Though still a large presence in British national life, the days when the BBC was a revered institution belong to the past. Years of being denigrated by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch and bullied by British governments anxious to secure the mogul’s favor have eroded the corporation’s public service ethos, its commitment to broadcasting based not on crude commercial imperatives but on standards of excellence.
Murdoch’s jibe against the BBC was that it was fundamentally patronizing, a body made in the image of the British elite. It’s a jibe that cannot be plausibly leveled at today’s BBC.
If the corporation now purveys much trashy Murdoch-style entertainment, it also seems increasingly compliant with his rightist political agenda.
Consider the preferential treatment accorded by the corporation to Murdoch’s longtime political ally, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Dogged by the suspicion that he deceived Britain into taking part in the war in Iraq and was involved in the “cash for honors” scandal, Blair left office as the most discredited British politician of modern times. Yet in the three-part series, The Blair Years, broadcast by the BBC last month, his prime ministership was portrayed in terms that were nothing if not indulgent. On hand throughout to put emollient questions to the former leader was the Times columnist and trusted Murdoch ideologue, David Aaronovitch.
However, from time to time the corpse of independent-minded BBC political journalism is apt to twitch. It did so last week when on BBC2’s current affairs program, Newnight, the presenter Jeremy Paxman clashed with the neoconservative ideologue Dean Godson over a report produced by the latter’s think-tank Policy Exchange which alleged that British mosques have been openly selling books advocating terrorism. Newsnight had been following up the report, The Hijacking of British Islam, which was splashed all over the British media in October, but discovered that some of the evidence on which it was based may have been faked. Allegedly, receipts for the supposedly incriminating books purchased by Policy Exchange’s researchers were forged. Outraged by this claim, Godson described Newsnight’s accusations as “perverse and libelous” and threatened legal action.
Godson’s appearance on Newsnight represented a breaking of cover by a veteran spin-doctor whose activities are the very antithesis of what the BBC has stood for. Though educated in Britain, he springs from a family of professional US propagandists. Indeed, it could be said that he is a born manipulator. His father was Joseph Godson, a German-Polish emigre to the US who worked in London as US labor attache in the 1950s, forming a discreet alliance with the British Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, and becoming involved in plotting against Gaitskell’s formidable left-wing rival, Aneurin Bevan. Godson Senior was part of the concerted US effort during the Cold War to subvert the British left, to purge it of communist sympathies and win hearts and minds on behalf of the “American proposition”. This so-called “liberal conspiracy” found influential expression in the London-based magazine Encounter, which was secretly funded by the CIA. In many ways, it was a harbinger of the pro-US New Labour politics of Tony Blair.
Dean Godson’s older brother Roy Godson has also been a career propagandist. A veteran of the 1980s administration of US President Ronald Reagan, he is the author the book Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards (1995), which offers an unapologetic rationale for US subversion of other states, endorsing the use of deception, including forgery, and outlining a special role for “deep-cover” officers. Regarded by some as just such an officer, Dean Godson is a leading proponent of the belief that the “psyops” practiced by the CIA during the Cold War furnish important lessons for fighting the war of ideas against Islamism. Also a former servant of the Reagan administration, he became chief leader-writer for the Daily Telegraph and has worked hard in recent times to expose the Muslim Council of Great Britain as a front for radical Islam. By publishing leaked official documents, his think-tank has endeavored to discredit Foreign Office efforts to open a dialogue with Islamist groups. Godson has been portrayed by the canny Irish journalist Tom Griffin as seasoned Machiavellian, a dedicated exponent of black propaganda. Nobody will have been less surprised than Griffin to learn that Policy Exchange may have been engaged in forgery.
It might be felt that if Godson’s methods lead to the flushing out of extremists, they have proved their worth. Yet it scarcely needs underlining that the deliberate deception of which Policy Exchange stands accused is wholly incompatible with the democratic values that it purports to uphold. What is especially disturbing about Godson’s work is the role it is playing in lending respectability to the view that Islam itself, not just “Islamism”, is a fundamental threat to Western civilization — rather as Encounter once encouraged the belief that leftism constituted a mere staging post on the road to communist totalitarianism. It seems fitting, incidentally, that Godson is a contributor to the politically ambiguous British magazine Prospect, an intellectual monthly in the Encounter tradition which has sought to build a “progressive” consensus that British national identity is being undermined by immigration and the importation of alien mores, not least those of Islam.
In focusing attention on the machinations of Dean Godson, Newsnight has performed a democratic service. The BBC may not be what it was but its journalism has yet to suffer complete emasculation.
