How can BBC viewers and listeners possibly develop a considered view of the merits of political parties amid such flagrant dishonesty and misrepresentation. No wonder an early 2007 survey by the UK media regulator Ofcom revealed that almost half of viewers - 46 per cent - consider BBC1's news coverage biased. And although 54 per cent still think, frighteningly enough, that the BBC is impartial, this figure has fallen from 77 per cent in 2002.

In response to this gradual awakening to the great license-fee rip-off/betrayal and increased questioning about the point of the BBC's very existence, the BBC Trust has commissioned a review by researchers at Cardiff University to probe the claims of bias. "The BBC is committed to providing impartial news and factual coverage across the UK," yawned the chairman of the Trust's editorial standards committee.

Familiar tale

All of this will sound depressingly familiar to readers everywhere. Especially in those countries with a major "public service" broadcaster.

The Irish, for instance, will recognise the Donnybrook "Dublin 4 mentality" of the metropolitan elite who dominate the airwaves of their national broadcaster RTE, for which they, too, pay an annual license-fee to endure unrepresentative, anti-Catholic outpourings. For their part, Australians will identify the BBC as a mirror-image of their own government-funded ABC. Effectively a talking-shop for consenting liberals, even token ABC conservatives turn out to be closet liberals. (Like one Michael Duffy, given a weekly radio show to address in some small way the overwhelming Leftism of so many ABC presenters, who turns out to be a former anarchist who declared last year that he would give his first-ever vote in an Australian election to the far-Left Greens!)

Pilloried by some as standing for "Anything But Christianity," an incident involving Play School, the flagship ABC programme for infants, is indicative. In 2004 the show featured a storyline about a fictional little girl with "two mums," causing three government ministers to complain furiously to the ABC's Managing Director. The head of children's television retorted that the segment in which the lesbian 'mums' featured "provides an opportunity to show children the wider world."

Such warping of reality is encapsulated in the climate change fiasco, where the non-debate boils down to whether global warming will fry us or roast us. As with the BBC, in this arena ABC presenters and journalists often display a hatred of even the notion of balance. Its chief science presenter, Robyn Williams, rarely has sceptics on his Science Show. He is so unused to listening to counter-arguments that he repeats all the Chicken Little 'sky is falling' nonsense e.g. suggesting that a 100 metre rise in sea levels over the next century "is possible", without the slightest suspicion he could be contradicted, even by his own politically correct sources - like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicts seas to rise this century by 59cm at worst. He gets away with such wildly embarrassing errors because, as one commentator pointed out, "Which journalist will dare rebuke him when even the ABC's one conservative now votes for the Greens?"

In BBC-like fashion, a new Managing Director vowed in 2007 to act on complaints of bias and look for "further diversity of voices - ensuring the ABC is the town square where debate can flourish." A new show soon followed which would "ensure that on contentious issues of the day, there is opportunity for the full range of opinions and perspectives to be heard." It is called Difference of Opinion. Only one problem: it doesn't offer one! An old die-hard liberal, Jeff McMullen, was pulled out of broadcasting retirement to host the show and natter with three fellow liberals before a be-sandaled audience about the joys of "multiculturalism" or (in drought-stricken Australia) the evils of dams and nature-wrecking farmers etc. etc., without fear of contradiction save for one conservative voice on any given programme.

Commenting on such "barely token efforts at balance," Andrew Bolt, the one-token-conservative on ABC television's

Insiders and "invariably outnumbered by panellists on the Left," says: "I can think of only one conservative presenter in the entire ABC network."

And so, like the BBC-Labour nexus, the ABC is known as the Australian Labor Party (different spelling, same ideology) in disguise, with its presenters and celebrities moving seamlessly from their supposed impartial "public service broadcasting" to ALP service at federal and state levels.

Maxine McKew, the former political commentator who unseated Prime Minister John Howard at the last election, is the fourth reporter from the ABC's flagship 7.30 Report to morph into a Labor politician. An astonishing record not remotely matched by any other station. The host of the show himself, Kerry O'Brien, was Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's former press secretary. Moreover, his fill-ins on the programme have included not only McKew (who just happens to be married to a former national secretary of the Labor Party) but also Alan Carpenter (the current Labor Premier of Western Australia), Clare Martin (Labor's former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory) and Mary Delahunty (who retired last year as a Labor minister in Victoria). There are numerous other Labor politicians, such as ex-NSW premier Bob Carr and various press secretaries to Labor leaders, who were ABC journalists at one time or another. On the other hand, very few ABC staff have become politicians with the conservative Liberal Party.

The stuff of Banana Republics and Communist Gulags, this Big Media-Big Government conflict of interest should and does exasperate many Australian taxpayers. Many more, however, seem inured to the corrupting relationship and passively absorb the bias unfolding on their screens with a shrug. Perhaps a British-sized $350 per year license-fee might excite them?

Commercial clones

The mainstream media outlets, however, are universally partial. Which is to say that even readers without a local tradition of publicly-funded national broadcasting will find the description thus far instantly recognisable. Public broadcasters have a particular duty to be balanced, yet today they offer the same politically correct liberal-Left ideology as the major commercial broadcast and print media: acting together as one massive public-relations arm of government - promoting big government solutions to problems real or imaginary; all in uniform rebellion against the Creator, His Church and the natural law.

In 1999, American Big Media press lawyer Bruce Sandford tackled the same problem of media credibility currently besetting the BBC in his Don't Shoot the Messenger: How our growing hatred of the media threatens free speech for all of us [The Free Press]. He tries hard to be even-handed as he looks for the causes of the "canyon of distrust" and ever declining readership of America's daily newspapers. And yet despite his interesting account of the history of "yellow [tabloid] journalism" in the U.S., his conclusion that "There is no more 'sensationalism' or 'bias' in the media today than there ever was" rang hollow. "I do not think that bias is a big problem in American newspapers," a former editor tells him. "I think there are biased reporters; I think there are crooked lawyers." Sandford readily concurs, beating the drum for modern scribes. Journalists," he assures us, "do care. They have ideals, curiosity, a longing to contribute to a better understanding of the planet, hopefully its improvement. Ever buoyantly they research the human condition. Bravely they tell us things we would prefer not to hear." And, doubtless, some still do.

Several years later, however, Bernard Goldberg's Bias [Regnery Publishing, 2002] and its sequel Arrogance [Warner Books, 2003] shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, blasting Sandford's lame defence of modern media to smithereens and confirming in articulate detail the long-held concerns of untold millions of Americans. A winner of seven Emmy awards who served nearly thirty years as a reporter and producer for CBS News, Goldberg blew the whistle on rampant, institutionalised liberal bias in the newsrooms of America's big media conglomerates: "I know the business, and I know what they don't want the public to see."

You bet! From the moment that he first went public with an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 February 1996, after failing to get a response to concerns he had voiced within CBS about slanted news coverage, the veteran reporter became persona non grata with all his liberal media friends, including stars like Dan Rather. "You can talk about many things when you work for the big network news operations," he writes, "but liberal bias is not one of them. My professional life was turned upside down. I became radioactive. People I had known and worked with for years stopped talking to me."

As a self-professed "old-fashioned liberal," inclined to support 'gay marriage' and so forth but open to argument on all such issues, Goldberg's testimony is particularly damning. Yet even though his 1996 article only attacked liberal bias, not liberal values, he was sidelined and eventually forced out of CBS within four years. When the article became a book and Bias was released in December 2001, it was widely reported around the world and Goldberg discussed it in on "about 400 radio programs" and did "about 40 cable TV" interviews across American. Yet even as their own viewers were turning the book into a bestseller, CBS, ABC and NBS News refused to mention the book or have Goldberg on any shows to discuss it. This, as Goldberg observes, is indicative of "how biased these people who say they are not biased really are."

With his up-close-and-personal first-hand experience of twenty-eight years on the inside, Goldberg describes an utterly delusional and arrogant News Mafia which cannot conceive the possibility that they could be wrong or that their overwhelming liberal prejudice might influence what they report.

Nefarious Times

The Godfather directing and perpetuating this liberal Mafia stranglehold is the fiercely ideological New York Times.

A news-gathering conglomerate at the vanguard of political correctness and viscerally anti-Christian, this paper, which 99.5% of the American people do not read, "is still the most influential newspaper in America," Goldberg confirms, "because the most influential people in America do, in fact, read it." Not only because its columns are syndicated to hundreds of local papers around the country, but mostly because "it sets the agenda for so many other news outlets, especially the [TV] networks where most Americans get their world and national news. The fact is, the Big Three news networks wouldn't know what to put on the air without it."

It seems that TV news types have so little respect for their own news judgement that they are literally paralysed until the Times breaks or confirms a story. One veteran CBS News reporter phoned his editor in New York to offer him a live report of the 1971 LA earthquake while the room he was in and the desk he was hiding beneath were still shaking. He was told to hang on for a moment. When the editor returned to the phone he said, "I don't see anything about any earthquake on the [news] wires." This reporter had beaten the wires - beaten everybody - but it wasn't in print so it hadn't happened. A few minutes later, when the story hit the wires, it became real news and the reporter got on the air. That is power!

The Times, therefore, determines what is news and what is not. "If the Times ignores a story - or a book or a social trend or an idea - then it invisible," says Goldberg. But what it deems an important story is carried everywhere, in America and throughout the world, with its legendary liberal slant, which is shameless. According to the late Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, the first person to trumpet and forensically expose liberal bias in Big Media, the Times' national political correspondent Richard Berke spoke at a gathering of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, where he assured them that the Times would remain very receptive to the 'gay' agenda because "three-fourths of those who regularly attend the daily meetings that determine what will be on the front page of the Times the next morning are 'not-so-closeted' homosexuals."

Readership of the Times is diminishing, but the influence it exerts is as enormous as ever. "As long as the rest of the mainstream media keep depending on the Times to define what's news," its former culture editor, Hilton Kramer, points out, "its power will remain." This allows the Times to distort reality on a daily basis: "to write the news it wants to see," as New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Sullivan put it.

Examples of this arrogance are legion. On one occasion it literally turned a prominent supporter of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, Henry Kissinger, into an opponent. The Washington Times pointed out that other lesser know Republicans had actually broken ranks, but because they didn't have Kissinger's worldwide prestige the Times simply "kidnapped Kissinger's name and reputation on behalf of its opposition to the President's strategy."

The News Mafia, in turn, mimic their morally and intellectually corrupt Godfather in promoting a systematic falsification of major social and cultural issues to fit their jaundiced worldview, damaging and destabilising individuals, communities and nations. We know about abortion, but take the early manipulation and politicisation of the AIDS virus, which in terms of epochal fraud ranks alongside the man-made global-warming con of our day.

The AIDS scam

Goldberg explains how the media co-operated with 'gay' activists to "scare the hell out of straight America" by persuading everyone "that gays and junkies were only the first wave, that heterosexuals were next, then the nation surely would demand that the government put all its efforts into finding a cure or a vaccine to combat this deadly disease.... The battle cry was a clear as can be: no one is safe anymore!... While AIDS was devastating minority and gay communities in America, while it was leaving Middle America virtually untouched, the news stories conjured up some other reality. [...] Despite evidence to the contrary - heterosexuals were not falling by the wayside like junkies or gay men - the press, especially TV, loved the 'No One is Safe Anymore' story. [...] The primary myth was that the disease ... was epidemic among non-drug-abusing heterosexuals."

"But after the virus was around for a while," Goldberg continues, "I started to wonder: where are all these straight Americans with AIDS? ... where was the epidemic... There was no escaping the fact that the news I was getting from the press and TV didn't jibe with reality." Statistics from a 1992 Center for Media and Public Affairs study confirmed his observations. Comparing the information on TV with "real world data on AIDS victims compiled by the Center for Disease Control," the Center found that:

At the same time, the media demonised queries about how sufferers contracted AIDS. "How did you get it?" was quickly designated a "hostile question" which might offend the media-protected 'gay' species. In the course of deflecting attention from the sodomites, a 1992 prime-time CBS news program 48 Hours even did a show called "The Killer Next Door." A "monumentally dishonest" programme, according to Goldberg, it purported to show how AIDS was now a daily threat in white, conservative, middle-class Orange County - a place, the reporter solemnly intoned outside a local high school, "where, like so many other places in suburban America, children are waking to a frightening new fact of life: the shadow of certain death." As it happens, "The Killer Next Door" was produced by a 'gay' man dying of AIDS, which might account for why only one young man with HIV says he's 'gay' and the others interviewed "either tell 48 Hours they don't know how they got the virus or they don't say even that much. And, of course," concludes Goldberg, "48 Hours doesn't ask. Because the wrong answers could ruin the premise of the whole show. AIDS, after all, is 'The Killer Next Door'."

Since scaring the hell out of people makes for good television, the 48 Hours deception like all the AIDS scaremongering embodied that heady mixture which drives the media: deeply cynical and selfish motives overlaid with self-righteous liberal emotion. "If I've learned anything after all these years as a network newsman," insists Goldberg, "I know this much: never - never! - underestimate how low news executives, and TV people in general, will go in the pursuit of higher ratings." At the same time, "journalists on the Left define themselves by their compassion... AIDS gave them a great opportunity to care, to show how compassionate they could be... It was journalism by sentiment... They could unite us all. By God, they could integrate America!" As long as they told us AIDS was now "everybody's disease," all of us would be equals. "All of us would be equally susceptible to the killer virus that, as we were so often told, 'does not discriminate'."

Journalists did the job of 'gay' activists and got Washington to pay attention. They doubtless felt good about themselves - but they lost their credibility. And worse: by hindering the fundamental first step in controlling a communicable disease - determining who is getting it and how - their disinformation campaign did no favours to those in greater jeopardy.

The 'gay' clergy cover-up

A similar history is related about the media's rank collusion with the sodomites to turn the American clerical sexual abuse saga into a generic paedophile problem rather than a specific homosexual problem, by covering up independent findings that 81% of the cases involved homosexual clergy buggering teenage boys. Goldberg recalls how the extreme 'gay' lobby group GLAAD was "issuing bulletins and alerts almost daily, seeking to steer the direction of media coverage and encourage journalists not to stray too far from the approved line that the scandal was indeed about pedophilia." On cue, "Reporters overwhelmingly did what the gay activists wanted. When I did a Nexis search to find out the number of stories in which the networks used the term pedophile priests as opposed to gay or homosexual priests in their coverage of the scandal, the results were stunning." In respective order, the references to those terms numbered - CBS: 57-3-5; NBC: 31-5-2; ABC: 30-4-3.

During this non-coverage, a "principled journalist still young and idealistic enough to be surprised by what she saw happening" told Goldberg:

Even if many journalists were driven to expose the abuse scandal for the wrong reasons, to use it as a blunt instrument to beat the Church, we can still thank them for having done so. Only their nuclear blast of publicity proved capable of moving complicit and negligent shepherds. And yet, as 'gay' sympathiser Goldberg admits: "in the coverage of this issue, political correctness took precedence even over the welfare of adolescent kids."

Craven collusion

In the same fashion Goldberg quotes chapter and verse on how journalists accept and report as credible news even the most outrageously implausible statistics from the feminists, which all "fit the preconceived notions about women held by feminists inside the newsroom." They use them to perpetuate, against all the evidence, the myth about women and girls as "victims" and men as "oppressors" and, in particular, to suppress debate about the rampant sexualisation of young children due in large part to a society of working mothers (Goldberg calls this "The Biggest Story the Media Won't Cover").

Typical of this particular deceit is the media mantra that American girls attempt suicide more than boys, while almost never reporting that boys succeed three times more often. Or the clearly incredible statistic, still quoted in textbooks and bestsellers by leading feminists like Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, that 150,000 women (3,000 a week!) starve themselves and die each year from anorexia, when according to dissident feminist Christina Hoff Summers the real number is fewer than a hundred (in any event certainly very low). Likewise the media picked up and ran with phoney stats about pregnant women beaten by their husbands being the number one cause of birth defects in the U.S, and depression supposedly affecting four out of every ten American women every week.

"With the media's complicity, I knew I could move any issue and make it work," wrote lesbian Tammy Bruce in her book, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds. A former high ranking official of the extreme liberal political lobby group the National Organisation for Women, she once phoned a newsman while driving her car to demand that he put a pro-feminist spin on an item unflattering to the feminist cause which she had just heard on the radio. In the very next news segment, she writes, "the reporter actually apologised and delivered the real story (that is, my version of it)."

Goldberg recounts the same craven newsroom collusion with all the various liberal lobby groups and the consequent perversion of the truth about affirmative action, abortion, social welfare, homelessness, working mothers, racism, guns etc. etc.. Effectively, newsrooms have been balkanised, with all the vested interest groups - the 'gay' caucus, the feminist caucus, the black caucus, the Hispanic caucus - pursuing "advocacy journalism" for their own cause, making a fair and balanced presentation of issues impossible. "On gay issues, for example," he writes, "they now revert to name-calling at the drop of a hat in order to shore up their own close-mindedness and orthodoxy. They don't give credence to the 'other side,' because deep down, I suspect, they don't think there is another side. Not a legitimate one anyway." And so the media relentlessly portray 'gay' activists as being on the side of the angels and their opponents as bigoted and intolerant. Full stop.

Diversity myth

This is why all the talk of increased "diversity" within Big Media, whether public or commercial, is spurious.

In 2006, the BBC employed a diversity officer, on a salary of about '90,000, whose role includes helping recruit more diverse presenters in order to get white producers to think about minorities. "I see my role as opening up [the BBC's programming] to diverse talents and voices," she said. The truth, however, is that while the minorities will be diverse (except for the signal absence of orthodox Catholics, of course) there will be no diversity of opinion: whatever their ethnic, gender or cultural differences, they will all sing from the same liberal hymn sheet as the BBC establishment.

Nor will this liberal group-think be eradicated by the "Safeguarding in Trust" sessions mandated by the Director-General for his 16,500 programming and content staff in the wake of all those rigged phone-in competitions and the smearing of Queen Elizabeth. As the BBC's cherished "values" are purely relativistic, it follows that its vaunted "corporate culture" is simply a "dictatorship of relativism" (in the Pope's coinage). Hence, training sessions aimed at reinforcing those so-called "values" which inform and underpin the "corporate culture" will merely compound the moral vacuum - or "systemic failure", as the Director-General called it - which provoked the scandals in the first place. Only the Christian notion of objective truth can ever break this subjective circle of delusion and decay.

The same holds true for print and TV journalist training schools: liberal talking shops for fellow liberals which extirpate objectivity and thus the notion of balance at the outset.

The Colombia School of Journalism is the most prestigious in America. In fact, they say: as goes Columbia, so goes journalism education in America. Yet it is described as an "intellectual gulag" where political correctness rules and dissidents are punished in a way reminiscent of the orthodox seminarians censured and persecuted in our Modernist seminaries. In Arrogance, a graduate of Colombia informs Bernard Goldberg that only two of the more than two hundred students in his class would publicly admit to being right of centre. "I knew the school would be left-wing," he says, "but I didn't really anticipate the ferocity of the bias."

Commenting on the lockstep liberalism that defines the school and its absence of a shred of diversity of thought among the students or faculty, another student says: "It's a school for Stepford students. That's how they want it. God forbid you challenge them or rock the boat - you're gonna get it. Supposedly they believe in the Socratic method of give-and-take and free open dialogue. But what they really practice is the autocratic method: If you think you have a point, forget it; you don't. End of discussion."

Not surprisingly, no one at the Columbia School of Journalism thinks there is a liberal bias problem in the media. It is not, therefore, on the agenda for discussion, just as it is not up for discussion with the media elite, as Goldberg discovered.

Flight to New Media

In light of this cook's tour of the institutionalised bias of Big Media against balanced, factual reporting, one clearly sees that the ongoing public flight to the New Media (the internet, cable TV and conservative talk-back radio) as the primary source of news and analysis is not simply down to the vapid 'Infotainment' being passed off as serious news on superficial nightly bulletins. "The decline in the ratings for television news corresponds with the rise of the millionaire class of television journalist," rationalises one certified media mogul, Michael Gartner, a former president of NBC News. Deluded to the end, the Big Media bosses and their underlings just don't get it: don't understand that truth matters! Deprive the public of accurate information for long enough and they will hit back, as they have en masse in recent times.

Last December, a poll by Sacred Heart University [SHU] found that the most trusted national TV news organisation, for accurate reporting, is the New Media Fox News at 27.0%, with Mr Gartner's old NBC News outfit way down at 10.90% and its Big Media cousins ABC News at 7.0% and CBS News at 6.8% lagging even further behind. The SHU Poll also found just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting. By a three-to-one margin, Americans see news media journalists and broadcasters (45.4% to 15.7%) as mostly or somewhat liberal over mostly or somewhat conservative.

An "astonishing percentage of Americans see biases and partisanship in their mainstream news sources", said James Castonguay, associate professor and chair of SHU's Department of Media Studies & Digital Culture. "The availability of alternative viewpoints and news sources through the Internet no doubt contributes to the increased skepticism about the objectivity of profit-driven news outlets owned by large conglomerates."

Added Jerry C. Lindsley, director of the SHU Polling Institute: "Americans know bias and imbalance when they see it and they don't like it. When most service organizations strive for consumer satisfaction ratings in the high eighties to low nineties, an overall positive rating of 40.7% is dismal." And he added, "Americans know that it's just not that hard to present both sides and keep personal bias at home."

Liberal hypocrites

It is certainly not too hard for normal, God-fearing people. But it is clearly beyond the godless Media-Government-Business complex and its battalion of self-serving Stepford reporters. Insulated within the ideological echo chambers that pass for mainstream media newsrooms today, they find it impossible "to present both sides and keep personal bias at home." Truth and courage lose out to liberal group-think and self-interest every time. For beneath all their bleeding-heart liberal posturing about "protecting the oppressed" and "saving the planet" from those "intolerant Christian bigots"- it's all about THEM.

"I spent a lot of years with these people," writes Bernard Goldberg about his former TV news colleagues, "and you have no idea what major league phonies they can be. How they will support every item on the liberal agenda... until, God forbid, the fallout starts to affect them - or their bottom line... I have called these media elites 'Liberals of Convenience' because of how easily they justify the way they marginalize black people and poor people in the news coverage - and all in the interest of maximising ratings and otherwise furthering their own careers... when money is on the line, when their jobs and their hefty salaries are at stake, the liberal news media do what the money demands...It's nothing personal of course... just good business."

Goldberg's personal experience, applicable right across the rapacious media spectrum of whatever public or commercial hue, was neatly summed up by the late libertarian, acid-dropping journalist Hunter Thompson: "The TV business," he opined, "is a cruel and shallow money trough, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs."

Ergo, the hundred and thirty-five quid question: How much longer can I bear to watch the BBC elite and its monolithic empire wallow in that trough, cavort in that hallway and choke the life out of goodness and truth - at my expense?

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