More evidence war on Murdoch is about BBC preserving its dominance

Thus when the BBC decides to manufacture a story, or ignore another, it forms reality for millions in Britain and world-wide.

– Michael Gonzalez, 30 July 2003 (Wall Street Journal)

That is what the BBC is desperate to maintain.  No one looking at the current Guardian-BBC onslaught against News International should do so without understanding the historic context and the real agenda behind the fight.  But first, lets remind ourselves of the current situation.

The Guardian and BBC started its latest offensive using the years old story of ‘phone hacking’  as a pretext for renewing its war with Rupert Murdoch.  News International was nothing but a proxy in this fight.  With the fall of the News of the World, arrest of Andy Coulson and resignation from News International Chief Executive, Rebekah Brooks, the Guardian-BBC axis could have declared victory in its campaign to exact a price for the criminal behaviour of Screws journalists. But they have not done so as the real target was always Murdoch.

Never mind that Murdoch may not have known any details of operational criminality by some of the employees inside his media empire, for the Guardian-BBC cabal this was never an issue.  The aim was always to take out their biggest rival.

That is why the ‘phone hacking’ campaign quickly gave way to the carefully planned original aim of the left-liberal elite to prevent Murdoch regaining control of Sky, which this blog covered in detail.  With that objective completed far more easily than anyone expected with Murdoch announcing he was dropping his takeover bid for BSkyB, any reasonable person would have believed this story was over bar the prosecutions.  Not a bit of it.

With blood in the water and momentum established the campaign has now morphed into an effort to drive Murdoch out of the UK media sphere entirely.  Supported by their useful idiots in Parliament such as John Prescott, Chris Bryant and Ed Miliband, the left wing media machine has surrounded the Murdoch citadel and is mobilising itself for a final battle.

It is not happening because of News International wrong doing, that was just the way in, it is happening because the BBC (steered editorially by its Guardian mothership) has come very close in the last couple of years to seeing its dominant position in the UK media dismantled.  The left-liberal elite knows how close it came and is feverishly trying to destroy its only real competitor in the all important broadcast news arena.  The obsessive coverage of anything to do with News International and Murdoch in the Guardian and on the BBC is part of an agenda to protect its control of news reporting and editorial lines in Britain.

Having brought ourselves up to date, let us now take a look back to something that puts this battle into context.  Published in New York in 2003 was a piece by Michael Wolff – biographer of Rupert Murdoch, liberal media commentator, regular Guardian columnist, and a regular on BBC news and current affairs programmes – called BBC You Later.  As the by-line explained:

Never mind the battle between the BBC and the Blair government. The real nemesis of the all-powerful British broadcasting institution is Murdoch.

Prophetic words.  The piece focuses on Wolff’s visit to the 2003 Edinburgh International Television Festival – or BBC-land as he called it.  Against the backdrop of the Hutton Inquiry, Gilligan resignation, Dr David Kelly suicide and so on, the article included observations such as this…

It may just be more accurate to say that the BBC is Britain. Certainly, the legions of BBC defenders and partisans all but argue that there may not be a Britain without the BBC.

The fight, therefore, to protect the BBC or to dismantle the BBC is a fight for something like the soul of Englishmen everywhere.

and this…

And then in Edinburgh, in spirit if not in person, there was the BBC’s other blood enemy: Murdoch. (Murdoch’s papers, the Sun and the London Times, seemed to conclude every day in their coverage of the Hutton Inquiry that the BBC had, for all intents and purposes, killed David Kelly.)

The historic polarity in British society has been upper class/lower class, Labor/Tory, Thatcher/anti-Thatcher. The polarity was now more precisely BBC/Murdoch.

The whole piece is worth reading in full.  But by far the most important section is the conclusion back in 2003 which positions today’s Guardian-BBC war with Murdoch perfectly:

The BBC now derives much of its identity, along with its justification for constant expansion, from its implacable fight against the Murdoch beast; likewise, Murdoch derives much of his purpose from opposing this most egregious of liberal bureaucracies.

This may just be some quaint, hard-to-understand British rivalry, an artful balance of interests as opposed to our own Hobbesian media anarchy. On the other hand, it may really be a genuine fight to the death (you might even argue that the death of David Kelly has as much to do with the Blair-Murdoch grudge against the BBC as it does with the war in Iraq).

It could be the final Murdochian win: taking the BBC down.

But I’m not sure I’d bet against the BBC. It could be the last unassailable state.

Once again, based in historic record we find more evidence to demonstrate the Guardian-BBC campaign is nothing to do with public service or public interest, but about domination of the news, information and editorial line fed to the British public.  Far from the plurality the Guardian and BBC claim to hold dear, they are doing everything possible to make themselves the sole source of news in this country.