Rod Liddle notes in passing in today's Sunday Times the words and phrases not used by the BBC in its continuous coverage of the Mumbai attacks: Islam, Islamist, fundementalist, Muslim, jihad etc.
Similarly, some of Channel 4 News's coverage exhibited such a state of denial that I thought a couple of times that maybe I had misheard. The killers, announced Jon Snow at the top of the show, showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed".
Excuse me?
Snow later wrote on his daily email : "I suppose the nearest parallel would be the school killing at Columbine, near Colorado".
Thankfully Charles Moore had a riposte to this moronic observation in yesterday's Telegraph.
'No! The Columbine killings were isolated actions of two young minds disturbed. They were not the product of a paramilitary, worldwide, politico-religious ideology,' he wrote. ' After Columbine, websites of international religious organisations were not buzzing with conspiracy theories to excuse the killers.'
Elsewhere and outside of the News division, it was business as usual at the BBC this week. With the new version of the 70s hit series Survivors, the Corporation surpassed itself. I'll leave it to AA Gill in today's Sunday Times to make the point:
'The plague was introduced as a rather benign flu, and the overriding atmosphere was one of antiseptic political correctness; the mixing and matching of all possible colours,races, religions and sexes was scrupulous. Normally, I’m in favour of social management and good manners in broadcasting, but here the boxes you tick seem to come ahead of characterisation. Even the corpses had to have a broad and inclusive ethnic mix. It made the casting look like a collection of prospective Labour candidates for unwinnable seats. The survivors were a dull and bland group, except for a rather good and malevolent secret baddie (white working-class male, of course).'
Non-news output has always been more important, I believe, in shaping a culture's view of itself, and with the decline in traditional news-watching it is becoming more so. Survivors says much more about the BBC now, and it's wish-fulfilment fantasies, than it does about a post-apocalyptic Britain.
The truth however is that any other TV channel would probably have taken a similar approach; the political and cultural mindset of the BBC is actually widespread across much of the broadcast media. The huge difference of course, is that we're not having to pay for it.
