The BBC, Russia, and Unreality

BBC coverage within Russia has taken a rather snarky tone for some time. They're not really reports as much as they are snide editorials. Secular Humanism is the religion of modern culture and the BBC advocates for this - even if they would deny it. Classical Liberalism is the default political theory, even though there's no real basis for assuming this within a secular worldview. They can't appeal to any authority and in a contest of empirical evidence the system is far from unassailable even though they seem to think so. One would think that an international news outlet would be a little more cynical regarding the history of democracy and liberalism in the West, but after all we are talking about a kind of faith - even if it's a vain and empty one.

Russia is demonised because it has rejected Liberalism and has embraced authoritarianism, and not a few liberal states are moving in that direction. The BBC seems to think that Western governments are answerable to the rule of law - once again, I think they need to revisit their archives. I suppose they would say that Western governments haven't always 'lived up to' the values they profess but little by little things are getting better. Well, such a statement (I think) can be easily if not summarily refuted.

Recently the BBC ran a few reports comparing Putin's Russia to Orwell's 1984 and spoke of a kind of 'unreality' that exists in Russia. The BBC reporter (or commentator) spoke of how news media in Russia present the Ukraine invasion as an act of self-defense (or should we say preemptive war?) and that it's presented as if Russia is 'liberating' Ukraine. What absurdity! People believe this stuff that these news outlets report. It's like they're living in Orwell-world!

I sat there shaking my head as I listened to the report. Again, one would think a serious outlet like the BBC might do a little better or be a bit more introspective. But in reality this where outlets like the BBC so glaringly fail. They get caught up in narratives that happen to fit their ideology - in this case Putin is the embodiment of evil and so his narratives are prima facie absurd.

But in 2003 the United Kingdom under Tony Blair embraced the Bush narrative that attacking Iraq was effectively an act of self-defence (packaged as preemptive war) and that the Coalition of the Willing (there's an Orwellianism for you) was 'liberating' the people of Iraq.

There were plenty of people at the time who rejected this patently farcical narrative and believe me - we felt like we were living in an Orwellian world of unreality. And the BBC was certainly part of this propaganda. Their coverage was hardly adversarial if better than some of the worst commercial outlets in the United States.

The Bush narrative was an absurdity and subsequent investigations have revealed it as a fraud from start to finish. Western media coverage connected to that episode can only be described as journalistic malpractice.

Maybe some would say the same about Russia. There are certainly farcical elements to Putin's narrative and yet there's far more truth to it than anything put forward by the Americans or their British cronies in the wake of 11 September, 2001. This is not to defend or justify Putin's actions. Far from it. They constitute murder but if Putin is a war criminal then certainly men like Bush, Cheney, Blair, and the late Rumsfeld also belong on the dock - along with basically every other US president going back more than a century.

It's right to counter Putin's narratives but also be sceptical with regard to the likes of Biden and Stoltenberg - and certainly Zelenskiy. But that's not what the BBC is doing. The outlet is a great resource for international news - we have nothing like it in the United States, where there's no market for it as most people can't even find their way around a world map. And yet the BBC is deeply flawed and of limited value. I listen to the World Service almost daily and yet I also know that when it comes to certain stories related to geopolitics or gender (among other things), their reporting must be taken with a pinch of salt and in other cases the reporting veers into unreality and must therefore be viewed with no small degree of scepticism and even cynicism.