BBC engages in pro-homosexual agitprop and anti-Catholicism....again

As this Zenit article makes clear, "The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is not known to be one of the Catholic Church's closest friends. Although it has a worldwide reputation for high quality programming, the vast state-funded broadcaster has often been accused of treating the Church and the Catholic faith unfairly at best, and maliciously at worst.

Many examples back up this accusation, beginning with a number programmes over the past 10 years that have been blasphemous and highly offensive to Catholics.

In 2003, the BBC broadcast -- to a large international audience -- a documentary entitled "Sex and the Holy City," which intentionally misrepresented the Church and its teaching on condoms and AIDS. Two years later, it aired 'Jerry Springer the Opera,' a blasphemous and very offensive programme that ridiculed Jesus and the faith in general. Earlier, the BBC had spent £2 million ($3.13 million) on a program called 'Popetown' -- an animated series set in the Vatican that mocked the Church and included plotlines about bestiality. Due to protests, it was banned in Britain but broadcast overseas and sold in Britain on DVD.

The BBC has also been accused of failing in other areas when it comes to Catholicism. The persecution of Catholics in the Middle East or Asia is rarely covered or warranted adequate attention; the immense good work that Catholic priests, religious and laity do around the world is generally passed over; and the Church's invaluable contribution to Western culture tends to be disparaged in favour of focusing on the sins of Church members in the past.

The BBC has also been blamed for more subtle instances of anti-Catholic bias. Discussion panels, news reports and web articles tend to focus on the sensational; they also often comprise contributions from secular figures or dissenting Catholics but hardly ever from orthodox Catholics who will properly convey the Church's teaching.

The corporation's treatment of clergy not infrequently involves interrogations by disparaging and dismissive presenters who seem to view them as guilty until proven innocent. Stephen Glover, a non-Catholic British newspaper columnist, wrote how a BBC television interviewer, quizzing English Archbishop Vincent Nichols in 2007, 'treated him like a member of some extreme sect, interrupting him continually, and sneering at him as though he were a half-wit.'

Most of this bias is attributed to a predominantly secular mindset in the corporation that embraces, or is sympathetic to, the culture of death, whether it be abortion, radical feminism, the homosexual agenda, euthanasia, or unethical science such as embryonic stem cell research. 'The BBC," Glover once wrote, "represents a materialist, mechanistic consensus which has rejected God, and deludes itself that science is capable of providing a complete explanation of existence.'

Even one of the BBC's most accomplished journalists, Andrew Marr, admitted the difficulty the corporation has in offering unbiased coverage. 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral,' he told a secret summit of BBC executives in 2006. 'It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'

At that same meeting, one veteran BBC executive was reported in the British press as saying there was 'widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness' and that much of this mentality is 'so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.' It was also reported that 'nearly everyone' at the summit agreed the Bible could be thrown into the bin on a comedy show, but not the Koran for fear of offending Muslims."

Now BBC Radio 4 has broadcast a play about John Cardinal Newman written by Stephen Wyatt and entitled "Gerontius." This play regurgitates the hateful and calumnious accusation that Cardinal Newman was a closet homosexual, an asinine notion which has already been thoroughly refuted by the Cardinal's biographer Father Ian Ker.

In 1989, two Harvard-educated homosexuals, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, wrote a book entitled "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90s." This book was to be a "gay manifesto for the 1990s." In their own words, "The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long established principles of psychology and advertising.' (p. XXVIII). Part of this propaganda campaign was the idea of depicting great personages from the past as having been homosexual to gain acceptance for homosexuality. The idea was that people would associate homosexuality with greatness. Which is no doubt why the historically anti-Catholic BBC would present a play portraying the great Cardinal Newman as a closeted homosexual.

If the BBC is really interested in exploring for skeletons in closets, it need look no further than to its first Director General, Mr. John Reith. Mr. Reith had pro-fascist sympathies. In fact, after the National Socialists exterminated dissidents within Germany, Reith wrote, “I really admire the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt.” Mr. Reith also had an admiration for Benito Mussolini.

When can we expect a BBC program which examines these issues?