BBC TV and Radio news really must get professional and take out opinion and value judgements from its reporting.

On the TV 10 o’clock news on Tuesday, May 7, the news reporter from Rotterdam talked about the murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn having “odious” views.

It is not the BBC’s place in a news programme to describe anyone as having odious views. It might just make sense if they immediately provided background as to why the views were odious. But the BBC does not do this. During the Jean-Marie Le Pen hysteria leading up to the runoff against Jacques Chirac, all kinds of labels were pinned on the National Front leader with little attempt to back them up.

On BBC Radio 4 earlier on Tuesday, we were told that Fortuyn’s policy was “ferociously” anti-immigrant. Not just against unlimited immigration, which is rather a mainstream idea. No, according to the leftists at the BBC, anybody pointing to a problem with immigration must be demonised, so Fortuyn is not seeking to sort out a problem, he is “ferocious” in his approach, and is against immigrants personally, not immigration policy generally.

Strangely, a BBC NewsNight report on Tuesday evening, said that Fortuyn was not anti-immigrant, but had made the point simply that the limit had been reached. Some extremist!

The homosexual Fortuyn was also portrayed as some kind of jack-booted fascist in his opinion on the Muslim religion, which he described as “backward”, hardly a ferocious term. Yet many Muslim nations discriminate against homosexuals, seek to stop women from entering the workplace, and don’t display much respect for freedom and democracy. Nations dominated by Muslims are mostly poverty-stricken dictatorships. Why can’t people express this view without being labelled as odious fascists by leftists and the BBC?

In Radio 4’s PM programme on Tuesday, Peter Hain, Minister for Europe who opposed Britain’s entry into the EEC and ERM membership, blustered about nazis and fascists of the right in Europe, but the reporter interviewing him just let him get away with it. Surely Hain, still a card carrying CND member, should have been asked to substantiate these wild and woolly allegations. But I suspect he would have had some trouble putting meat on the bones because for politicians of the left, “fascist” is just a form of abuse often with little substance. Hain and his ilk use abusive terms like fascist to stamp out democratic debate. News organisations like the BBC owe it to us to stop this happening.

I’m not going to hold my breathe, but get a grip, BBC. Some hopes.

Neil Winton, May 8, 2002

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