One of Today's gimmicks is to have the programme produced and presented occasionally by non-journalist guests. This is in line with what Marina Hyde has dubbed 'celebocracy', the line that anything can be improved by the towering presence of someone famous in another field, entertainment being favoured. No doubt the BBC ascertains that the guest producer is "a safe pair of hands", i.e., a right-winger or a political naïf.
However, something went awry earlier this month. The guest was the recording artist P.J.Harvey who introduced taboo subjects and people on the BBC's blacklist. Thus my prediction that John Pilger would never be allowed to broadcast from a BBC studio has had to be discarded
So, Ms. Harvey, your relationship with the BBC is subject to revision. I hope someone keeps a check on how often Ms. Harvey's recordings are aired on the corporation's music programme's following her act of subversion.
Predictably, reactionary voices bewailed afterwards that the BBC had broadcast 'left-wing tosh' and 'liberal drivel'. Nick Robinson, the BBC's 'impartial' political editor, took particular exception to the contribution by John Pilger, while the pro-war Murdoch employee David Aaronovitch, a Times columnist with a penchant for wagging a warning finger at Glenn Greenwald, objected to being 'lectured at in a news programme'
That's Nick Robinson the out and proud Conservative Party member, and Aaronovitch, the self-proclaimed socialist who is well paid for spewing out anti-left propaganda.
'For the 21st-century British Right, though – used to seeing their sense of what is important go largely unchallenged in day-to-day political broadcasting – the programme was an outrage. [...] Since this year's group of guest editors also included such establishment figures as Dame Eliza Manningham Buller, former head of MI5, and Anthony Jenkins, CEO of Barclays Bank, there are clearly no grounds for complaint from the Right about the overall balance of this year's holiday editions.'(Medialens)
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