Are we getting pissed off with the BBC

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

Try living next to a UKIP bubble!

The right wing think the BBC is a hotbed of Trotskyist maniacs.

I suspect the right wing doesn’t, at least the powerful parts, but it suits their agenda if the gullible in the UKIP bubbles, etc, believe it, hence the rhetoric. It also allows the BBC to claim a veneer of impartiality: ‘look, we’re getting complaints from both sides’.

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

OK that's a conspiracy theory too far for me. I'm out. I see an organisation under political pressure for fear of it's funding and threats of break up.

I think you also need to take a little look at the CVS of some of the seniors in BBC News & Current Affairs. A bit of a hotbed of right wingery, IIRC.

 

[SteveS1]

I think you also need to take a little look at the CVS of some of the seniors in BBC News & Current Affairs. A bit of a hotbed of right wingery, IIRC.

Can you elaborate? Seriously I don't know the CVs of the News and Current Affairs overlords. I've heard a lot of opinion but not seen much by way of fact. Not that their views necessarily prevent them from remaining objective.

 

[Tony L]

All the left and liberal arguments for supporting the BBC even as they jump up and down on left and liberal values belong to another era.

You are looking at the BBC purely through a political lens, and one of a very specific colour. I can’t blank all the good it does elsewhere in the arts, music, science reporting (including a lot of green content), factual historical programs etc along with many genuinely good dramas such as Small Axe which you cite. For me the news and current affairs is a very small part of it. I no longer watch any of it unless Emily Maitlis is presenting Newsnight or I catch any of Today or PM on R4. There is a lot of BBC content I’d never dream of watching, but the stuff I do more than justifies its existence. I certainly don’t consider it a news source any more (aside from Newsnight).

 

[matt j]

I've never paid a licence fee, maybe if they separated the Radio from TV crap I'd consider it.

What I find amusing is that both sides complain about the BBCs bias- you have all the Brexit wingnuts whinging about it being a left wing, remoaner mouthpiece, likewise the left see it as a Murdoch lite, right wing, Trumpian brainwashing device.

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

Can you elaborate? Seriously I don't know the CVs of the News and Current Affairs overlords. I've heard a lot of opinion but not seen much by way of fact. Not that their views necessarily prevent them from remaining objective.

Sorry, nothing to hand at the mo’ but I recall some commentary a while back about the BBC’s head of News & Current Affairs being from a right wing media hinterland, and his appointees from similar. The choices of panellists for QT were often laid at the door of these types.

 

[Seanm]

OK that's a conspiracy theory too far for me. I'm out. I see an organisation under political pressure for fear of it's funding and threats of break up.

The options aren't "conspiracy theory" on the one hand and "well-meaning professional types doing a difficult job under a lot of political pressure". There's a fair bit of in-between, as well as different ways of looking at it entirely.

Political journalists are typically far too close to their subjects, socially, professionally, politically and demographically. They all went to similar schools and universities and believe the same things. They have always known each other: many are married to each other or otherwise related. They all go to the same parties. Hacks rely on Downing Street for access. Even in normal times there is a revolving door between the BBC and CCHQ (current standard bearers: Robbie Gibb, ex-head of BBC politics, now Downing Street director of comms [and brother to Conservative MP Nick Gibb]; Allegra Stratton, ex-political editor of Newsnight, now Downing Street press secretary).

On top of all that there is always political pressure related to funding, all of it from the right. And almost all political journalists are fantastically self-regarding and incapable of self-reflection, so they don't feel it necessary to account for any of this in any way, or develop formal rules to manage the overwhelming pressure to fall in step with their subjects. I mean the idea that there could be a meaningful level of objectivity under these conditions is absolutely laughable and the only people who actually believe it are the hacks themselves. And in fact there isn't any objectivity is there: you just need to look at the things they do and say. All of its got worse as the Conservative Party has got worse, the journalists more thick and the BBC's position more (apparently) precarious.

Where's the conspiracy? It's all out in the open and they don't even see any need to defend it. Just look at how people like Owen Jones get monstered when they suggest that, e.g., Allegra Stratton moving from the BBC into Downing Street, while being married to the editor of The Spectator, which used to be edited by the current prime minister and is owned by a company chaired by the BBC's Andrew Neil, is maybe a little bit off. They literally can't see a problem!

You are looking at the BBC purely through a political lens, and one of a very specific colour. I can’t blank all the good it does elsewhere in the arts, music, science reporting (including a lot of green content), factual historical programs etc along with many genuinely good dramas such as Small Axe which you cite. For me the news and current affairs is a very small part of it. I no longer watch any of it unless Emily Maitlis is presenting Newsnight or I catch any of Today or PM on R4. There is a lot of BBC content I’d never dream of watching, but the stuff I do more than justifies its existence. I certainly don’t consider it a news source any more (aside from Newsnight).

I'm not. As I've said, I've considered all that, weighed it up, and decided that it's not worth the price we pay for it, which is a one-party state.

 

[droodzilla]

The options aren't "conspiracy theory" on the one hand and "well-meaning professional types doing a difficult job under a lot of political pressure". There's a fair bit of in-between, as well as different ways of looking at it entirely.

Political journalists are typically far too close to their subjects, socially, professionally, politically and demographically. They all went to similar schools and universities and believe the same things. They have always known each other: many are married to each other or otherwise related. They all go to the same parties. Hacks rely on Downing Street for access. Even in normal times there is a revolving door between the BBC and CCHQ (current standard bearers: Robbie Gibb, ex-head of BBC politics, now Downing Street director of comms [and brother to Conservative MP Nick Gibb]; Allegra Stratton, ex-political editor of Newsnight, now Downing Street press secretary).

On top of all that there is always political pressure related to funding, all of it from the right. And almost all political journalists are fantastically self-regarding and incapable of self-reflection, so they don't feel it necessary to account for any of this in any way, or develop formal rules to manage the overwhelming pressure to fall in step with their subjects. I mean the idea that there could be a meaningful level of objectivity under these conditions is absolutely laughable and the only people who actually believe it are the hacks themselves. And in fact there isn't any objectivity is there: you just need to look at the things they do and say. All of its got worse as the Conservative Party has got worse, the journalists more thick and the BBC's position more (apparently) precarious.

Where's the conspiracy? It's all out in the open and they don't even see any need to defend it. Just look at how people like Owen Jones get monstered when they suggest that, e.g., Allegra Stratton moving from the BBC into Downing Street, while being married to the editor of The Spectator, which used to be edited by the current prime minister and is owned by a company chaired by the BBC's Andrew Neil, is maybe a little bit off. They literally can't see a problem!


I'm not. As I've said, I've considered all that, weighed it up, and decided that it's not worth the price we pay for it, which is a one-party state.

This excellent interview with Gary Yonge touches on the theme of your second paragraph:

In Britain and I think much of the West there are two things – first of all, there is access. If I do this, they will keep talking to me. What is the price of this access? But even tied to that, in a way I think that it was less true before, they are essentially of the same class.

In Britain, the percentage of columnists who went to private schools and Oxford or Cambridge is higher than it is in the House of Lords. Then you have this group of people who know each other, even if they don’t personally know each other. Not necessary electorally, but socially they have the same interests. Where did you go skiing? I went skiing there. Where did your son go to school? My son goes to school there. Where did you study, I studied there. Then there is a kind of collusion. It is all informal, none of it is stated, none of it is written down, none of it is probably even recognised. And yet all of this is fully very clear if you’re on the outside.

So when there are these ruptures — and this is as true for Trump as it was for Jeremy Corbyn in Britain — then they kind of band together, and the journalists become like political actors and as gatekeepers and they become affronted personally by the presence of these interlopers who have been selected by the great unwashed. And they find it much more cozy, comfortable to be in these much smaller cliques that represent quite a narrow band of political ideology.
...
When you have the generation which in its formative years saw the Soviet Union collapse, capitalism is the only thing, the only game in town, [Francis] Fukuyama’s End of History — everything else is childish, and romantic and utopian and ridiculous.
...
This is the world these people grew up in and it has collapsed. It collapsed with the crisis and they have really struggled to get their bearings since then. And that is how they become stenographers [putting out] whatever the last powerful person said to them, so long as their power is in some way connected to the neoliberal project.

The whole interview is superb and well worth reading.

It was a sad day when Yonge left the Guardian but, really, who can blame him?

 

[Seanm]

This excellent interview with Gary Yonge touches on the theme of your second paragraph:

The whole interview is superb and well worth reading.

It was a sad day when Yonge left the Guardian but, really, who can blame him?

Yes that's very well put. All of it's true and as I say they don't hide it. I just find it incredible that anyone could look at that situation and expect it to produce anything other than what it does actually produce, which as Yonge says is stenography. It's bad enough when things are vaguely normal but when you've got such reckless, mendacious extremists in charge it means the laundering of really nutty, dangerous ideas. It has to: they have to keep keep channelling this stuff as they always do, and they have to make that seem reasonable, otherwise everything they do and have ever done is called into question.

 

[Tony L]

I'm not. As I've said, I've considered all that, weighed it up, and decided that it's not worth the price we pay for it, which is a one-party state.

The BBC didn’t create the ‘one party state’! If anything that was Labour. If there is no credible political opposition to right-wing ideas you tend to get right-wing ideas. As ever just contrast England to Scotland. The difference is credible opposition to Tory rule. Labour won’t even campaign for a proper democratic electoral system FFS, and without that we have no chance of our politics ever being anything but a thin veneer on a wealthy establishment power-base. I have no idea why you would prefer to throw our media to Murdoch or worse. It reminds me of MaxFlinn championing Trump because he’d got the hump with Clinton blind to the fact that even worse is always even worse.

 

[Seanm]

The BBC didn’t create the ‘one party state’! If anything that was Labour. If there is no credible political opposition to right-wing ideas you tend to get right-wing ideas. As ever just contrast England to Scotland. The difference is credible opposition to Tory rule. Labour won’t even campaign for a proper democratic electoral system FFS, and without that we have no chance of our politics ever being anything but a thin veneer on a wealthy establishment power-base. I have no idea why you would prefer to throw our media to Murdoch or worse. It reminds me of MaxFlinn championing Trump because he’d got the hump with Clinton blind to the fact that even worse is always even worse.

I’ve explained why.

 

[vince rocker]

You are lucky then.

*Notes avoidance of the question*

 

[timH]

Its just occurred to me that if the BBC had an interview with Jesus would they have to also interview Lucifer for balance?

 

[Jim Audiomisc]

I've never paid a licence fee, maybe if they separated the Radio from TV crap I'd consider it.

What I find amusing is that both sides complain about the BBCs bias- you have all the Brexit wingnuts whinging about it being a left wing, remoaner mouthpiece, likewise the left see it as a Murdoch lite, right wing, Trumpian brainwashing device.

I see it more like a collection of bits flocking in vaguely similar directions.

My point being that you get a totally different 'BBC' if you only take in their 'News and Current Affairs' rolling (often) rubbish. Short, Sharp, Shallow, and now hopelessly under-funded thus making investigations almost impossible most of the time.

Whereas if you take in their documentaries and special interest programmes you get a different 'BBC'. One that offers 'More or Less', 'File on 4', and many specialist ones on Science, etc. Add in at present the Reith Lectures - well worth a listen.

Ignore the froth and taste the coffee.

 

[Seanm]

Client Journalism’s end of year round up of top moments of client journalism. Only 7 from the BBC.

https://twitter.com/clientjournoexp/status/1342102169420505091?s=21

Agree that the best moment was Kuenssberg jumping in on the Cummings story to defend him on Twitter. Very non-Fox journalism, we’re very lucky.

 

[graystoke4]

all the time ,but what can you do, the beeb is dead ,just don't know its dead,
over paid school boy chum's shocking,
and if i hear someone say, that the blue planet with Dave Attenborough , at the helm is worth the money on its own, they have never travailed the world , ,, i will stop giving to, charities, its up to you, i fund guide-dogs for the blind , and mac Macmillan's, stop being so blinked,

 

[droodzilla]

Client Journalism’s end of year round up of top moments of client journalism. Only 7 from the BBC.

https://twitter.com/clientjournoexp/status/1342102169420505091?s=21

Agree that the best moment was Kuenssberg jumping in on the Cummings story to defend him on Twitter. Very non-Fox journalism, we’re very lucky.

I was wondering where to post this.

I hope everyone clicks on the link. If you're contemplating the UK's political hellscape and wondering how the Conservatives get away with one disaster after another, you will find some of the answers there.

 

[Seanm]

Late entrant, another from the BBC’s Chris Mason:

https://twitter.com/chrismasonbbc/status/1342134558708424704?s=21

So glad we don’t have to put up with Fox-style Great Leader fluffing in this country.

 

[Tony L]

That is shockingly bad it has to be said. Really cringingly bad. I’ll probably put up with it though as long as they keep doing this sort of thing as well.

 

[TheDecameron]

Kuensberg imagines she’s some kind of Richard Dimbleby- that tone she affects where every gossip piece about Johnson, his mistress, their dog, old Stanley, is delivered as though she was mc’ing Churchill’s state funeral or a coronation. She thinks somehow she’s mediating the procession of history for the peasantry.