BBC bias: according to Paul Dacre

Background briefing: a very interesting speach from a prominent newspaper editor.

From CFNews: Daily Mail Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre used a rare public speech last week - the Hugh Cudlipp lecture at the London College of Communications - to savage the BBC, accusing it 'under a figleaf of impartiality' of imposing its world view.

'Firstly, consider the sheer size of the corporation which is, despite its bleating about being underfunded, a conglomerate that employs 26,000 people, has a vast £3.2bn budget, and thinks nothing of paying £18m to a chat show host. Then consider this: the BBC employs more journalists and their support staff - 3,500 - and spends more on them than do all the national daily newspapers put together. Pervasiveness? Where there was once just a handful of channels, the BBC now has an awesome stranglehold on the airwaves reaching into every home every hour of the day. Like an amoeba, that reproduces itself by fission, the corporation just grows and grows. On TV there's BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, News 24 and BBC World. Then there's Radios One, Two, Three, Four, Five Live, Five Live Sports Extra, 1Xtra, BBC 6Music, BBC7, BBC Asian Network and, of course, the BBC World Service. On the web, bbc.co.uk has a staggering 53 per cent of the British online audience and the corporation has just earmarked a £350m war-chest to expand into social networking on the internet

The BBC has 15 regional TV services across England plus 40 local radio stations and now - in a move that has huge implications for newspapers - is considering launching over 60 local TV news stations across the UK … But it's not the BBC's ubiquity, so much greater than Fleet Street's, that is worrying but its power to impose - under the figleaf of impartiality - its own world view …What really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small 'c', which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons

Thus it exercises a kind of cultural Marxism in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads

Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large, BBC journalism starts from the premise of left wing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain's past and British values, America, Ulster Unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity, and family values.

Like The Guardian's, the BBC's journalists, insulated from real competition, believe that only their world view constitutes moderate, sensible and decent opinion. Any dissenting views - particularly those held by popular papers - are therefore considered, by definition, to be extreme and morally beyond the pale …[Press Gazette]