Even in a day of instant media, for many when it comes to news, it remains 1956 and Richard Dimbelby is still watering his spaghetti tree . Yes, the hallowed BBC is where the television and radio news begins and ends for many too many, though not without cause. The BBC presents the most polished, professional looking and sounding reports of any news organisation in the world. The stories appear thorough and indeed many though certainly not all of the reports are just that. I watch the BBC and will continue to do so, but this certainly does not mean that BBC News is a hallowed organisation whose word ought to be not only the first but the last in news. Once one gets past readers who intrinsically know the correct pronunciations of opposition Bangladeshi MPs who died in 1984 and a seemingly infinite knowledge of remote Congolese villages enraptured in three man civil wars; The BBC’s ‘polite agenda’ often hampers the organisation from delivering stories that might upset the careful balance of left and right in the minds of many pseudo-intellectual segments of the public. The BBC has always been something of a gentleman’s club, the organisation has its own rules, its own etiquette , its own official dictates regarding what to call disputed place names and how to say foreign words that would un-pronounceable to even the most donnish librarian. But this attitude also attempts to fit news into carefully centred lest rigid paradigms of right and left. There’s no place for extremism in BBC News, even though extremism exists in the world to-day far more than it did during the Cold War. There’s no room for interviewing and exploring the political and military positions of seemingly vile leaders; people engaged in the kinds of behaviour that most would condemn, but still all have the right if not duty to enquire about.
More ominously, the BBC exercises from its world coverage, anything that challenges a broadly pro-western, pro-democracy, pro-NATO, pro-Council of Europe, pro-human rights point of view. Let me be clear; some of these things are good. The Council of Europe(quite apart from the EU Council) is an overall decent however impotent organisation, one whose aims for the world are on the whole admirable. Human rights and democracy are also preferable to suppression and autocracy—on this premise, most are agreed. But this does not mean the news should simply ignore or demonise through innuendo, people and regimes in the world that are deemed to be outside the Council of Europe human rights esprit de corps.
In recent years, the trend of taking a pointed negative tone with anti-European regimes has dangerously metamorphosed into a kind of patronising paranoia in the reporting of both home and foreign political affairs. Reports on political movements apart from the three traditional parties is virtually non-existent with the somewhat queer exception offering inflated publicity of the BNP—this especially in the last general election. The BBC have a pornographic fascination with this irrelevant party and exploit its existence to portray all parties outside of the Con-Lib-Lab consensus as comically absurd as the BNP are. The truth is, the majority of moderate people are fed up with the political status quo. They are turning to UKIP on the right and the Greens on the left or away from politics all together. Even nationalist parties ought to get their due, even though I find these parties even more reprehensible than the BNP.
Worst of all though are BBC reports on the EU. The EU is a cryptic, somewhat mysterious and endlessly convoluted organisation; but this does not mean reports on EU affairs, affairs which affect 75pct of all UK law, ought to be dull and confused. When the BBC devote time to the EU it’s usually at three in the morning on a Tuesday when an obscure EPP MEP from Denmark debates an aubergine and a tabby cat on reform of pensions for window cleaners in Antwerp. Yet whilst the BBC are attempting(either wantonly or due to lack of sound judgement ) to kill interest in the EU via intellectual attrition, some very crucial things are transpiring. The EU is attempting to take away from both the private sector and nation-sates, the right to regulate financial markets, The European Arrest Warrant has seen people seized from their homes held in conditions of unmitigated squalor, conditions that would but considered un-fit for human habitation by the Geneva Conventions—all without what would pass for proper evidence. Beginning this year, police from any EU member state can be ordered by police from any other member state to spy on their own citizens; making no allowance for national privacy laws. The EU is forcing countries into austerity measures when the EU itself refuses to allow her own books to be audited whilst continuing to pay pensions that are more generous than those of any national civil service or indeed any nation-state’s parliament in Europe. Suddenly the EU isn’t as boring as it is unquestionably significant. But BBC viewers and listeners would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Thorough reports on both sides of opinion on Europe, the non-Western world and military struggles in far off places are easily found on the web and indeed in many newspapers. Yet the BBC maintain an iron grip on sophisticated digital as well as broadcast reporting, leaving many in the dark when it comes to crucial matters affecting the world.
What then is a viable alternative? Sky News is simply the BBC hosted by reporters with poor A-levels. ITV News as perversely atrocious and boorish as Saudi hard pornography. But then there’s RT, a source for television news that I find myself turning to with ever more frequency. RT is everything the BBC is not—for better and for worse. The reporters aren’t as well dressed, the studios not as sleek, the music less dramatic, some readers are speaking English as a 3rd language—but when one sets style to one side, RT’s true value is lain bear. RT’s value is substance.
RT was set up in order to offer a European audience, perspectives on world events from beyond the cocoon of consensus land. RT forsakes the BBC’s polite agenda and interviews some of the world’s most intelligent, rogue, controversial, dangerous but also most respected figures—RT take no prisoners in this respect. I take no pride in saying this but 24 hour BBC News reports have become rather provincial in recent years—very recent years in fact. Reports about a small time murderer, imprisoned paedophile, moronic pop star or worse yet reports that ‘David Miliband is going to make an announcement’ when the world would be perfectly happy to hear other stories until he has made his announcement; are just some of the problems with an increasingly provincial if not parochial BBC.
RT by contrast devote segments often of up to fifteen minutes in length to debate crucial matters of world affairs with historians, economists, authors and eloquent politicians including from opposition movements little known anywhere in Europe or the UK. RT’s reports on Europe are un-afraid to show the cracks in the EU’s armour, something the BBC simply don’t like to do. The European Question has two sides. There’s the ‘everything is fine, we know what we’re doing, Europe as she stands is the only way forward’, point of view. But then there are voices of Euroscepticism, voices coming from sources as diverse as concerned liberals, from traditional conservatives, from trade unionists, from nationalistic parties, from Communists, from Governments such as the Czech and Polish Government and now even the German opposition—and RT gives all of these people, people as diverse as Lord Dartmouth of UKIP to the Czech President. The depth and breadth of RT’s reporting is something that is simply no longer seen on the carefully packaged BBC, even on News Night , I sometimes watch and wonder if it’s little more than tabloid journalism read by people who can pronounce obscure names in Tagalog whilst eating an unripe mango.
Reports from the Russian sphere are often seen as RT’s strongest area. In this area, coverage of utterly intriguing as well as highly relevant regional conflicts are presented in a 24 hour format, conflicts whose existence often doesn’t even make it to many English language websites, let alone the BBC. RT is not by any means pro-Kremlin. Yes, it tends towards scepticism of radical nationalist movements in the Russian sphere just as inversely the BBC harbours instinctually anti-Kremlin and anti-Putin/anti-Medvedev slants. But whilst the BBC is content to derived Russia in the misleading and inaccurate lexicon of the Cold War, RT delve far deeper. For the BBC, Russia is a kind of anti-democratic backwater, RT expose the real Russia; a state reclaiming her traditional greatness, but also a state going through a long transitional period—just as Western Europe did after the World Wars. RT interview leaders and opposition politicians and intellects from all of the regions and republics of the Russian sphere. They report on internal Russian affairs in a manner that is deeply more thorough and considered than anything in the West—exposing European observers to names of Russian opposition leaders whose side they’ve taken without even knowing their names. Seeing the real face of the Russian opposition ought to be rather telling to many in Europe. Those who oppose Putin and Medvedev are not all liberal minded cosmopolitans with an eye to Europe. Many are on the fringes of such dangerous extremes to the extent that their presence in political life would be anathema in any European nation-state.
But RT’s extra-European coverage extends far beyond the Russian realms. In a move that ought to shame the BBC, who have been reporting in India since the BEEB’s inception; RT offer a far more comprehensive view of Indian politics and social affairs and one can same the same of BBC reports into East Asian politics and social affairs. RT wisely forsake sound bite reporting and elaborate filmed reports for in depth interviews with people who have considerable expertise in regional politics, as well as interviews with first hand witnesses of prominent events round the world. In an age where the world is more interconnected than ever before, it’s rather necessary to have a news outlet who look beyond London, Brussels, Paris and Berlin to other regions from South America to Central Asia.
I’d like also to dispel another rumour about RT. RT is not an arm of the Kremlin. It is a private organisation whom the Russian Government along with many international charities and grants, fund. The BBC gets vastly more money from the British Government than RT do from the Russian Government. I’ll not pretend the BBC will soon break out of their polite, far too polite reporting habits, but RT does signal one thing. The BBC has for decades been the most widely spread media outlet for news across the globe. No other service, not Sky, not Al-Jazera not CNN come close to having the reach of the BBC. But with RT, Russia have told the world that their information culture has not only entered this new information age, but has done so in a manner that is more in depth than the BBC or Sky, vastly more transparent than Al-Jazera and far more wide ranging than CNN.
The next time Jeremy Paxman starts complaining about the weather, I hope many a viewer will stich to where the real news has in great part gone—to Russia With Love.
Hitler and Stalin,
1967 was something of a watershed year for modern music. In many ways it was the most important year for music, particularly in the UK, since the end of the War. The year witnessed monumental debut albums by Pink Floyd, The Nice and Procol Harum in addition to The Beatles, Stones and Kinks branching out from blues roots into the neo-classical territory of the younger generations. In many ways though the most lucid and thorough album of this year was Days of Future Passed by The Moody Blues. 
In the history of states, there is little more dangerous a tractate; little more dangerous a political philosophy than the notion of popular sovereignty. Here historically reliable conceptions of a state being a permanent institution changeable only by mutual consent, legally recognised treaty, or the enforced consequences of a war is thrown into a frenzied scrap-heap in favour of a vastly more dangerous tenant—one of permanent flux. Popular sovereignty deprives great states of maintaining an existence that is based on anything more than the mathematical calculation of whim, in haphazardly selected geographical units. To the advocate of popular sovereignty, a demos is not a matter of political anthropology but one of geographical selection, of race or worst of all of a anarchistic formula that defies the bounds of even pseudo-science. Summarily and most crucially; to the advocate of popular sovereignty the state exists not as a matter of fact but as a matter of choice; not as a matter of law but as a matter of metaphysical will. The dangers of this ought to be self-evident; but shall be enumerated in several paragraphs hence.