The BBC

It's pathetic. They all seem to be doing it though. Even the Guardian is running with all the "goodies" above the fold.

i shouldn't really single out the Beeb for the paucity of economic journalism but y'know, that's the stuff i listen to

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bgej/afghan-footballers-bbc-taliban

I heard that report the other day, it deeply horrible and vindictive - wtf are they trying to achieve here? Other than shitting up their international rep some more.

Saving the licence fee.

I normally don’t care for arguments about the BBC bias as (imo) it zags all over the place. But maybe I’m wrong. I find the idea that a news organisation reported this story, in this way, genuinely evil.

figured the bump would be about this...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/mar/18/bbc-chair-richard-sharp-helped-friend-to-paid-job-advising-corporation

the BBC has a correspondent dedicated to watching boats in the channel and stoking alarm so maybe some genuinely evil is definitely one of their modes

Genuine evil is what they want in the Red Wall, I believe.

they trade on this rep of their overseas stations being trusted news sources and having huge audiences in Asia and the Middle East. Then they do a nasty, yes even evil, Fox News style racist smear piece on vulnerable asylum seekers like this. They deserve some serious flak and I could imagine a lot of their bbc Persian staff would not be happy with this.

It's just spectacularly misjudged. Even if every claim in the story were verified, it would practically be the plot of Escape To Victory.

In other BBC news (and News) the Today programme has used the 20th anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq to revisit Iraq, speaking to Yazidis and other Iraqis, weaving reports in throughout the morning's stories, emphasizing a direct line between the invasion and the rise of Islamic State, a "nostalgia" for Saddam, and concluding that any peace is fragile due to the ethnic divisions codified into law by the American and British administrators. Hard to think of a more damning way of marking the date but it would have been nice to hear a bit more of this in real time rather than 20 years later ffs.

the list of countries that have lots of people fondly remembering the various forms of dictatorship that got replaced by democracy and free markets must be pretty long

it would practically be the plot of Escape To Victory

Love this Tracer !

I just had a call with a few girls left in Afghanistan. The rumours spread among them that if they do an interview with the media they will be evacuated to the west. This is what the BBC article caused among women. It's getting worse and worse https://t.co/xU0Fw3U2t1 pic.twitter.com/esd2sRc8tu

— 𝐳𝐞𝐲𝐧𝐚𝐛 (@zainab_Mozafari) March 19, 2023

one of the refugee footballers from Afghanistan, this has got to be one of the scummiest things the bbc has ever done, trusted news organisation my arse. And they do love to fact check other sources of news.

⁦⁦@BBCNews⁩ interviewed Simpay Khalifa, stuck in a hotel near Wooten Bsssett. With great English & a very pleasant personality he'd be a great asset to any employer. On the left is Simpay during the interview. On the right is the photo they chose for the online story. pic.twitter.com/fFVC5E9P37

— Gyll King (@GyllKing) March 20, 2023

Small beer compared to other stuff but this and hasty exit of Ken Bruce seems to show an organisation which doesn’t value its talent.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/22/it-just-feels-a-bit-sad-the-rev-richard-coles-disappointed-at-rushed-bbc-radio-4-exit

excellent visit to the Raven Row exhibition People Make Television last week. of course, you could only scratch the surface of the archive, even with several visits, and only parts of programmes in a relatively short visit of a couple of hours. but it was fascinating – both in its own terms and how it reflected on today's social and video'd world – and delightful – the local presentation of people, places and events, presented such colloquial vernacular things as accents, high streets, interactions, clothes, in ways that you don't see very frequently. the importance of this archive as a historical artefact is significant, I think, and like many such activities at the time they take place probably underestimated at the time.

it was a mixture of BBC Open Door and local cable television - a model that never took off in the way it did in the US. It was interesting to see that these hyperlocal productions had corporate broadcast backing in a bid to drive subscriber numbers; one personally professionally interesting aspect was how business models, mutatis mutandis, stay the same – Disney currently grappling with cost per subscriber platform challenges, or the way cable has been significantly disrupted by FAST (free ad-supported streaming tv) in the States - a model that is unlikely to repeat itself at the same scale in Europe due to the lack of cable.

a few of the things I caught - all of them were enjoyable and interesting, and the importance of the strand/channel of communication for black people, as the exhibition catalogue points out in one of its essays, was significant. where else would they be heard like this?

Black Teachers (16th April, 1973) – a really great view of the effects of racial prejudice in the education system, and how it bends you out of shape as a child and adult, how you have to adapt to it. this incidentally very much a theme of a rewatch of Lynda LaPlante's Prime Suspect the other day as well - a startling rewatch for me, how effectively and brutally it dramatised the scope of men's violence, and male institutional violence towards women, much of it presented as the thinnest of psychological canalising of phsyical violence. i hadn't at all seen as a teenager the highly structured and insightful way LaPlante structured the relationships between the two. Well worth a rewatch, especially in the light of the recent Met report (not that this report in itself will come as a surprise).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhCbdD30az4

It Ain't Half Racist Mum (1st March 1979) - reasonably well known this, I think. With Stuart Hall and Maggie Steed. Well worth viewing again to get a different set of voices from the past effectively analysing the tiresome and asinine media litigation of the notion of impartiality (BBC and otherwise) of today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oZtBfN87A

A documentary on Balham and Poplar street protest – I can't find online footage or the date or title – with a wide variety of community members (for a zebra crossing in the Balham case). It finished with a round table discussion where a very young woman, who'd helped make the Balham piece, talked very well about how a camera wielded by a community member brought very different responses to one wielded by, say, a BBC news team. A couple of old women watching at the same time started laughing immoderately at this – turned out that one of them was the young woman in question, which was lovely. Another of the round table participants said that the making of the programme had enabled better communication between the residents – he said he was startled by the number of different views, which taken in isolation were rarely belligerent, malignant or unpleasant, but brought together in unmediated ways might come into conflict, and that community television was one way, quite a good one actually, of managing that mediation.

In as highly videoed a time as ours, it's hard to see that it has quite the same mediating magic, that some of the setting-up, the event, the equipment of the broadcasting state or corporation in the hands of the people, brings, but there's plenty to examine below the surface of the comparison I think.

Another snippet I caught, this time of a local Bristol programme, brought a smirk of cynical recognition. An extremely well-spoken young woman was interviewing a v old west country couple (the accents!) about whether they thought women should be allowed to do the same jobs as men, to which the woman, and subsequently her husband kept on saying 'Of course, if they can do it, why not?' Which apparently wasn't the right answer, so the young woman said 'What about bus driver?' (the proximal cause of this interview was women bus drivers in bristol I think) 'If they can drive the bus why should it be a problem?' 'What about train drivers?' 'Sure, why not?' 'What about airline pilots?' (Husband this time): 'If they've been trained to do it, why shouldn't they?' 'But you wouldn't be worried getting in a plane with a lady (I think she said 'lady') pilot?' 'Why should I worry if she can fly it?'. They were very patient with the interviewer imo.

Anyway, great exhibition, there was lots more, and I wish I'd seen a lot more on top of that – hope the entire catalogue is made available somewhere like the BFI.

booming post, hopefully i'll dig in to this

I had wanted to see this but I kept stopping myself because I wasn't sure I wanted to go to a museum to watch TV. Now I'm regretting it. Looks like the exhibition is finished?

yes, finished I'm afraid. and it was really just watching tv in a museum, but it was done about as well as that can be. ofc, the problem is that it's not really possible to watch it all in any curated way anywhere else. i hope that changes.

just to round out an unspoken point:

he said he was startled by the number of different views, which taken in isolation were rarely belligerent, malignant or unpleasant, but brought together in unmediated ways might come into conflict, and that community television was one way, quite a good one actually, of managing that mediation

'but brought together in unmediated ways might come into conflict' and be made belligerent, malignant or unpleasant in the process. this is of course the social media model and it's probably worth considering how the courtesies and rituals of media engagement represented in the broadcast production and distribution models on display at Raven Row, might be reproduced in the IP and social media production and distribution models. it doesn't seem to me entirely *necessary* that the Thiel application of Girard, by which I mean the instigation of the thumbs up model of mimetic sorting of groups, has to be the only way to derive insight and communicative value from social media, though I'm not certain about that. On clickbait measurement I'm considerably less sure. If something can be counted, something will be counted, and used as a measurement of better or worse. And that is a problem inherent to addressable media (as opposed to broadcast media).

Foucault's recognition of the power of structuring data to form the political landscape gets truer and truer exactly as it's overlooked

The media is the panopticon ffs

Loved these posts Fizzles, wish I’d known about this exhibition sooner though.

no doubt to be replaced by another Tory donor https://t.co/w2tycNL57z

— James Mackenzie 🐀v (@mrjamesmack) April 28, 2023

is nadine busy?

"I am going undercover..." i.e. being actively misleading.

In some journalistic contexts, this is valid. Essential even. But when it comes to mental/neurological diagnosis, an *incredibly* complex process as is, dishonesty has a huge impact on the outcome.

/5 pic.twitter.com/yWL2t9XlTx

— Dean Burnett (@Garw✧✧✧@o✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧) (@garwboy) May 15, 2023

Things are somehow worse elsewhere

Just for clarity… this is not a live situation 😳
It happened in Scotland and we are covering it on @5_News today https://t.co/9NFjQxCbpo

— Dan Walker (@mrdanwalker) May 16, 2023

it's bad enough that you're platforming Jonathan fucking Pie but running a trailer during the football commentary is pure violence

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0gn8_pX0AAhqaX?format=jpg&name=large

and a certain horrendous bbc presenter is trending, the one that dressed as a cowboy once!

tbf if it's that cunt i thought he was Channel 5 now

On Radio 2 also I think?

It weren't me, guv.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/breaking-jeremy-vine-denies-bbc-30421015

... or Rylan.

that picture's doing him no favours

I would have certainly thought Westwood or Moyles but it makes it sound like it’s a current presenter

i forgot about his Radio 2 gig

couldn't happen to a nicer guy

Huw, sorry, How long do we have to wait to find out who this is?

Hoooooo boy

are youse dropping cryptic clues here that it is Huw Edwards!

"Nonce" is trending today - you wouldn't get that on threads!

dunno if its been doctored but photo of huw in his pants now doing the rounds on twitter

more out of his pants than in them though

unfortunately for BBC nonces, Starmer isn't DPP anymore so they are very likely to get prosecuted now

I would have advised Huw Edwards to turn the other cheek but photographic evidence suggests he's already done that.

he's really fucked his chance of a knighthood now!

he broke the rules by going full pedo before the knighthood

BBC not helped by their current Director General having one of those generic smug Tory faces which makes him look like he's constantly smirking.

Then there's this...

Tim Davie says gap between initial contact and approaching presenter was reasonable but ‘there may be some learnings’ from case

findings out, learnings, laughings, that's what the BBC is for

Doesn't the 'victim' now say this is all bullshit made up by her mom?

there are fresh accusations from another young woman about "menacing texts" and requests for sexually explicit pics. I don't know if this is normal for ppl using dating apps but am calling that this guy is a wrong 'un.