Radio-4 the main national serious radio station has a women’s hour, but does not have a men’s hour. Although the women’s hour program has moved beyond the mantra of ‘all men are rapists and abusers’ the program regularly features guests who are of this ilk. Equality must cut both ways. Controversial feminist views and skewed statistics are allowed onto the airwaves unopposed. Radio-4 therefore needs to also have a program where men are equally able to complain about women. Here is an example of how men’s issues are mistreated by radio-4 on the Today program.
“…During yesterday’s broadcast she (Anna Ford) introduced an item on the treatment of men during divorce cases. There were two participants: Elizabeth Woodcraft a feminist barrister, and Neil Lyndon, author of the uncompromisingly anti-feminist No More Sex War. Lyndon felt that the interview was rather skewed in favour of his opponent, who was allowed to talk for more than two of the piece’s three minutes. After the broadcast he received a call from Today’s deputy editor, Rod Little, agreeing, apologising and saying Miss Ford had been reprimanded….”
Sunday Telegraph 31-Sep-97
The BBC World service has traditionally had a reputation for excellence. The station features news and documentaries with reporters of world-standing such as Mark Tully and Misha Glenny. A recent drive is under way to feminise the world service (announcement: “calling all our women listeners” BBC 13-Aug-96) a new program called ‘Everywoman’ targets women listeners and copies the Radio-4 ‘Woman’s Hour’ practice of including a liberal sprinkling of male-bashing. New world service reporters such as Julliet Tindell now send back reports from Tokyo (BBC 26-Aug-96) where for example women are illegally imported into Japan to work in the ‘entertainment’ industry as prostitutes. According to the Japanese newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun Mon Aug 12 1996 there are 160,836 male and 123,664 female immigrants staying illegally in Japan as estimated by the Ministry of Law (1-May-96). The men work in the so called KKK jobs. In Japanese KKK stands for dangerous, hard, and dirty, i.e. the jobs that no Japanese would want to do. The BBC program failed to mention anything about the fate of these illegal male immigrants. The program also failed to mention anything about men imported to work as male prostitutes. It is tempting to suggest that if immigrant women to Japan were being burnt to death in blast furnaces, or being trapped under agricultural machinery then we would soon hear about it from Tindell. This pattern of ‘women-as-victim’ reporting is increasingly repeated in many other countries by the BBC world service. The new correspondents have an obvious ‘male-bashing’ agenda and this is excluding the highly respected and experienced correspondents such as Tully and Glenny.