The BBC is beginning to sound oddly like Pharyngula…

As calls for reform mount, two former BBC employees have spoken to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity, offering a rare glimpse into the culture at the corporation.

Former employee #1

“There was something of a Left-wing cabal – and if you were more centrist in your politics, your opinion wasn’t appreciated. Eventually, you just stopped speaking up. They would absolutely talk about diversity of voices, then shut down anybody who didn’t agree with them.

…

“There was also this clamouring for diversity that made a bit of a mockery of it. They had a diversity scheme, but when they couldn’t find enough external candidates they just put internal people on it who wouldn’t have got through in a fair competition. Suddenly, people who weren’t particularly good at their jobs were in really sought-after positions simply to fulfil quotas and make things look a certain way.”

And time goes on and those people see to it that the BBC has extremely thorough coverage of the drag communinny but ignores women entirely.

“I also saw a certain worldview carried forward in programming. There were documentaries that were supposed to be about discovery, but they started from a fixed view and followed it through to the end – so then you’d have whole films built on confirmation bias.”

Oops.

Former employee #2

“I don’t think some of what I’ve been reading of late is representative of the corporation. What I do think is that there was a period when younger generations were over-empowered, and it skewed certain outcomes. People with very little experience were given far more say in decision-making than they should have had, mainly because older, white and middle-class staff were paranoid about the ‘optics’ of saying no.

“The fetishisation of youth meant that, regardless of whether they were any good, the assumption was that young people must know the answer. They don’t – or not yet, anyway. In some cases, there were people in very senior jobs who were far too inexperienced, making big mistakes with compliance and duty of care, and they were protected by the managers who’d put them there. Being young became a qualification in itself.”

I’ve talked about this often, I think. There’s this pattern – the changes that came about in the 60s and 70s and beyond were often sparked by young people, or by broad movements that featured a lot of young people and were energized by young people. Civil rights, feminism, LGB rights, anti-colonialism via opposition to the war in Vietnam – all featured young people in leadership roles. There was a pattern: older people are used to everyday racism so it doesn’t shock them the way it shocks younger people. It should but it doesn’t. Everybody got very used to that pattern, so this tacit belief formed that the old guard is always wrong, is always ignoring some burning injustice because they just can’t see it, therefore, young people are the ones who have to educate them or kick them aside or both, because young people always get this stuff right.

It’s taking us way too long to learn that they don’t.