Is it wrong to be right?

The BBC's coverage of the recent tragedy in Norway sent me into a bit of a Twitter frenzy.

First on Saturday's BBC Breakfast, and then on Sunday's Andrew Marr Show, they took obvious delight in the opportunity to denounce 'right wing terrorism'.

As I asked in one of my early tweets,

What do Anders Behring Breivik, Margaret Thatcher, and @DanHannanMEP have in common?

Answer: according to the BBC, all are 'right wing'.

I've written about this before, but it seems like one of those points I'll have to return to again and again. Thankfully, bloggers with a much bigger readership than mine are on the case ...

Echoing one of my Sunday morning tweets, Tom Paine noted

It's Christmas for the left-liberal consensus. They are still in their glee from the undoubted success of their suspiciously Campbell-esque campaign against News International. They are still earnestly blabbering over state-dominated airwaves, without a hint of irony, about the supposed 'dominance' of a private company struggling to compete with the funded-by-force BBC. A Norwegian nutjob has now made them an even greater gift. Watching the Andrew Marr and Murnaghan shows this morning (and wondering as usual why the Conservatives are as little in evidence as they were in opposition) their delight was manifest.
...
The BBC held out for mere seconds before dropping the 'extreme' from 'extreme right wing.' Compare and contrast with the way they never describe socialist violence as any kind of left wing but wrap it in the false black flag of 'anarchism'.

Today Norman Tebbit wrote an excellent article condemning the coverage by our tax-funded broadcaster:

As for the BBC, I am not in the least surprised that it has denounced Anders Behring Breivik as – yes, you’ve guessed it – an extreme Right-winger. After all, Left-wingers like the Baader Meinhof gang don’t kill people, do they? There was time, too, for a bit of Christian-bashing and not too much thought about the doctrines of Christianity. Then Breivik’s views on Islam (similar to Prime Minister Putin’s views on Chechnya) and those on immigration (shared by Pol Pot and Mao) were used to fit him up as a Nazi and therefore an extreme Right-winger. The only bit missing from the charge sheet is that we do not know if he was a climate change denier and, like Tony Benn, a critic of the European Union.

On Sunday evening the BBC even dug up a psychiatrist to say that Breivik was perfectly aware of what he was doing and it was all about leading a Right-wing, conservative revolution. It makes one wonder what the Corporation might have made of it all but for its statutory duty of impartiality.

Cranmer, too, offered a useful perspective:

Just a few months ago the right-wing Freedom Association and Norris McWhirter were caricatured by the BBC as fascists and neo-Nazis, and even Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer Charles Moore now asserts that Right is wrong. International Development Minister Alan Duncan equates socially-conservative, right-wing Tories with the Taliban; the co-Chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi has had a swipe at the Right; and David Cameron isn’t averse to talking about ‘right-wing extremists’; a ‘right-wing fascist party’; ‘far right groups’ and ‘the hard right’.

The subliminal message is inescapable: ‘Left is good; Right is bad’, because right-wing beliefs breed right-wing philosophy which spawns right-wing extremism which is malignant. Ergo, those who tend towards the political Right must be subject to state surveillance.

And so we arrive at the unquestionable BBC state orthodoxy and narrative of enlightenment. It is ‘spin’, but of such an Orwellian subliminal manipulation of the vernacular that any contrary utterance strikes a chord of jarring dissonance, and the speaker or writer is cast into political, social or spiritual oblivion. Norman Tebbit, Simon Heffer, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Daniel Hannan, Peter Hitchens, John Redwood, Melanie Phillips, The Freedom Association... These are the new ‘fascists’ of the Right; they exist at the periphery of social acceptability, while the fascistic tendencies of those left-wing groups which seek to intimidate and silence any reasoned protest against socially-liberal, ecumenical, europhiliac multiculturalism are completely ignored.

All are well worth reading in full.