BBC carries ancient and incurable cancer of British envy of US

The revelation by a whistle-blower, which a review of news film confirms, that the BBC deliberately spliced what it represented as an accurate excerpt of a speech by President Trump on January 6, 2021, to make it sound that he was encouraging his followers to attack, invade, and vandalise the United States Capitol demonstrates what every informed viewer and listener of the BBC news has known for decades: Its reporting on United States politics, amongst many other subjects, is profoundly dishonest and unprofessional. The BBC does have excellent programming at times, but it has never institutionally outgrown the megalomania of its founder, Lord Reith, who regularly derided even Winston Churchill with fierce vulgarity, and, subsidised as it is, the BBC has never outgrown Reith’s insolent monopolistic attitude.

The two greatest sacred cows in the United Kingdom are the BBC and the National Health Service and neither of them is remotely deserving of the veneration that they receive. The BBC news is probably the most influential source of information in the country and it is virulently anti-American, overtly anti-Semitic, constantly performs gymnastic acts of political correctness and wokeness, both in the selection of personnel and of news items and in the almost unwavering slant of its coverage of public policy issues. The National Health Service has become a notorious political liability and is an uncompetitively inefficient provider of healthcare. The fact that it was the first genuine universal healthcare system in an advanced industrial country is a status upon which it has coasted to the point of levitation, as the BBC has on Reith’s extravagant claims of pristine impartiality for public broadcasting, for many decades.

Anyone with access to the internet may call up President Trump’s remarks at the Ellipse, adjacent to the White House, on January 6, 2021. It has been the subject of a spurious attempted impeachment of him in an office that he no longer occupied because of the expiry of his first term as president, as well as extensive legal proceedings and Congressional hearings. There is absolutely no debate or possible contradiction that President Trump urged his followers to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically.” Nor is there any possible dispute that he feared that some hooligans would attach themselves to the gathering of approximately 250,000 of his law-abiding followers and create an incident. For that reason he offered the Mayor of Washington Muriel Bowser, and the then Speaker of the House of Representatives (who is ultimately in charge of the Capitol Police), Nancy Pelosi, up to 20,000 national guardsmen to assure the security of the Capital. This offer was declined and it has since come to light that a number of eminent Democratic officeholders were hoping that a sufficient level of disorder would prevail that Trump could be permanently smeared as an insurrectionist.

Over a thousand people were detained without trial for up to two years as alleged suspects of trespass and worse misconduct at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They were laboriously subjected to the standard techniques of US prosecutors, in notorious defiance of several sections of the Bill of Rights, and threatened with indictments for dire offenses unless they were able to jog their memories and produce inculpatory evidence against members of the administration and particularly the President himself, for the recollection of which they would receive a minimal prosecution and an absolute guarantee against prosecution for perjury. This is the core of the American prosecution system and the single greatest reason why the United States has five per cent of the world’s population and approximately 25 per cent of its incarcerated people, and why the United States is not really by traditional British standards a society of laws. These techniques were unavailing and not one shred of evidence has ever been adduced that the President or anyone entitled to act in his name incited or even wished for the unseemly events at the Capitol on that day.

The failed attempt to smear Trump as someone who aspired to the violent overthrow of the government and the rejection of a highly questionable but ostensible presidential election result, escalated to spurious indictments. President Trump was acquitted by 78 million American voters and the attempt to prosecute him on various counts including culpability in the events at the Capitol has since been exposed by meticulous legal and congressional examination as a monstrous fraud, one of many that has been perpetrated uniquely in American history against this President.

The American system is essentially a jungle masquerading as a civilised legal system where the prosecutors and the defendants meet on a level playing field. But it is a democratic country and the American public has the right to organise its government anyway it wishes. The BBC on the other hand has never ceased, in over a century, to wave about the holy virtue of public broadcasting as it practices it and to proclaim itself to be the premier and most reliable and impartial source of news in the world. It is in fact the principal carrier of the ancient and incurable cancer of British envy of the United States: A soul-destroying resentment of the unprecedented rise of that country to overwhelming worldwide influence and the presentation of that rise as garish, corrupt, and a disrespectful usurpation of the status of Britain in the world. Occasionally the BBC, like other foreign media outlets, is charmed by an elegant American leader, Roosevelt or Kennedy,  (even briefly Obama), but generally the BBC leads the British in a chorus of ungrateful hypocrisy and snobbery in its attitude to everything in America except the domestic extreme Left.

This incident of deliberately altering the President’s remarks to his followers excavates a new low in the dishonesty of the BBC’s American coverage, the greatest single failure in its standard news coverage, except for its outright hatred of the Jewish state and its thinly disguised reservations about Jews generally. The BBC news service should be cleaned out and required to meet a reasonable standard of impartiality. But anyone waiting for such a long overdue reform to take place is almost certain to be disappointed. Lord Reith has been dead for over 50 years but his implacable bigotry is imperishable.