Chapter 4: SABC > BBC
“If you’re hanging on to a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision — let go before it’s too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black”
Ralph Brown as Danny, in “Withnail & I” (1987)
Most South Africans delighted in former chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoneng’s destructive reign at the SABC. They loathed Auckland Park, and the episode was as macabre as it was vicious - the sight of a strange, rural creature, ever so slightly black magic-ish, who sometimes, when feeling especially cruel, swaggered into press briefings wearing a fedora that barely covered his little darting eyes. Sometimes he would speak of himself in the third person. This was entertaining as clearly, he had just learned how to do it. “Hlaudi is more cleverer than academics” or statements to that effect would have broadsided retired white professors and the media elites living within sight of Auckland Park. On one hand they should have been delighted with a central committee profile throwing his weight around the national broadcaster - on the other, it was just a bit too…voodoo - too much Dr. Kananga from “Live and Let Die”, in the days James Bond wasn’t on puberty blockers and working as a pre-Musk Twitter content moderator.
The trouble at the SABC went true to Hemingway’s gradually-then-suddenly form. The post-liberation “intellectual” ANC, filled with icy sparkling wine, hubris and complacency preferred Sutenbastud BBC, a template for which to perpetuate bias the direct opposite its predecessor pumped the airwaves full of - be supportive of a “left” government, don’t screwball its ministers, etc. Jacob Zuma and Hlaudi Motsoneng’s provincial SABC, on the other hand, were puzzled then impatient as to why the bloody thing couldn’t just go full Hugo Chavez ‘Alo Presidente or China-state run television overnight. The transition that was occasioned between 2005 and 2009 was revealing.
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In February 2008, the political editor of the SABC, Abbey Mokoe, did something that betrayed the idea South Africa is backward. Here things went well ahead of the curve.
Abbey was also the head of the Forum of Black Journalists and decided that a briefing by the head of the ANC Jacob Zuma (Thabo Mbeki had, since the ANC elective conference in Polokwane the previous year, assumed dead man walking status) was to be attended by black journalists only. The incident prompted a backlash from white and coloured journalists, notably Kieno Kammies, employed by Primedia at the time, who stormed out of the building in front of cameras. The South African Human Rights Commission commented that Abbey’s behavior was mischievous, and he resigned from the SABC the following week.
Abbey’s smart little move, were it to occur in Portman Place in 2023, would today receive more support than in Auckland Park in 2008. Thanks to postmodernism and grievance studies, there is a renewed appetite for campus-like exclusion based on immutable characteristics. Today, the BBC is long on Abbey’s strategy - because no organization captures the absurdity, depravity and contradiction of Sutenbastud as perfectly as the BBC. Neither the UN nor the EU come close. Whilst you could argue that the regulator Ofcom is an attempt to out-BBC the worst excesses of the BBC, the broadcaster is to Western society the essence of pigheaded obstinance, of trying to be all things to all men - then just some, of consciously and unconsciously retreating from the things it’s supposed to do in a spell of conviction that it serves a higher or greater importance than the vast majority of people who pay for its existence expect it to.
The idea that it is doomed either way absorbs the majority of the prevailing sentiment. On the “left”, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn - those beautiful, short, salt and peppered women with wild teeth carrying Socialist Worker “anti-racism” placards and shrieking about refugees - are convinced the BBC is “right” wing, that it deliberately engineered Brexit propaganda, that its reporters - for the last decade - have been too soft on the revolving door of Conservative Prime Ministers and that it repeatedly affirms bias against Labour, or the green agenda. On the “right”, Conservatives will produce glossy catalogues and rap sheets of all the times a lefty mole, ordinarily a heavy-set woman speaking out of her bottom about the NHS, or a grubby student speaking whipping up a fantasy about an encounter with Neo Nazis (usually no. 2 or 3 on the list of Things That Never Happened), was planted in the live audience of the BBC’s flagship “Question Time”. It will detail the Twitter accounts of BBC personalities - and accompany these with the supposedly enforceable impartiality contractual clause the presenters are subjected to, along with a Google Sheet indicating how many times said clauses have been breached.
Although the “right” is closer to the truth, it is anything but a victory. It just how far “left” the Overton window has shifted, and how much the “right” has been willing to concede, so that it now accepts pronouns and the climate change agenda - compiled, in the case of the BBC, by environmental activist groups and renewable energy corporations. The “right” itself is compromised, and possibly complicit, evidenced by the ridiculous theory of “one nation conservatism” (a group within the Conservative party numbering between 110 and 130 who largely support the BBC). With the closest thing to an opposition confined to the margins, the BBC may soon just fag the whole impartiality thing - not even talk about it - and surrender to its “left” impulses.
Examining the BBC and the role it fills today leaves no doubt: just as neo-liberal globalism condemns cities with a specific variant of gentrification, a similar condition has ruined entertainment, leaving it over-sanitised, platitudinal, not fit for purpose. As a result we’re bored. We’re bored of music that sounds the same or worse, copied, of drama that has been subjected to diversity casting and seeks to amplify Sutenbastud’s messages as they relate to trans, climate, race and immigration. The crisis of entertainment extends and we’re in danger of boredom of the timeless - the great cultures of opera and ballets have slipped from interest and have to rely upon the impressive concentration faculties of the truly discerning only.
As state broadcaster the BBC effectively controls music in the United Kingdom. Think back to the early 90s - when electronic music, coupled to the recent arrival of MDMA, blazed a trail through Britain, but nowhere with more intensity than in the northern industrial heartlands where an entire culture shifted. Men who would ordinarily drink beer with each other before attending football matches to throw darts at opposition fans were now shirtless in a club at 4am rubbing Tiger Balm into the pressure points of those same opposition fans, all in various states of stimulated euphoria. Amongst England’s black communities, the same could be argued for drill, described somewhat unflatteringly as a combination of American West Coast rap and cutlery being shuffled around the kitchen, or the music of postcode gang warfare. That too has stilled and now, for the better part of a decade, English music - and the BBC by extension - just grasps.
It grasps at comedy, a lightning rod for UK culture. Take the case of Frankie Boyle, the Scottish comedian who has previously remarked, during live performances, that the Olympics swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s face “looks like she is staring into the back of a spoon” and that “Katie Price (formerly known as the porn star Jordan) is scared of her severely disabled child Harvey as he might rape her”. Boyle has since taken a route expedient to his own interests as means to deal with criticism of these comments: he went hard Sutenbastud, described himself as mainstream, earned himself various slots on the BBC program calendar - and hacked his own routine to attack Brexiteers and “transphobes”. He is joined by an insufferable “comedian” who couldn’t help but thrust his south East Asian heritage into every skit. Nish Kumar is untalented, but realised that the BBC audiences were not particularly talented either - years of brainwashing had reduced them to nodding wojaks, so instead of actually saying anything funny, he went the Sutenbastud politics way, and incorporated into his shows statements that didn’t prompt laughter, only applause. That is telling in the analysis of the decline of comedy as it relates to the BBC: laughter is an instinct, applause, in this case - a political tool of consensus. Eventually, in March 2021, Nish’s “Mash Report” was canceled by the BBC; exactly how many people were tuning in as the show tanked is not clear, but I suspect you could probably squeeze them into a strip mall’s parking lot, and still have room for deliveries.
It grasps at drama - and here it really, really grasps. One of the most popular series over the past years aired by the BBC is called “Line of Duty”, written and directed by Jed Mercurio. I didn’t last half of the first episode of the first series (there have been 6 series to date) because it was basically like putting a camera in the offices of the most boring compliance company in the world, where rows of desks of silent desk suckers with yellow hi-viz jackets on the backs of their chairs produce spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. Apparently it has gotten much, much worse, but Mercurio has furiously defended his work, including snapping at my friend James Delingpole, the TV critic, declaring: “turns out people actually are interested in a police bureaucracy!” Perhaps their interest was because of their own lives were enduring the same cycle of different things, perhaps it is perceived as interesting because it explores - badly - the least interesting things about the police, as everything else has already been done, and however uninteresting, a perception may exist that its somehow “new-ish”. “Line of Duty” also committed to journeying the unforgivable new Hollywood way: into positions of fictional authority in the drama (heads of police), or positions of skill (snipers) it shoehorned diversity casting, as though its script was written by the parties responsible for BBC climate editorial policy. So the result is a police bureaucracy whose characters refer to double digits alongside double letters more than they speak real words, spiked with a social justice dimension - so, honestly, what’s not to like?
For a time, the United Kingdom’s capacity for entertainment was nearly unrivaled. But something happened to it, and you could find a small example of that change in South Africa’s Trevor Noah. Trevor went from good comedy (e.g. routines about gay beggars at traffic lights in Johannesburg and Jacob Zuma’s pronunciation) to The Daily Show in the United States - where he was pathetic. Hauled into a culture war primarily targeting Donald Trump, he lost his presence and became yet another partially outraged legacy personality prompting applause. Artistic innovation was no longer worth investing in: it was the “message”.
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The BBC is underwritten by something called The Royal Charter, which sets the permissions and conditions for the BBC to effectively mandate every single citizen in possession of a TV to fork out. In the United Kingdom, if you do not fork out £159 per year, Trev from the Enforcement Division - sometimes based in a different county to the one you’re in - will doorstop you, at home, and issue you a summons (this current Royal Charter only expires in 2027). Thus the BBC can finance the mountains of boring, jerkish, unimaginative and unnecessarily provocative content it currently does. Like its competitor Sky it throws itself into non-events like Black History Month or PRIDE - the difference being, one you can escape from by not owning a subscription, and the other you’re forced into “licensing”. What makes it even more painful are the extravagantly remunerated people who present its programs and read its news - who occasionally turn around and slap it across the face in public.
The worst example of this is a former English footballer and sometimes potato crisp salesman called Gary Lineker, the highest-paid profile at the corporation.
Lineker was raised in Leicester. He claims to have been called a “Paki” at school. This is contentious; unless every single sports website in the world (and the BBC) is using the virtual equivalent of the Krok brothers’ Ambi Extra skin-lightening cream, he is very much white, as is his brother Wayne, a former Ibiza nightclub owner whose behavior toward women younger than his nephews has creeped out much of a nation that punches well above its weight when it comes to inappropriate intergenerational relationships. Wayne is obscenely tanned - the prize for a life suspended between avoiding sunblock and the beams of sunbed. But even then there is no doubt: he is white.
After playing football, Gary’s next game was social justice - and it remains, for him, very much a game. He is a passionate advocate for mass immigration and a fierce critic of the Conservative party, whom he has compared to Nazi Germany. His urge for unfettered immigration stems from his circumstances: Gary owns houses in prosperous postcodes, alongside neighbors with high retail standards - and that sort of coffee is not exactly going to make itself. And that is the sum of his hysterical shrieking on Twitter: he wants people called Ahmed and Bilal to make stuff for him, to provide garden and cleaning services, to observe the self-checkout counters at the local Waitrose. And failing that, to pick the vegetables Waitrose sells. He doesn’t care where they live, what impact the environment from where they have originated will have on their new surroundings, and what conflicts could emerge - it’s literally: “Bilal, get into that field, pick that broccoli.”
In 2023, Gary accused the Conservatives of being Nazis in respect of the latter’s supposed position on “refugees”. But Gary and his supporters don’t appear to have noticed: the UK’s treatment of “refugees” has been the most luxurious in the history of the world. Far from keeping the arrivals in camps like Lindela, they’ve taken over hotels and guest houses (minimum three stars). They’ve tendered catering contracts and dished out smartphones and free transport passes. For Gary and Britain’s oversupply of sneering Sutenbastud “human rights” lawyers this isn’t enough: they must stay here and pick strawberries (or traffic women). To object is Nazi - and he doesn’t mind saying so, even if the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is of Goan and Hindu Tamil Mauritian descent (Braverman’s husband is Jewish - his confidence in a corporation that permits his wife to be racially harassed must be epic - imagine how he feels when Trev arrives to collect the “license fee”).
This latest time however the BBC did act (contractual clause: “breach of impartiality”) and removed Gary from another of its flagship programs, “Match of the Day”. Commercially it was genius: 50000 more viewers tuned into a Gary-less broadcast. But Sutenbastud, via other journalists and Twitter, soon intervened and forced the corporation’s incumbent wet-fish-handshake Director General Tim Davie into an embarrassing reverse ferret. Gary went back onto Twitter after Tim caved: “We remain a tolerant nation”. He claims to have struck a deal with Tim that permits him to continue ranting about climate change and refugees - and you get to swallow it all.
This asshat-ery, the hat swapping between the asses of Tim and Gary, a kind of panem et circenses (bread and circuses) designed to first confuse then appease. It’s meant to hint at the existence of a forum for dialogue and resolution, but the BBC occupies a much more sinister sphere in public influence - and no better example in its history exists than Covid facts and fact-checking exercise.
Before we explore this feature of recent history, I’d like to present a proposal to you in respect to the profession, or more accurately - phenomenon - of “fact checking” and “disinformation” reporting. Now, remember that Mengistu character? Ethiopian, couple of million dead, lives, erm, “quietly” in Borrowdale, Harare? He’s still around and by all accounts - in the manner of an aging analog pornographer brooding the accessibility of internet smut - he’s pissed off. So I propose that we bring him out of retirement and ask him to customize a multi-faceted, vertically-integrated, enhanced interrogation and torture program for “fact-checkers” and reporters who frequently quote “fact checkers”. I don’t think we impose a budget as it may intrude upon his creativity - literally, give him a skeletal RFP and let him populate. Inspire the dude with offal - preferably leopard - give him as much baboon spinal fluid to drink as he wants, a mobile with international minutes to call Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea whenever he needs to blue-sky a few ideas. Trust me: two weeks into the program you’ll feel as though a part of a broken world was cured as you slept.
Back in March 2020, an absurd and mendacious missive was circulated by Ofcom to all media organizations coinciding with the first of the UK’s lockdowns. “We have decided,” the body announced, “that no content outside that of WHO information will be permitted for broadcasting or publication.” You may have been confused here. Which WHO? The UN-ey one? Funded by Bill Gates, who insisted that the Ethiopian communist Tedros becomes its boss? People didn’t get a say in that one, but this irritated them more because the British government misled then cuckolded by Sutenbastud $cientists was about to do something unprecedented - and all WHO’s errors and past controversies be damned.
The BBC’s competitor ITV was out the blocks first and screeched Ofcom’s nannied instruction into every home with ITV’s jowly and never, ever acceptable Piers Morgan leading the charge. Almost immediately every single question outside of boundaries established by the blatant democratic violation was classified as conspiratorial, or fake news, or “disinformation” - and the party asking the question was attacked. On every episode of the show (“Good Morning Britain”) he presented alongside Sutenbastud Susanna Reid and a muttering shrew of a meteorologist called Lucy, Morgan was accompanied by one Dr. Hillary Jones and Hillary (lol) - or Shillary - would drive the fear into every home, like he was a shit Siener van Rensburg, predicting zombies on the Surrey / Hampshire border, a vulture lurking uncomfortably close to Kev the local publican as he crawled to the nearest remdesivir / ventilator station.
The coronaporn of the BBC was, at the start, oddly less confrontational and menacing than ITVs. Then it quickly changed, and suddenly you had the sight of the diamond-faced, BLM enthusiast Ros Atkins speaking to “experts” with the same degree of self-importance Piers Morgan shouted at skeptics with. Then it got even worse. At this point, the BBC did something especially cruel.
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Her name is Marianna Spring and she is a BBC “disinformation” reporter. She is young, privileged (private school plus Oxford) and just girl-boss butch enough to prompt nauseating Zoomer idolatry; whenever she posts a selfie on her various social media profiles - usually two to three times a day - the majority of flattering correspondence comes from equally butch looking women, many with pronouns and flags in their bios. Some with bikes. Her feature analysis was coof and questions remain as to whether she was groomed into the role; since 2021, one of her eyes appears to have dropped below the other. No explanation has been issued for the impairment.
A coof disinformation reporter working for the BBC during extraordinary circumstances has one job: to go after people. Humiliate them, shame them - eliminate any threat to Sutenbastud’s information monopoly, to the regime-approved narrative - the “message”. Skin the lockdown skeptics and compare them to American high school massacre deniers. Skin those questioning the “virus” escaping the Wuhan Institute of Virology and accuse the inquisitive of being anti-semites. Skin the doctors and nurses asking questions - the former pharmaceutical bosses, scientists who disagree with their right-on, social justice-y colleagues - and then skin and make dogpiles of the weak and the powerless with the help of useful idiots and their bikes and flags on Twitter. Make the recently redundant look gullible, damaged, drug and David Ike-addled. Skin them until they are not only are they science deniers, but white supremacists too - and when they are so disfigured by all the skinning - when all that is left are exposed festering sinews and broken families and irreparable relationships - others who may have sympathized once will know never to fuck with the “message” might of the BBC.
Marianna began by projecting the image of a country torn by “conspiracy”. It started in podcasts and columns, until she appeared at anti-lockdown marches accompanied by a camera crew. “Why are you doing this? Is it worth it?” Fortunately many of those marching were wise to what she was doing and were unwilling to concede an inch. At one specific march, someone got into her face: “Well I dunno Marianna,” one protestor fronted, “maybe you and your bosses at the BBC have a point - maybe I shouldn’t protest these completely unnatural, illogical interventions that have destroyed my marriage and ruined the prospects and mental health of my children. Maybe I should just kneel, bang my crockery on Thursday evenings and be grateful that the most brilliant academics ever are gonna figure this one out.” This encounter was never covered.
By October 2021 the wisdom of lockdowns began mainstream interrogation. Slippery chancers in medicine and politics, who had championed the case for lockdowns with “two weeks to flatten the curve”, began retreating in smug denial: “Well, you know, I was always something of a lockdown skeptic myself.” Marianna chose a different form of escape. She didn’t admit to being wrong or cruel - of course not. Instead, on the 18th October 2021, Marianna composed a column for BBC online entitled “I get abuse and threats online - why can’t it be stopped?” This, after she had appeared in documentaries (Panorama) and podcasts attacking “conspiracy theorists”.
It’s impossible not to look at the mess surrounding the young woman and not blame the BBC for pushing her in front of the oncoming train. Here was an enthusiastic 20-something woman, eager to please - the BBC saw the talent, and decided to scatter it in the least constructive around the most controversial subject - a finger shoved in the mouth of a right the British were exercising.
That wasn’t just freedom of speech. It was something that people had acquired from Tony Blair’s government in 2003 - as compensation. For when it became clear that the decision to invade Iraq alongside Dick Cheney and America’s military-industrial complex was based on wholly dishonest intelligence, a begrudged arrangement was forcefully extracted from Iraq’s embers - one that allowed the British to question or comment on any major decision their government had taken, regardless of whether the government liked it or not. In return for disastrous decisions that ended the lives of millions of Iraqis, the British took a sense of agency without expiry, and 17 years later quarters within the electorate chose to use it. When the United Kingdom poodled up to shock and awe, Marianna had just turned 7; even if her political awareness was unusually pronounced at that young age, its unlikely she would have appreciated the effect that the Blair axis sexxed-up dossiers and WMD fantasies had on ordinary people. Sensing intense scrutiny upon the information they were processing to the “licence” payers, the BBC decided to use Marianna in the way Big Climate forces used and continue to use the catastrophe goblin Greta Thunberg.
The escape Marianna chose on the 18th October 2021 was desperate and revealing. She went turbo victim, claiming that she was being abused, that Twitter pre-Elon Musk was making no effort to reign in the trolling, that she - and many others were targeted for nothing other than being women. In appealing to such entrenched sensitivities, Marianna was hoping that people would ignore what she and the BBC had done to prompt the response.
They had deliberately hurt people. In the course of her reporting, through the podcasts and documentaries, she had gaslit guilt by association and tried to wrestle from them that which they were entitled to. And when they got tired of being called stupid, or impressionable, or chided for not expressing unhinged enthusiasm for another lockdown, or insulted for their experience of an adverse reaction to an experimental therapeutic, they responded to the bully - and they made her cry.
In 2023 the crying continues. Marianna remains the disinformation reporter - but her scope has extended into a farcical “new” arrangement entitled “BBC Verify” - which employs 60 - that’s right, 60 - other journalists. Not that they’ll announce it, but many of the conspiracies that she seized then mocked in the early hysteria can no longer be dismissed the way they were. This is especially true for the lab origins and wild, reckless claims about the effectiveness of the vaccine, or its supposed safety. So with the BBC comprehensively discredited on the issue of coof “conspiracies”, she sorted by seizing Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, framing it identical to the response of the worst journalist in the United States, Taylor Lorenz of The Washington Post: “Feels like the gates of hell just opened.”
Marianna and the BBC are more insulated here than they were from the trouble they started about anti-lockdown marches and supposed conspiracies, as she can play the single, over-trolled woman with more credibility; Musk’s commitment to free speech, perhaps the clearest of his all political positions, included offering previously banned profiles the opportunity to make representations for account restoration. Things that would get you booted under Twitter’s previous regime were no longer applicable - the idea being to promote open discourse of all subjects assuming they didn’t contain threats of death. This wasn’t just not good enough; what Marianna and by default the BBC consider open discourse is demonstrably closed.
*
For the recently initiated, the shift toward identity broadcasting - one in which an editorial policy is determined by crafting villains - became apparent in 2016. On balance if you consider the reporting leading up to Brexit, a slant influencing the position of remaining in the European Union is visible - not overtly so, but it’s there. However, the slant influencing the position against Donald Trump was clearly visible; for people who hadn’t been paying attention to the creep of Sutenbastud within the corporation, the finger was on the scale - and the initial excuses were laughable.
The main excuse was that much of the BBC’s reporting was simply an aggregation of US media sentiment - they were simply taking the temperature of their colleagues. As an exercise this was reckless; legacy media in the US exists to make people hate each other, and the BBC knew this. That it failed to acknowledge that the likes of CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and co had built aggressive commercial modeling on people hating each other betrays the fact that its own reporting benefited from this. The best example of how the BBC was content to express the confected mania of its US journeymen involved Donald Trump’s so-called “muslim ban”.
In December 2015, less than a year before he was elected President, Trump suggested a total ban on Muslims entering the United States - in response to the terror attacks of Paris, France the previous month and the San Bernardino attack in California on the 2nd December. The suggestion was skewered, by David Cameron and the incumbent Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who claimed: “What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for, and more importantly it’s not what this country stands for.”
But the problem with electing outsiders is that sometimes - unlike those groomed to power - they make good on their promises. On the 27th January 2017, Trump effected Executive Order 13769 - Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. The countries subjected to the ban were Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
It was not a “muslim ban”. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation in the world, wasn’t on the list. Neither was Tunisia nor Algeria nor Saudi Arabia nor Jordan. Irrespective of the order’s merits, calling it a “muslim ban” was lazy at best, profoundly disingenuous at worst. For a corporation with considerable resources, the BBC could afford to report responsibly in the manner expected of it, but it willingly embraced the rotten Associated Press model (the South African radio station 702 is a good example of taking anti-Trump reporting and publishing it without applying even elementary critical analysis). This is also true for coverage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, when a young white activist was run over and killed. It was the event that Joe Biden claims inspired him to “run for office” (again), and its deliberate misrepresentation the reason why so many BBC viewers remain convinced that Donald Trump is a white supremacist.
In that event’s immediate aftermath, American anti-Trump legacy media had deliberately taken some of Trump’s words out of context. The infamous comment “there were very fine people on both sides” was cast as Trump defending white supremacists, and trying to diminish the stature of what had happened. But the people Trump was referring when he said “very fine people on both sides” were not Neo-Nazis, but a group of activists objecting to the removal of the Robert E Lee bust. For these people, the removal of the statue was a clear attempt to rewrite history they cherished; they were not knuckle-dragging skinheads - they were grannies, bird-watching enthusiasts, retired postal workers, and now, courtesy of the repulsive commercial modeling of the legacy media, and how it had captured editorial policies, their lives were disgracefully smeared - both in America and abroad. The BBC sniffed its chance to correct an injustice here - just another example of how stupid and cowardly these people really are.
Before Trump, the BBC’s perfect white villains of the world were two profiles - the Afrikaner Boer, and the white Zimbabwean. These people were acutely identifiable by their masculinity: they played rugby, they drank, they knew how to shoot, they were some of the best farmers and soldiers the earth has ever known. But for Sutenbastud, the enhanced masculinity was a bit much; whilst there was a whole lot of hunting and fishing and surviving going on down south, there was just pedo, pedo and pedo in Portland Place, the BBC HQ in London. The very worst of these is the subject of a chilling Netflix documentary broadcast in 2022. Jimmy Savile.
What the documentary fails to pursue is a long-held suspicion that the sicko Jimmy was not operating in a hermetically sealed dome: if nobody else was abusing, then almost certainly others knew he was. Multiple reports published to date reveal a psychopath - someone who chose to buddy up to charities and children’s hospitals because of access. He didn’t see children or the vulnerable as a byproduct of his work - he took the line of work to abuse, a means to an end. One hospital even gave him a set of keys.
The former professional hunter and best-selling author Hannes Wessels has studied the phenomenon of BBC propaganda in the context of its hatred toward white South African farmers and white Zimbabwean soldiers. On the 11th September 2014, Wessels documented the BBC’s loathing, highlighting the moral chasm within the corporation:
Throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s when we ‘white racists’ were being vilified we had no idea our most vocal and effective critics were also fully involved in running a massive pedophile operation and the BBC was providing a safe and comfortable haven for a legion of perverts and sexual predators of varying proclivities. The Savile story is too ghastly and detailed to delve into here but this corporate poster-boy attacked nearly 1000 mostly defenseless victims aged 5 to 75 in a criminal career that lasted over 50 years. His depravity extended to the morgue where he bragged of having engaged in sexual activity with cadavers and stealing glass eyes from the dead to fashion jewellery. The incidents ranged from inappropriate touching to rape and involved victims from children to pensioners, the mentally retarded, hospital patients and female staff alike. He was never prosecuted.
Clearly it was a case of white “settler” equals bad - but pedo equals fine. In the same article Wessels mentioned some sinister events, listing the names of BBC profiles who have all died in mysterious circumstances. The most well-known was the presenter Jill Dando, who was murdered on her Fulham doorstep in 1999. A loner suffering from Asperger’s syndrome called Barry George was arrested, charged and subsequently sentenced, only to be acquitted on appeal. Attention has since turned to the possibility of a Serbian assassin: Dando had presented the corporation’s “Crimewatch” and fronted an appeal for Kosovan refugees. However, former insiders allege that Dando had come into possession of a raft of information detailing pervasive sexual misconduct and abuse rife within the corporation - and, when coupled with information released in the year of Wessels’ article, it make for intriguing analysis. Here’s Wessels again:
According to figures released under Freedom of Information, 539 staff have signed gagging orders at a total cost of £28million. The scale of the pay-outs led to accusations that the BBC was using the agreements to silence potential whistle- blowers and victims of bullying or sexual harassment. The biggest pay-offs were made to BBC managers, with 77 executives receiving more than £100,000 and 14 over £300,000. They include George Entwistle, the former director-general who received a £450,000 pay-off, double the amount he was contractually entitled to. He resigned in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal after spending just 54 days in the job
Scandals in western television networks are not new, but they appear to have exploded in recent years thanks to the deliberate penetration of cynical commercial strategy into editorial policy. This is true of the United States in particular, the controversies discovered in the wake of Fox News’ Roger Ailes death, in the ethical violations of Chris Cuomo and Jeffrey Zucker at CNN. And yet, despite its oversupply of in-house pedos, despite its often pathetic standards of reporting, the fact that it weaponises its “fact checkers” and “disinformation” reporters to instigate hatred against ordinary people and no longer forms a part of creative innovation, it endures. The BBC - tragically - wins.
It wins because the alternatives - for example the upstart GB News - are completely inferior, because they exist only in the margins to which they’ve been shoved, and from there can only react. Take the case of Shamima Begum, the ISIS bride. Shamima was schooled in London’s east, and found the idea of an Islamic Caliphate alluring, so she gapped it to Turkey, then crossed the border to Syria where she “married” a Dutch-born ISIS fighter (“married” in the sense that she was 15, meaning it is not recognized by Dutch law - not that it mattered to the ISIS judge). Unlike other ISIS recruits, Shamima wasn’t blown to pieces by a hellfire, and today inhabits a half-life in a settlement. Five years after absconding she was located in Syria, and so began a series of pleas to return to England. She’s lost all three children and the husband is incarcerated in Northern Syria, unlikely ever to be paroled.
In contrast to the former Deutsche Bank passage boy Sajid Javed, the Home Secretary at the time, the BBC pursued the line that Shamima was groomed, and that she should be allowed to return to a court of English law. Sajid had revoked her citizenship, which was overwhelmingly welcomed by a public still haunted by Jihadi John’s decapitations of British and American citizens. But the BBC persisted, and in 2023, a sympathetic documentary was aired: “The Shamima Begum Story”.
Cue indignation and condemnation from “right” wing media. “I am not buying her story!” Dan Wootton, host of the Dan Wootton show on GB News thundered, accusing the corporation of softening the ground for her return.
What Wottoon and his bosses didn’t do was travel to America to visit and interview the prisoners arrested for trespassing in Capitol Hill in Washington on January 6th 2021, an event sold to the cult of Sutenbastud by American legacy networks and the BBC as an “insurrection”. They didn’t look at Mark Zuckerberg’s donation for the “fortification” of US elections. They didn’t interview the small business owners whose livelihoods were destroyed by the “mostly peaceful” BLM riots of 2020. Because when you’ve accepted life in the margins, you’ve already lost, and all you can be is reactively indignant, outraged, and whilst you’re being outraged in the comments section hours then days after the event, the BBC is moving on, collecting cash, shitting it upon the least talented but most righteously opinionated, and as these broken people snort and vomit their way through it, they are going madder.
Say Megan Markle comes out soon and says, “well, fuck it, I think I’ll just convert to Islam.” What do you think the BBC’s response will be? Not: “Heavens, this is not good.” No. “I think,” a correspondent will tell a panel - all who agree with him or her by the way - “that being the head of the Church of England, the King could do with some religious diversity, so, yes, altogether a wonderful day for minorities.”
Admittedly its not something I would expect fellow South Africans to consider; how grateful we should be for the absence of a BBC in full social justice flight. In that transition between 2005 and 2009 one incident illustrated that in the place of sneering judgment with the express purpose of social engineering leading to destruction, uselessness and calamity would prevail in South Africa - and in hindsight, it was glorious reassurance. Prescient too. In October 2008, the then Chairman of Finance Portfolio Committee in Parliament was being interviewed on SABC 2 but the chair upon which sat Nhlanhla Nene wasn’t having any of it. The thing cracked, and Nhlanhla tried to retain composure but it was too late. It collapsed beneath him, and the last thing viewers saw were his little arms hitting the desk on their way down, followed by an expression of horror on the interviewer’s face.
*Coming Wednesday 13th December, Chapter 5: Valkenburg