisingly contemptuous of what (these papers) describe(s) as ordinary people."
