I’ve started to play a little game on the school run and when I’m out and about. I call this the ‘Radio Four Game’. The rules are simple. Preset Radio Four on your car radio and at random times during the day hit that preset to see what Radio Four is going on about. I find that in at least thirty to forty percent of the time when I randomly hit Radio Four, what I get is middle class Leftism coming out of the loudspeaker. Recently I’ve randomly tuned in and been assaulted by the BBC’s covid or climate catastrophism, race grifting, leftist talking heads, whining about Islamophobia, hand wringing about food choices and similar stuff.
It gives some idea as just how biased the Radio Four output is when I can randomly during the day flick to Radio Four and find that on at least a third of those occasions it is the middle class Left’s narratives that are being promoted. I used to be an avid Radio Four listener from the late seventies up to the turn of the century, it was my go to non-music station and contained a variety of voices and a diversity of opinion. Now much of what originally drew me to Radio Four, news, analysis of current affairs, comedy, drama and culture stuff doesn’t appear as diverse intellectually as it once was. It’s culture and drama as well as its comedy (or such as passes for it now) is firmly rooted in the mores of Islingtonian middle class leftism and its news and analysis programmes are depressingly mired in a similar orthodoxy.
I should not be able to randomly tune to a major speech oriented radio station and only find one narrative. I should be able to randomly tune in and find many different narratives. That this ‘Radio Four Game’ delivers me roughly one third of the time one particular narrative certainly in my view indicates bias and a failure to embrace intellectual viewpoint diversity by the controllers of Radio Four.
My sampling of R4 is limited to Today and TWatO. In both cases these days, they usually force me to switch to Classic FM to avoid apoplexy. My pet hate (in a crowded field) is how they sound. My hearing isn’t as good as it used to be. I’ve spent too long close to 25pr field guns firing. The diction is terrible. They gabble. They don’t speak clearly. They talk over each other. Amol Rajan must have the most slovenly diction on radio and I would be delighted never to have to hear him again.
I’m afraid R4 is my normal car channel – occasionally interesting but mostly background noise as l can’t bear the bass heavy d***head ‘music’ interspersed with screeching and inane drivel on most of the other channels.
If you could point me to a channel that plays back to back Floyd, stones, Clapton etc with no dj l’d be interested
Planet Rock is pretty good. You do have to put up with the ads of course. There are also the Absolute radio stations that do music from your chosen decade and also have a rock channel. I haven’t listened to radio since I got a Spotify account. You have to pay a subscription but you can compile a playlist and put it on shuffle and you pretty much have what you just described.
I used to listen to a lot of R4 when I had a job with lots of driving. I also had an old Peugeot as a runabout that only had a cassette radio, I threw out all my cassettes years ago so I listened to the radio a lot. There used to be a religious show called Beyond Belief that was unintentionally funny. I’ve not listened to it for a long time now so I can’t really comment on the OP but it really doesn’t surprise me.
I think the main point is that the BBC, both radio and tv can put out anything they like. We are forced by law to pay their heinous tv tax no matter if we don’t like and don’t use their biased services. Big brother knows what’s best for us and we will pay for it on pain of criminal charges.
If you’re feeling particularly brave, try the Radio 5live game. The same philosophy, just even more left wing and with added hectoring.
BBC World Service is the wokest of them all. The feministas have taken over. Everything bad is because of climate change.
Well yes, I fully understand concerns about paying the licence fee to receive political and news coverage which a lot of people feel is not impartial enough. However I’m happy to pay my licence fee for cultural reasons, namely the wide range of music, mostly classical but not exclusively, available on Radio 3. No commercial channel is going to match that, c.f. the paltry offerings from Classic FM with snippets of music interspersed with adverts?
Spotify do classical music too. I have some short pieces mixed in with my eclectic pop and rock playlist. Classical music has always been cheap to buy on CD too.
I switched off ALL radio in 2017 (except one foray into LBC 9th April 2018 Nigel Garage show 22min40sec in on YouTube) otherwise the car & home radios are redundant. Got fed up with constant yammering about Trump, about how we thickos voted for Brwxit, the constant climate change crap, streams of leftist loons, Greta bloody thunderthighs, the “gender” lunacy and months of being aurally assaulted by LGBTQPLUSVAT “pride”, BLM crap and black history month that seems to last for years at a time. Add in the gambling diction, hectoring talking heads, an almost complete lack of anything that sounds like music, and on the commercial stations, endless adverts with the gabbled “terms and conditions apply”. I still use my cassettes in the car as well as an MP3 player that streams music via the radio.
TV is severely restricted as there are 100stations with bugger all on and it’s on MUTE most of the time due to the endless adverts mostly for GAMBLING, openly revolting wee-wee and periods, or have mangled, repeated and destroyed tune I can no longer stand, “sweet Caroline” anyone. As for that grubby Keith Lemon. The endless parade of “inclusive and divers” ugly minters, fat, snot-hanger-nose-ringed hanging-snot-septum-piercings and lastly the energy grifters Connie g us about 100% renewable energy. It’s back to my tapes, vinyl & CDs. If I want a film or TV series, I have DVDs and old videos. I am effectively “off grid” as far as the MSM goes, any news and information I glean from disparate sources and make upy own mind. A POX on the lot of them.
Here endeth the Sheikh’s lesson.
TYPO, predictive text fail… Nigel FARAGE
I missed out:
What really pisses me off is the almost comete erasure of white people, yet the race-grifters are silent, their idea of “inclusivity and diversity” seems to be NOT including any diversity, driving a growing resentment that they will claim to be evidence of “racism” due to “white privilege” rather than seeing the blindingly 0bvious, that they are the real racist, but if they admitted that, they’d be out of their race-grifting jobs.
We now get the “token white”, more often a mixed race couple, unless it’s lesbians, or the white bloke is the stereotypical idiot.