A national broadcaster?

I've been reading an article by Gerry Hassan in the Sunday National. It's a very striking analysis of how the BBC operates and, in particular, how it has failed to meet the changing political and social climate in the UK over, say, the past 30 years.

I've got used to politicians and others who have always thought they were the people in charge of society (churches, councillors) being mostly left behind by social change. For example, long after it was clear to the rest of us that 'people', ordinary people, were taking their own decisions about marriage, when to have children, whether to divorce and treating abortion as a personal matter, the 'authorities' were still intent on laying down the rules controlling our behaviour - especially the behaviour of women.

Hassan describes the BBC as 'never being ahead of change'. I'd go further and say the BBC has never shown leadership in reflecting the vast bulk of us in society, preferring to mimic the ruling classes. It has always lagged well behind not just in reporting change but in understanding that change was happening at all.

Hassan quotes filmmaker and academic Eleanor Yule in describing the Scotland that the BBC has projected as one of 'unrelenting cultural miserabilism.' Full of stories of 'damaged lives, poverty and crime.'

So here's a challenge for you: watch BBC Scotland news - or listen to it on radio - or read it on the website and classify the stories under those headings:

- damaged lives
- poverty
- crime

I would also like to add another heading:

- bad news about Scotland (that's the cultural miserabilism bit)

I'll go first. Today's BBC Scotland website has the following - just in its top stories:

- damaged lives: Edinburgh the AIDS capital of Europe
- poverty: nothing
- crime: a stabbing; a shooting
- bad news: a gas failure in Falkirk; another story about the QE hospital in Glasgow (day 13 of that story, I think); problems in the prison system

I went looking for stories about poverty. I switched to the 'regional' Scottish pages. More stories of crime. More bad news. But poverty might as well not exist in Scotland for all the BBC tells us.

It's nonsense, of course. Poverty should be - is for many of us - the top story in Scotland (and many other parts of the UK). We have many people battling daily with homelessness, disability and unemployment and trying to deal with the appalling Universal Basic Income regime. So why is it not mentioned on the BBC website?

I switched to the websites for Northern Ireland, Wales and England to see how things are there. The Welsh website is pretty thin. (Maybe nothing ever happens in Wales? Or someone thinks they're not important enough to merit a decent website page.) The rest reflect the Scottish website. And there's not a word about poverty on any of them.

In the case of Scotland and Wales (I don't know enough to comment on Northern Ireland, which currently has no government), discussion of poverty and how to deal with it might lead on to talk about how the Scottish Government is trying to offset the effects of the rape clause, the spare bedroom 'tax', child poverty (the baby box, better childcare), etc. Or even a conversation about how the Welsh Senedd is not dealing with these issues.

So read Gerry Hassan's article and follow the BBC for a wee while. Let me know what you think.