Tony Hall, the head of the BBC, is stepping down from his job: the latest hugely satisfying and thoroughly deserved victim of ‘Get woke, go broke.’
In his parting statement, Lord Hall declared that he felt the BBC had become a ‘very different organisation’ during his seven years’ tenure. It was, he claimed, ‘more innovative, more open, more inclusive, more efficient [and] more commercially aware.’
This is, of course, mostly rubbish.
Sure the BBC has definitely become more obsessed — at the expense of quality — with hitting its diversity and gender equality targets, so has arguably become more ‘inclusive’.
But it is a shadow of the organisation it once was.
The rot set in long before Lord Hall inherited the job. As a former BBC news trainee turned editor, then later chief executive — he joined in 1973 — Tony Hall really ought to have been a safe pair of hands to restore the BBC’s tarnished reputation, after such scandals as the ones involving its star children’s presenters Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris.
But the BBC’s decline only seemed to accelerate under his tenure, culminating in the recent crazed decision to launch a whole year’s worth of special programming promoting climate hysteria.
Of course, there’s no reason why Britain’s national broadcaster shouldn’t run programming of an environmentalist bent, especially with its unrivalled BBC Bristol wildlife photography crews.
But unfortunately, the BBC is — and long has been — ideologically incapable of providing a counter to the relentless wave of climate hysteria.
It fetishes diversity, but the one form of diversity it won’t allow is the only sort that matters: diversity of viewpoints.
The BBC is pro-Palestine, anti-Israel; pro-Hillary and anti-Trump; pro-Remain and anti-Brexit; pro-Fully Automated Luxury Communism and anti-Free Markets. The list goes on and on: on every geopolitical issue you know exactly what the BBC’s stance is going to be because it’s the one that reflects the bien-pensant Weltanschauung of its Guardian-recruited staffers. Once there were a few maverick right-wing voices to leaven the mix. Not any more.
“If I followed my heart I would genuinely never want to leave,” Lord Hall has declared. Which is probably code for: “I had to jump – otherwise they would have pushed me.’
Rumour has it that Lord Hall was keen to stay but that Prime Minister Boris Johnson may have wanted to make an example of him in order to show just how dimly the government views the BBC’s relentless wokeness.
During the general election, Conservative MPs were encouraged to boycott the BBC’s flagship radio political programme Today because of its relentless liberal bias.
Perhaps this shot across the bows will encourage Lord Hall’s successor to institute some necessary reforms.
Unlikely though. Far more likely is that Lord Hall’s successor will be non-white, female and so impeccably PC that all the few remaining non-woke people who still pay their licence fee will give up and move to Amazon Prime or Netflix instead.
The truth is that the BBC is quite beyond redemption. It has got woke and the sooner it goes broke the better. Destroy all its buildings, sack all its employees, and salt the earth. BBC Delenda Est.