Ms Kay is not happy again. She still views the win as a loss for Davis, rather than a win for Arnie because people wanted him to.
More interestingly, even if one supports the argument that a narrowly-based, high culture state broadcaster is permissible to allow people to better themselves (don’t scoff too much – I believe this is the thesis of Rose’s ‘Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes’ – and the market does not appear to be very efficient at giving poor people the high culture that the better-off can afford to consume – at extreme public subsidy too I might add), even if one allows this, should a state broadcaster’s role include opinion at all?
Perhaps this is where it has gone wrong – the BBC worked all those long years ago when it provided cold news (and was relied on as the fact source of record) and also high-culture plays and opera etc (and I dare say I am happy that there might have been some miners’ children in the impoverished North who learnt about Beethoven that way). The private sector is better at the BBC at providing opinion, and can do it more quickly and more efficiently. Why should the BBC provide opinion at all?
This is a quick fix, because the soft-left bias corrodes its news reporting as well as its editorial, but some proper guidelines and real editing could go a long way to fixing that. Of course, once it was made to spin off to the private sector all of the commerical tat it produces, subsidised by us, in direct competiton with the other TV channels (like EastEnders and 500 dreary home improvement shows) and dumped all of its new, sloppily researched and error-ridden, left-leaning ‘gotcha’ attack investigative journalism (that appears to have had tragic effects), it would have much more time to ensuring that its news was sober and sensible. Why was the British public happy for BT to float (another dinosaur from the bad old days of socialist Britain), yet the defunct NHS and multiple-tentacled Marxist juggernaut that is the BBC are sacred cows? (extreme mixed metaphor alert there)
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