No Black Lives Matter T-shirts and no Kamala Harris coffee mugs demands Director General of the BBC.

(From the children’s book, The Wonder Clock.)

So, what the BBC is apparently going for is a silent, reserved stance in which it is understood in some subconscious, perhaps in a meditative spiritual way opposed to racism.

It would seem that overt statements affirming racial equality are offensive, and we all know how easy authority figures in Great Britain are offended by any mention of the nation’s racist past. We don’t want to ruffle feathers or suggest that tolerance is an important value just a quiet, low priority one.

Racism is like Voldemort. It must not be spoken of.

Let me quote from the article.

The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.

He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”

Perhaps I’m mistaken but what I take from this is that he expects the BBC to do the stenography thing and have no view as to the right or wrong of an issue, to suspend their moral judgments.

This is an abhorrent environment to create in a news service because it puts outright evil and monstrous people on the same reporting plane as the righteous and good. Imagine covering the statements coming out of the Third Reich as substantial and normal as the statements of the democracies opposing them.

All he is asking is for reporters to suspend their critical judgment. If that isn’t wrong, nothing is.

Neutrality in the face of evil is also a decision and it is the wrong one.

James Alan Pilant