The BBC

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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Read more

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.

Very odd ramifications for the industry

Loved how Jane Garvey said something along the lines of ‘700k? It takes some men a whole year to make that sort of money at the BBC!’

I'll confess to feeling conflicted. on the one hand yes, equal pay for equal work. on the other hand there's a showbiz aspect to it. different talent can negotiate different fees depending on their fame and bankability. Something like an organisation-wide comparison of pay across different pay bands feels more sensible. so that you can see it's not just men who are able to command the big salaries. I could be disabused of this idea though. in fact i'd like to!

poorly phrased but i mean i'd like to feel like this is unambiguously the right decision. because i am happy for samira and it's delicious to see vine's massive salary questioned.

Yeah part of it is that people will tune in to watch <someone they've heard of/have liked before> doing something where they wouldn't watch <someone they haven't heard of/doesn't "connect"> do exactly the same thing. The disparities in this case were egregious and indefensible though.

there's so much subjectivity in the idea of star power or what makes somebody a draw. at the very least the BBC is going to have to address this in terms of dealing with employees more transparently and finding a rationale for their pay structure that's more convincing than the defence they've offered in this case

i think it’s saying unequivocally “you absolutely cannot do this” which is only a positive thing for salary levels for women and non white people.

what NV said.

Reading the judgement, it's more that while they would have accepted using Vine's "star power" as a justification for the difference, the BBC failed to show that it had taken that into account at the time, as it provided no proof that was case. All the other evidence it provided of his fame was dated after the time of the salary negotiation and was dismissed.

So it may not have set the precedent I thought it would, and will only mean more paperwork in future.

it's interesting that the institutional working of this subjectivity seems to have favoured white men for some reason

thanks folx i expected it would be more nuanced than that. serves me right for not reading up properly i.e. more than the actual article about it on the BBC and the guardian coverage! useless

i think a lot of restorative or positive discrimination judgments tend to mean “more paperwork” tbh. they tend to involve new types of administration and g owrnance to ensure unfamiliar ways of working are enforced.

*governance

Both of these programmes are ‘letters to the editor’ public service remit things so I’d imagine the fees for doing them would be on the low end, regardless of presenter, but never in my life would I have thought a female presenter of the standing to audition to host bbcqt would be on 1/6 the fee of a male colleague presenting this. Or that her fee would be under a grand for 30 minutes of Tx.

Her fee was equivalent to the male predecessor of the same programme though

lol all of these people are paid way too much

maybe the long term result of this is that it will equalise at a lower level

> Her fee was equivalent to the male predecessor of the same programme though

true. I didn't recognise his name though, whereas I know (and like) Samira from Front Row (although that's quite a recent thing tbf).

the 6x thing is the bit that sticks in my mind. and the way that people are mostly seeing this as a gender thing when there's a race thing in there too.

I don't think that the BBC, in future, is going to have enough money to keep paying these salaries, to anyone.

Maybe Koogs is right: the whole top pay scale needs to come way down, and, of course, be equal.

How do BBC salaries compare to Sky, ITV etc?

Considerably less pretty much across the board, I guess depending on how you allow for celebrity status etc (Eg “presenter of a football show” might earn more on the BBC than one does on ITV)

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/21/bbc-defended-opponents-free-market-evangelists-institution

Another winner from someone earning a crust for nothing. The overall point is lost in shite like this:

Like every organisation on the planet, it employs humans who make mistakes, some serious.

Free market evangelists are closing in on the corporation.

THAT'S COS YOU INVITE THEM ON EVERY NEWS BROADCAST

Lol yeah. I am sure the flat earthers must be days away from a QT invitation?

I had a long post on this which zing has helpfully deleted but the gist was tl;dr, if I saw <redacted> on fire in the street, I’d piss myself, and then I’d look for some petrol. The damage current affairs and news has done to the Overton window and political life in this country is immeasurable.

LOL OK

We'll introduce you to a #tradwife, a young woman who has chosen to be a traditional wife, staying at home to take care of the household chores while her husband works, and she is fine with submitting to her husband as he makes the key decisions in their lives. pic.twitter.com/4kbviYulcD

— BBC Talkback (@BBCTalkback) January 21, 2020

Likely a religious fundamentalist.

It’s a fash thing actually

Reminds me of this:

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/04/alt-right-women-are-upset-that-alt-right-men-are-treating-them-terribly/

I saw that tradwife thing the other day and couldn't decide which thread it should adorn. Doesn't feel that far removed in the UK from 40s-50s fetishists in general.