Christianity gets
tougher treatment than other religions, BBC director general Mark Thompson has
admitted. He 
claimed that the reason for the difference in treatment was that
Christianity had “pretty broad shoulders”.
In an interview about
faith and broadcasting for the Free Speech Debate, a research project at Oxford
University, Mr Thompson said that producers were faced with the possibilities of
“violent threats” instead of normal complaints if they broadcast certain types
of satire.
He suggested other
faiths had “very close identity with ethnic minorities” and as a result were
covered in a more careful way by broadcasters, the Daily Telegraph
reports.
“Without question, ‘I
complain in the strongest possible terms’, is different from, ‘I complain in the
strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write’,” he said. “This
definitely raises the stakes.”
In the interview Mr
Thompson said he was a “practising Catholic” who believed that the “truths of
the Christian faith” were objective rather than
subjective.
But he said Islam was
a religion “almost entirely” practised by people who already may feel in other
ways “isolated”, “prejudiced against” and who may regard an attack on their
religion as “racism by other means”.
And he seemed to
accept that the public broadcaster’s decision to screen the controversial show
“Jerry Springer: The Opera” on BBC 2 in 2005
was a mistake.
More than 45,000
people contacted the BBC to complain about its extremely irreverent treatment of Christian
themes.
Many argued that no
one would have thought of making such a show about the Prophet Mohammed and
Islam.
Mr Thompson said:
“The kind of constraints that most people accept around racial hatred, the fact
that it may be in certain forms of expression or certain forms of depiction, may
be outlawed because of the way in which they go to racial hatred and potentially
the promotion and incitement of racial hatred.
“I think religion
should never receive that level of protection or
sensitivity.
“But I think it is
wrong to imagine that it therefore goes into the general swim and that a cartoon
of the Prophet Mohammed is no more challenging than a debate about what two plus
two equals.”
He added: “The point
is that for a Muslim, a depiction, particularly a comic or demeaning depiction,
of the Prophet Mohammed might have the emotional force of a piece of grotesque
child pornography.
“One of the mistakes
secularists make is not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels like
to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.”
Asked by his
interviewer, Timothy Garton Ash, the historian, if
he broadcaster would not air a “comparably satirical” show about the
Prophet Mohammed, he said: “Essentially the answer to that question is
yes.”
‘The idea you might
want to … think quite carefully about whether something done, in quotes, in the
name of freedom of expression, might to the Jew, or the Sikh, or the Hindu, or
the Muslim, who receives it, feel threatening, isolating and so forth, I think
those are meaningful considerations.”