They Fixed It For Jim

The word schadenfreude, taking pleasure at another’s misfortune, could have been coined with the BBC’s relationship to Catholicism in mind.  For years the good old Beeb has taken great delight in every fresh revelation in the church’s running sore of sex abuse scandals.

As a non scientific test of just how much fun they’ve had, google the words “Catholic” and “BBC”. Your search results will be dominated by the following. At number two I got: “Chilean Catholic bishop resigns over paedophilia accusations”. Number three relates how: “Australian Roman Catholic Church admits child sex scandal”. And then there’s number nine with: “The world: The Shame of the Catholic Church”. And so on and so on for 1, 760,000 results.

These results will pop out without any need to be more specific in your search by using words such as “child abuse” or “sex scandal”. Finding so many such BBC articles in response to an innocent enquiry suggests that buggering little boys is a core activity for the church.

For the sake of comparison I googled “Islam” and “BBC” and as you would expect with two such neutral words my search resulted in positive and helpful BBC articles such as: “The Five Pillars of Islam” and “Science and Islam” and so on and on for pages and pages without anything negative to Islam.

This is, of course, just what you would expect. We wouldn’t want the BBC to associate “Islam” with the 20, 000 deadly Islamic terror attacks recorded since 9/11. But that being so, why don’t they extend the same courtesy to the Catholic Church?

The basic theme of the BBC coverage  has been that insular middle-aged conservative white men concealed horrendous cruelty to children for decades.

In view of this the Jimmy Savile child sex scandal unfolding  over the last couple of weeks is deliciously ironic. The latest story in this gathering storm is that in addition to the prodigious efforts of Mr Fix It with dozens of children there are now complaints of abuse about three other BBC employees.

In an undoubtedly uncomfortable parallel with the Catholic Church, it seems that insular middle-aged progressive white men at the BBC concealed horrendous cruelty to children (and women) for decades.

There are, however, a couple of differences that the BBC can take comfort in.

In all fairness to the BBC in ignoring abuse of nobodies they were protecting important celebrities and not just some no name pervert priest. This was no doubt part of their commendable “commitment to quality”.

Also being fine liberal minded gentlemen it’s obvious that those BBC apparatchiks meant well. When they ignored the cries for help you may be sure that their hearts were in the right place (on the left).

So we should all be generous in the future and not associate the BBC with the actions of a small minority of its employees. After all it would be a tragedy if innocently googling the words “BBC” and “children” should result in endless reminders of a few decades of errors.

After all molesting children is not a core activity of the BBC!