The BBC - Impartial or not?

Don't try to pretend that the Molotov-Ribbentrop was anything other than Stalin buying time to save his own ass. The Soviets and the Nazis hated each other with a passion and that pact wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. If Hitler hadn't broken it, Stalin would have done sooner or later, once he had finished the slow, lumbering mobilisation of Russia for war that caused him to sign the pact in the first place.

Their charter is a pretence, a declaration of intention to aim for something that is impossible to achieve.

Being in favour of neutrality is in itself a political position.

Whatever your views on German-Russian relations in the 1930s, what bearing does that have on whether Hitler operated a socialist system or not? He could operate in a socialistic manner and still hate Russian communism, could he not? Russian-German relations don't mean that one country couldn't work on communism and one on soclialism.

The facts remain that any serious study of Hitler's economic policy will see strong socialist overtones. The whole 'forced labour' thing, making the people work? Hitler may have been a nationalist, but to deny that he was a socialist is to deny an essence of his movement.

In which case, why give the BBC public-funding through a tax? If it fundamentally cannot achieve its Charter aims and the whole Charter is just a fig-leaf, then why not remove public funding and let the BBC try and compete in a free-market?
Surely you must be in favour of that if you believe the Charter aims are fatuous and impossible.

Neutrality would be giving voices to all sides and reporting factually rather than from a viewpoint. It's not a position, by definition it is a lack of a position.

I don't think it's the far-left and the far-right themselves that actually link up. Rather, I would argue that the further right or left you go, the more extreme authoritarians you get, and it is these, not the ideologies, who link. Once you get to Nazism and Stalinism the authoritarians have all but "usurped" the actual ideology, whatever that may have been (this is more the case with Stalinsm than with Nazism, where the Nazi value system did survive quite well). So what you've actually got is two totalitarian states whose only significant difference is in the nature of the veneer beneath which they operate.

I think you misconstrue state involvement in the economy for socialism.

according to you they were all socialist.

Facism is a right wing ideology, and communism is a left wing ideology.

No, I know quite well what socialism is, thank you.

Er, when did I say that? All I said was that Hitler, in economic terms operated a socialistic policy in Germany, why does that imply that I must think all sorts of other things are socialist. My example of forced labour etc. does not mean that I think that forced labour is the defining point of socialism, it was just an exmaple of something that I would associate with a socialistic system in the context of Germany at that time. Sheesh, could you try not to give irrelevant textbook passages so much??

After saying that there is a significant confluence between extremist positions you then seek to delienate them as polar opposites again?

You are of the political opinion that neutrality is desirable, not everyone is, your stance cannot be divorced from a belief or an ideological conviction, and us such is not neutral. Reductio ad absurdum.

It is not possible to be unbiased by presenting all viewpoints and only facts.

Presenting only facts (even if we can all agree on them being facts) is no means to objectivity, for it is in the selection of facts in which the bias would still occur.

I do believe the BBC is biased, but I do not view its charter as genuinely representing its purpose, which is really the British national interest.

On the grounds that it achieves more than the foriegn office in persuading the world of fundamental British viewpoints and generates incredible good-will and respect for us as a country throughout many parts of the world,

it easily justifies its own existence and every penny of what is effectively indirect tax revenue that it recieves.

I just don't think that that lines up with the other things you've said. You've said that it fundamentally cannot be neutral, you haven't responded to my pointing out that it fundamentally does NOT present views in line with a 'majority' of people and yet you still think we should fund it, apparently out of some old-fashioned view that it's taking the British view worldwide, something that I don't think is true anymore.

The British have a level of debate and intelligence that is expressed through the BBC that forces a great many people in the world to respect us even if they disagree.

Nah, it's just the accent! Lets us sound like a knowledgeable authority on any subject, even when we're talking complete *******s. Seriously, works a charm at international Model UN conferences.

I watched a statement by the Iraqi spokesperson to the press during the war. I flipped between CNN international and BBC world, on BBC they showed him giving his statement in English, and then on CNN they had a muffled sound of arabic speech with an overlay of an arabic women translator brokenly repeating what the iraqi spokesman was saying. This was so blantant and stupid of them, but if it had not been for BBC being visable alongside it would have been a highly subtle form of propaganda. They wanted it to appear that he was speaking in arabic, because people have more sympathy for those speaking their own language to them, and the women they chose to act as if she was translating had worse and more broken English than the Iraqi spokesperson.

One thing I will acknowledge is that many people around the world associate Americans with bias automatically even when they are not, and CNN international has reacted to that. Have you noticed how since September 11 2001 all the white Americans anchors on CNN international have been replaced by British people (who are percieved largely due to the BBC by the international community as less biased), and the Americans that remain are all ethnic minorities such as hispanics, phillippinos, and American Chinese reporters (because that will show that America is multicultural and help them communicate to people in Asia and Latin America).