Of Social Media, Truth, and BBC Scapegoating

I think even the best satirists couldn't have made up the situation at the BBC at the moment.

In essence, it has been discovered that over many years, a certain person with a predilection for paedophilia was allowed to run rampant in some BBC programs, and elsewhere. Not only that, it appears the BBC may have occasionally quashed programs talking about said problems - or any other persons accusing other persons of said crimes - as they felt the evidence wouldn't stand up. And so the arnchair critics rounded on the BBC. Then they do broadcast a report on the subject, and the armchair critics roundly criticise the BBC again - not, you understand, because the program named names or anything, but it allowed other people, on other news channels and on social media, to make allegations that were then shown to be false.

So what does the UK Chatterati Establishment do after this?

The answer is obvious - you howl for the new BBC Director General, in the job for only 54 days, to fall on his sword, because clearly he is the only person responsible for the whole mess over the last 20 years*. Clearly. As everyone knows, a Director General edits every program ever put out, and recruits every bad apple in the organisation, including those before he was ever in the post.

Where are all the people who were around over the last 20 yaers then, who may be more to blame, you may ask? Tut, you naive paduan - the old adage of the endgame of a crisis - absolve the guilty, fire the innocent and promote the uninvolved - shows itself to be true again, in spades.

Alternatively, you may just - if you were a tad sceptical - be thinking this has all the hallmarks of an establishment trying to protect itself. Perish the thought that it may in fact be others who are muddying the waters here for their own ends. One is reminded of Anthony Trollope's reasons for writing The Way We Live Now, about the greed and corruption in the Establishment some 150 years ago:

Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now.

And where will the truth eventually out itself in all this? I'd lay odds on bets it will be on Social Media long before it gets to the Olde Meedja. Reading and watching the Olde Meeja going in for the feeding frenzy and f*cking over the scapegoat, while skippng over the causes of the scapegoating, you realize they are essentially morally and intellectually f*cked. Fact Free analysis at its finest.

(Update 2 days later - actually its not Fact Free Analysis, its more accurately termed Furious Fact Fudging Analysis - being economical with facts here, being over generous there, adding a few spurious ones - to build the picture you want. Anyway, there seems to have been quite a strong public response on Twitter et al - outside the Olde Meedja of course - to get back on track with the Real Issues again. And BBC'ers who may just have had more to do with this episode are now being stood aside. The Crisis Management Thesis above says they will be absolved, let us watch and see)

*And then whine about his payoff, conveniently forgetting that if he hadn't fallen on his sword then others more involved may have had to....(and that he would have got it if he had waited to be fired, which was in no-one's interest. Lesson for the future is never to do the honourable thing....)