The BCC Website is one of several places I go to for news. If I were so inclined I could tune into BBC World Service; it is broadcast on FM in Kampala. If I had a television, BBC World is readily available. There is no doubt that the BBC’s influence in Uganda is huge. Along with Hollywood and the United Nations, the BBC is one of the biggest shapers of people’s thinking in the nation and far beyond of course.
Recently, whilst reading stories on the BBC’s Website a box keeps appearing. It kind of flashes up on the screen and looks like this:
I admit to being amazed when I read these words. For 40 years the BBC has been at the forefront of championing a worldview that informs us – even celebrates – that there is no truth, that everything is relative. And now it tells us that it is ‘Always Championing the Truth’! Just what is going on? What exactly do they mean? And how exactly do they put out this message and still keep a straight face? Let me offer a few thoughts that may provide some insights into this. I’d be interested to hear your comments about this too.
(1) Accurate reporting
I think that BBC journalists do try to avoid taking sides in political disagreements or war situations. In addition, they pride themselves on checking and double-checking a story before reporting it. This is to their credit; they are keen to get the facts straight and as a result, report a lot less than say the UK’s national newspapers, who will go to press with far less evidence for a story’s reliability. Perhaps that is what the BBC means by, ‘Always Championing the Truth’; simply getting the facts straight.
The problem is that for most of us the truth is much more than that. ‘Truth championing’ is implicitly making a claim to have a vantage point from which to assess what is a correct way of understanding the world over and against an incorrect way of understanding it. And if that’s true, the BBC is suggesting that not all truth is relative; that not everyone’s truth is equally valid.
That would be going against the whole western tradition of the last few decades, a stance that has shaped a generation to be deeply suspicious of any final truth claims.
(2) The post-truth world
The background to the BBC’s slogan may be found in the remark that followed the recent US election, namely that we are now living in a ‘post-truth world’. Many commentators, especially on the political left, have sought to point out the way that Donald Trump continuously makes outlandish comments about people and situations which have no basis in reality. Seemingly, he has jettisoned truth for lies; fact for invention and all in the cause of expediency.
Against this background, the BBC, I suppose, is seeking to stake its claim to be an upholder of truth in the world. As I have commented before in my blog post Trump, Clinton and the Post-Truth World there is much irony here. It’s hard to dispute that it was the progressive left who taught us that there is no such thing as final truth and took us on their journey into political correctness with its, ‘every view is equally valid and worthy of celebration’ agenda.
For forty years institutions like the BBC have informed us that anyone who thinks that they have ‘the truth’ is to be treated with suspicion. Even if they didn’t quite put it like that, everything that the BBC puts out, from soaps to documentaries out is underpinned by that attitude.
This is the essence of what we call the postmodern mindset: invariably, people who claim to have the truth will be seeking to impose their ‘truth’ onto others and to control them in the process. So according to this logic, men invented ‘the truth’ of marriage to legitimise the control of women. White people invented ‘the truth’ of their superiority over non-white people to justify the twin exploitations of slavery and empire-building. Heterosexuals invented ‘the truth’ that heterosexuality as the default human sexual situation and so labelled homosexuality as abnormal.
‘The truth’ – we’ve heard for a long time now – is always a smoke-screen for the oppression of others by dominant groups who manufacture ‘truth’ to make the world work for them. So realising that, it’s now our duty to expose all truth claims for what they are and accept the fact that no one has ‘the truth’. That everyone’s truth is different and that all truth claims are relative to all others has been the received wisdom for decades now. It’s against this background that the BBC’s claim to be ‘Always Championing the Truth’ leaves me just a little incredulous!
(3) Empowering the marginalised
Following on from the idea that ‘the truth’ is always a sinister lever used to empower the dominant in society, there is no greater cause for those calling themselves progressives than empowering minority groups. The progressive agenda really amounts to little more than this: to give a voice to and support those whose ‘truth’ has been drowned out by the louder ‘truths’ of historically louder groups.
This creed lies at the very heart of the BBC. So issues to do with women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, transgendered people and disabled people are daily on the BBC’s agenda. It seeks to empower these groups to get their ‘marginalised’ agenda out.
Now again, here’s the problem for the BBC: this whole approach rests upon an assumption that no one has the truth, that all truth is relative. Dominant truth claims need diluting and minority truth claims need amplifying, but in the end no one has ‘the truth’. If that’s your premise, how in the world can you claim to be ‘Always Championing the Truth’? Unless of course you believe that the truth is that there is no truth. But then you’re tying yourself up in knots when you claim to be a champion of it!
(4) The BBC’s truth is secular
For the BBC, the world is unmistakably a secular place. Although they give a nod to religion as a man-made affair, their assumption is that humanity is the centre of reality and the physical world is all that there is.
This material worldview is what shapes the BBC’s whole approach to news, documentaries and dramas. It gives no weight at all to the God of the Bible, the God who has spoken, acts in history and – from where I’m sitting – is the centre of all things and will finally triumph with his people, the church of Jesus Christ. In short, the BBC as an institution is predicated on the worldview that the physical world is all that there is.
To assume secularism and call it ‘the truth’ about reality quietly ignores the fact that ‘the truth’ about the world is fundamentally contested. The fact is that the majority of people on this planet in are not secular; theists and pantheists outweigh secularists by a long way. To call the secular, ‘the truth’ is in fact quite an act of arrogance on behalf of the BBC. A lot of people disagree with them; I for one.
(5) Truth suggests a Truth-Giver
Speaking now as the convinced Christian Theist I am, it seems to me that what is driving the BBC’s need to claim to be ‘always championing the truth’ is a kind of admission that we can’t avoid the idea of truth. It’s simply the way we are wired as humans. We may laugh at the idea of truth for a while, but in the end we come back to needing it to make sense of the world.
Unlike the BBC, who work on the secular premise that the world is nothing more than a cosmic accident and that truth is always a human invention, it seems to me that we can’t live in a world where everything is relative. If we try, we find that things get a little silly and we begin contradicting ourselves: there is no such thing as truth and yet we are the new champions of truth.
In the final analysis, we can’t escape making absolute statements. Even the statement that there is no such thing as truth is an absolute statement! Furthermore, it seems inescapable that we need a concept of absolute truth to make any sense of our world. Without it, the world becomes a place where the loudest voice becomes dominant and right and wrong cease to be meaningful.
The very fact that our world needs some way of knowing what is true and what is false points to a Truth-Giver – God. In the final analysis, only the knowledge of the true and living God, known through His word, allows anything to make any sense.
STOP
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2017-04-24. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.