The BBC

Just a thought Rob but have you thought you could avoid such a situation by inviting, say, a balloon on a stick with a stupid face drawn on it, thereby getting much the same level of insight without risking calls for violence?

— Alan White (@aljwhite) September 27, 2019

I was listening to much obfuscation and waffle from some BBC head on Today this morning. It's impossible to take this seriously as an impartiality issue, cos Fiona Bruce, Keunsberg, Robinson all should be getting the same treatment as Naga if they are truly concerned. It's completely bizarre that they gone to town on this one i.e. a clear cut case of nothing to investigate here.

I remember naively thinking she might be an improvement on Dimbers after her first QT performance. The DA one was her 2nd ep I think but it quickly disabused me of any such daft notions!

I was listening to much obfuscation and waffle from some BBC head on Today this morning. It's impossible to take this seriously as an impartiality issue, cos Fiona Bruce, Keunsberg, Robinson all should be getting the same treatment as Naga if they are truly concerned. It's completely bizarre that they gone to town on this one i.e. a clear cut case of nothing to investigate here.

This is utterly, completely otm. I don't understand why they're running w/ this.

The BBC pushed out a callous, miswritten statement written on iPhone notes in response to hundreds of complaints about Laura K’s conduct. They have their producers cuntishly dismissing concerns about platforming fascists on twitter. I think it shows which of their employees they consider to be worth protecting. Message received if you’re a poc at the BBC with any sort of public presence, I guess.

It is completely maddening that there isn't even any independent regulator like ofcom overseeing the bbc

so infuriating when you want to escalate a complaint and they're just like "we think what we did was fine" and that's it

ofcom does regulate the BBC!

fwiw the BBC is inundated with bullshit right-wing troll complaints constantly, no idea why this partic one got upheld. I cannot see the merits.

Let’s all just calm down. Brendon O’Neill just went on tv and said people should riot. It’s not like he said anything awful like “racism is bad”.

— Nish Kumar (@MrNishKumar) September 27, 2019

In the politics of the present, when we are in a politics of name-calling and insult, I think it’s probably unwise of the BBC to be calling out people for being liars or racist.

Yeah now that there’s all these racists all over the place we’d best not upset them. Is the ‘liars’ bit purely to emphasise why they’re going so easy on Boris? The fucking cheek of these cunts blaming some kind of malevolent ‘climate’ as though they’re not a massive part of helping normalise it in the first place.

I watched the Naga thing today and she went as far as she possibly could to avoid calling Trump a racist cunt. Fuck the BBC.

it's totally ludicrous.

it was entirely within Munchetty’s right to describe those comments as racist on air ... however, Jordan insisted she had breached editorial guidelines because she said the comments made her feel “absolutely furious” and that implied she was making a judgment on Trump’s personality, saying it is not the BBC’s job to be “calling out people for being liars or racist”.

This would be ridiculous wishy washy hand-waving even if she had called him out as racist but she didn't (though she might have well as done, because he is). She said she was:

"Absolutely furious, and I can imagine lots of people in this country will be feeling absolutely furious a man in that position thinks it’s OK to skirt the lines by using language like that.”

🚨 NEW: The BBC executive committee have now emailed staff about Naga Munchetty which looks like a total reverse ferret — “The very limited finding was not about Naga’s comments on racism. That part of the complaint was rejected”

— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) September 27, 2019

So the BBC has overturned the complaint:

🚨 Breaking: BBC director-general Tony Hall sends staff another email regarding the furore around the Naga Munchetty complaint.

He’s personally reviewed the original decision, overturning it.

— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) September 30, 2019

Amazing how the BBC considered it necessary to go to all this effort to satisfy an unsatisfiable person, whose real problem was having to look at someone whose face he didn’t like.
https://theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/30/bbc-racism-row-naga-munchetty-complaint-was-also-about-dan-walker

“These two presenters have never made any secret of their left-wing and anti-Trump bias but usually in more subtle ways, such as eye-rolling and looks of exasperation when reporting on news stories. However, personal commentary on controversial news stories is surely going too far and is way outside of their remit. They are employed as presenters not political commentators and as such should at least feign impartiality. It’s about time they were reminded of this.”

If you're that up yourself and bothered about news values why the fuck are you watching BBC Breakfast?

Funnily enough a couple of my less reconstructed Socialist chums decided Naga was a government stooge months ago, over not much iirc

The entitlement expressed in that complaint made me think that it was made by someone foul and prominent, otherwise why give it anything other than short shrift?

I've never liked Naga Munchetty much either tbh.

(xp)

I have no strong feelings but anybody looks impressive sat next to Dan Walker

Goes without saying really.

people who refer to the BBC's "left-wing bias" have mostly become deranged or they are just very thick.

1000+ complaints about the brexit coverage in the last month. and the success of the naga complaint is just going to encourage them.

Response from BBC to my complaint about Laura Kuenssberg’s “punch” tweets: pic.twitter.com/NV2Q10vd0u

— Christmas Eve ain't what it used to be (@bloonface) December 11, 2019

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/932/745/9cc.gif

As the BBC notes, their employee apologized for something she did. The BBC had nothing to do with this, scarcely knows who she is and cannot recall offhand if they've met her. They suggest you take it up with her directly because, really, they were all drinking tea in a sandwich shop at the time and have witnesses to prove it.

It's almost as if they want the licence abolished at this point

Perhaps they do. If you think the BBCs days are numbered, you may as well be in place to get some chunks of it when it’s sold off.

Perhaps they do. If you think the BBCs days are numbered, you may as well be in place to get some chunks of it when it’s sold off.

lol

Regarding today’s Politics Live programme, the BBC does not believe it, or its political editor, has breached electoral law.

— BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) December 11, 2019

Leave Laura alone!

They’ve taken the Politics Live where she made the remarks off iPlayer.

the actions of a broadcaster with nothing to hide, standing firmly behind their politics editor, in whom they have full faith

you'd imagine that having her programme pulled would cause some consequences inside.

i havent that good an imagination tbh

running slightly counter to the recent spirit of this thread the bbc will right now be extremely worried. boris johnson has said that he wants to reverse the “bbc decision” to charge the over 75s the licence fee.

in truth the bbc have played this hand extremely badly. they should never have agreed to Osborne’s arrangement whereby they shoulder the cost of the licence fees for the elderly and also the decision about who gets charged for it. i would say “zugzwanged” but the implications were obvious at the time and the bbc went whistling into dead end alley rather than being the victims of a high calibre chess strategy.

the budgetary impact is eye watering and would see a wholesale transformation of the bbc, its remit and its force as a mini industry within media as britain.

First you fuck it up, then you privatise it, right?

Well I guess the first stage of the plan is completed then

First you fuck it up, then you privatise it, right?

License fee avoidance decriminalisation seems like it might be on the agenda fairly shortly, which isn’t inherently indefensible but probably points further in the direction of making it an optional subscription-based service.

1h ago 09:48
BBC 'played a part' in contributing to Labour's election defeat, says shadow cabinet minister

Andy McDonald, the shadow transport secretary, told the Today programme this morning that he thought the BBC was partly to blame for Labour’s defeat at the election. In an interview with Justin Webb, McDonald said:

Don’t get me started on the media, Justin. I’m very worried about our public service broadcaster.

When Webb asked him if he was blaming the BBC for the fact that Jeremy Corbyn did not win, McDonald replied:

I am saying that they played a part. I’m really worried about the drift. You’ve seen the catalogue of criticisms that we’re making.

We’ve accepted that the print media are rained against us, but my goodness me. I’m going to look at us.

We’re the important part here. We got this wrong, but if the BBC are going to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial manner, I think they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot to say about this.

slanting coverage against Labour, McDonald replied:

Consciously, yes.

When you have a BBC presenter standing in front of a television camera saying ‘and Boris Johnson is on his way to a richly-deserved victory’.

McDonald seemed to be referring to the BBC political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who during one live broadcast referred to Boris Johnson winning “the majority that he so deserves.” From the context it seemed obvious to many that she meant to say “the majority he so desires”.

Webb put it to McDonald that this was just “a slip of the tongue” and that it was “madness” to read too much into it. McDonald replied:

How many slips of the tongue are we going to make until you accept it?

1) Am I mistaken in thinking it was LauraK who said the bold part?
2) The 'poor lab blame media' riposte will loom around the corner, but I think McDonald is fully in his right to call out BBC's shambolic and unbalanced performance during this GE.

On 1) you are mistaken, it wasn’t Laura K

1) you are mistaken it was Alex Forsyth, but Andy McDonald is also mistaken, she said "They have done a relentless focus on Boris Johnson’s promise to take the UK out of the European Union if he wins the majority that he so deserves."

it is more plausible to say she meant to say "he so desires" than if she'd said what Andy McDonald claims

emily maitlis writes for the grauniad about her prince andrew interview

i was moved by the deep compassion she shows for jeffrey epstein's many victims, the way she deftly outlines how the global elite are heavily implicated in epstein's sex trafficking ring, and how the queen's favourite son is very likely a rapist

This is the discussion in the Newsnight office a couple of weeks after it aired. We still cannot quite believe it happened. We have to pinch ourselves seeing global headlines, day after day: the ramifications of all the painstaking observations he made to us in that hour of surreal television. I agreed to do an interview about the interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “Was this your ‘Frost/Nixon’ moment?” they asked as I walked in. I had barely taken off my coat.
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I gulped. It felt like the finest thing I have ever been asked, but I couldn’t find a way to respond without sounding like a muppet.

oh no wait it's a bunch of self-aggrandising bullshit in which she spends paragraphs fretting over how much deference she should show the royal rapist and the word 'victim' appears just once

submitted without comment

Emily Maitlis is the lead presenter for BBC Newsnight and the author of Airhead – the Imperfect Art of Making News

Fair play, BBC Radio Cornwall. A source is a source. pic.twitter.com/YKhcZb2ib4

— John Kerrison (@johnkerrison) December 19, 2019

Doggers be dogging

Samira Ahmed be WINNING!

:D

always going to be difficult to defend a claim that Jeremy Vine was doing better work than you

yeah that was great.