David Sedgwick - BBC: Brainwashing Britain? How and Why the BBC Controls Your Mind

When devils will the blackest sins put on

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows

Othello, William Shakespeare

Anyone spending time on social media these days cant but help notice a growing mood of scepticism towards what is commonly known as the mainstream media, or MSM for short. The little people are frustrated. They feel cheated somehow, duped, disregarded, reviled even. The worms appear to be turning. Before the birth of the Internet the plebs took everything they heard from the MSM as the gospel truth - they had little choice. And then along came the Internet Facebook, Twitter et al.

Things would never be the same again.

Britains own lynchpin of all things mainstream, the BBC has found itself under scrutiny like never before. Why should I as a licence payer, asked a social media user of BBC News one day, have your biased reporting shoved down my throat? Strong stuff: biased reporting is bad enough, but to be forcibly fed this stuff? Theres plenty more where that came from: As for the BBC, notes a Disqus user, I can't bring myself to bother watching anything they broadcast now - every single thing they produce is an exercise in social engineering no matter the topic. And then theres this: Keep it up BBC. Watching you dig your own grave makes better viewing than 99% of the programmes you make. Another Disqus user summarises the situation thus:

I never hardly watch anything from the BBC

these days....its all total drivel. Even the

'comedy' is rubbish now.....its just not funny.

And the News is always left- wing propaganda!

And documentaries are usually ' historically

inaccurate' being always MARXIST inspired

revisionist drivel. Their 'costume dramas are

merely an exercise in historical revisionism to

promote the multi-cult Marxist dystopia.

Volumes upon volumes of books could be filled with comments such as these. Multi-cult Marxist dystopia .. ? Clearly, something is not quite right here, and has not been since at least 2016 and beyond. The election of Donald Trump as US president and the UKs vote to leave the EU has, it would appear, heralded in a new age of consciousness in a hitherto docile public:

@Anon

Would we have known just how infested the

BBC are with left wing propaganda? Brexit

has been the awakening for many, including

me.

The more it attacks the US president and the more it attempts to undermine Brexit, suspicions that have been hitherto vague began to crystallise: how does the BBCs claim to be an impartial, politically neutral broadcaster square with its continuous, at time petty and vindictive attacks on the democratically-elected president of the United States? If the broadcaster is indeed a national voice representative of the country as a whole, why has it been doing everything in its power to undermine the outcome of the 2016 EU Referendum in which some 17.4 million citizens expressed a desire to leave the union?

@Anon

Brexit has exposed the BBC for what it is. Its

time is up.

The mask appears to be slipping, the heavenly show not quite so alluring, the proclamations not quite so convincing.

And so social media echoes to the sound of BBC bashing: Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, British Bullshitting Corporation, Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation , not forgetting our own particular favourite (and inspiration for this book) British Brainwashing Corporation . These are just some of the more printable interpretations of the BBC acronym seen on the net. While the broadcaster has always had its critics, this is unchartered territory. Antipathy towards the corporation is visceral. Im getting really fed up with the complaints and criticisms being directed at BBC News at the moment, writes the BBCs John Simpson. Not so much from our usual critics... No its middle-of-the-roaders who are doing the complaining now. But it never used to be this way.

In the not too distant past Britains national broadcaster basked in the adulation from a tame, almost nave public. Everybody, or so it seemed, depended on the BBC. Some even adored it. In reference to its sensible, pragmatic approach to all things Britains post-war media playfully dubbed the corporation Auntie. The name stuck. Through war and peace, Auntie remained a calm, authoritative voice even though some had started to feel uneasy with its claim to be an independent organisation, free of government interference. Reservations aside, the BBC was undoubtedly the voice of the people. By the 1950s it had carved out a niche in the British psyche so deep, so secure, that the adoption of Auntie merely sealed its unique status within Britain and beyond. The question of trust would never have even occurred. Fast forward to 2018.

The calls to scrap the television licence fee grow ever louder. Accusations of bias and misconduct abound. From stories littered with inaccuracies and glaring omissions, hardly a day goes by without Britains national broadcaster finding itself up to its eyeballs in yet more controversy. We managed to laugh our way through every crisis and you get a lot at the BBC, recalls former Director General Greg Dyke. As we shall see in this book, the reasons for this situation run deep, much deeper than mere incompetency. Lessons can always be learnt from mistakes which are genuine. Deliberate errors are another matter altogether.

The modern BBC is an entirely different animal than it was back in the 1950s when Auntie seemed to capture its essence so deftly. The modern organisation is in fact barely recognisable to its 1970s or even 1980s incarnations. Something has changed is changing. The purpose of this book is to investigate the reasons that underpin this dramatic transformation. With its enthusiasm for all things liberal and progressive, to the ordinary man and woman in the street the national broadcaster arguably feels ever more remote, ever more detached from their own reality than at any time in the corporations near 100-year history.