The Noble Liar: How and Why the BBC Distorts the News to Promote a Liberal Agenda

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Review ------ The Noble Liar is going to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Good. Today more than ever we need to shake up the public debate about major institutions and be forced out of the comfort zone of our echo chambers. Those of a liberal disposition who are so virtuous in their rightness that they are ruthlessly illiberal about those who disagree may squirm at the accuracy of their depiction in this important book. Those who are happy to be noble liars to promote their greater truth may be stung by the deconstruction of how they are contributing to a festering rot at the heart of media institutions. But good for Robin Aitken for courageously taking on thorny taboos and making us rethink received opinion. Aitken uses the BBC as his main focus, but is skilful in his critique of the national broadcaster, invaluably allowing us to reflect on key contemporary issues: institutional contempt for the values of the millions of people, distortion of media impartiality under the guise of fact-checking and the preachy nature of an ever-narrower news agenda that avoids discussing prickly questions that challenge liberal consensus. --Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, author of 'I STILL Find That Offensive!' The Noble Liar s a world of self-obsessed and irresistibly comic liberals against whom the pendulum may already have be to swing. --Conservative Home Bias in the news is dismally, but brilliantly, adumbrated in a new book by Robin Aitken, a BBC staffer for more than 25 years. Aitken, to the back teeth of the partisan nature of the corporation's news coverage, concludes that the BBC has 'whether through carelessness or hubris' given up any pretence of impartiality, preferring instead to promulgate its philosophically asinine world view. --The Sunday Times About the Author ---------------- Robin Aitken is a former BBC reporter and journalist. He spent twenty-five years working across all levels within the Corporation, from local radio to the Today programme. He is the author of Can We Trust the BBC? (Continuum, 2007). He is co-founder of the Oxford Foodbank and was awarded the MBE for this work in 2014.