Random Walk: On the BBC, Torquemada, Churches, Sex, Etc.

The Richmond [VA] Times-Dispatch ^ | October 5, 2003 | Ross Mackenzie

[quidnunc]

During Isabel, a lot of things went down besides trees. Among them …

• The vaunted reputation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has taken major hits. Long esteemed by the intellectually smug as the ultimate in electronic broadcasting objectivity, the BBC has been caught with its ideological underwear showing in the matter of Iraq intelligence and the Blair government. Broadcasts by the BBC, an entity heavily funded by the government, almost brought the government down. Now a BBC principal has admitted he failed to acknowledge errors, and the BBC's underlying leftism is being seen for what it is.

• Which brings up public broadcasting in the United States. National Public Radio (NPR) may be doing better than the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and 349 public television stations, variously subsidized by the federal government and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here, too, the pious see no bias. Yet despite its certain virtues, public broadcasting is skewed undeniably left — as the BBC has now been revealed to be. And the operative question here, as in Britain, remains: What prudent rationale defends government-funded broadcasting, or government-funded newspapers for that matter, in free societies brimming with vibrant competitive media?

• Remember avuncular Walter Cronkite, for years the oh-so-objective face and voice of CBS television news? He's now letting his bias show as well. In his syndicated column last month he scrivened this immoderation:

Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada was largely responsible for … [the] torture and the burning of heretics — Muslims in particular. Now, of course, I am not accusing the Attorney General of pulling out anyone's fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don't know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard's spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft's Department of Justice.

• So awful have D.C.'s schools become that even some holdouts are beginning to see the light. Mayor Anthony Williams likens the 67,000-student system to the disaster that was Hurricane Isabel. He wants a congressionally funded voucher plan and charter schools. He also wants to strip his school board of power and take direct control of the schools. All this in the face of resistance from the education lobby and teachers' unions — and all before it's too late, which it already may be.

• Episcopal muckety-mucks will convene twice this month to debate, among other things, the future of their church — riven by issues relating to the sanctioning of homosexual hierarchs and the blessing of homosexual union (a nicety for homosexual marriage). The issues have driven the church to schism, with lefties declaring mere moderates are incapable of understanding the intellectual complexities (somersaults?) compelling the church's homosexual embrace.

-snip-

[Torie]

A Random Walk ... , the first edition of which I read in Business School as a young man about 30 years ago. Much has validated the theses of the book since then.

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