The BBC

I can never get that Archbishop Of Canterbury cut-up on Blue Jam "Lord Of Landmines .. give them AIDS " out of my head!

i'll put this here rather than the tennis thread but I am so fucking angry i'm shaking, after listening to BBC Five Live's Sonja McLaughlan ponder out loud whether Naomi Osaka's depression might be an excuse because she's not great on clay, or whether she just needs to suck it up and talk to the media cos it's a weakness like having a weak forehand

i dunno if this'll get picked up anywhere but jesus fucking christ

The Sonja McLaughlan who sat 'sitting in her car crying' after receiving online abuse over an interview with an England rugby player?

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/rugby/rugby-union/six-nations/sonja-mclaughlan-reporter-interview-questions-farrell-jones-b1808781.html

oh shit was that her?

i hope she gets bullied out of a fucking job for this but i doubt it

"There's a school of thought, isn't there, around Naomi Osaka, that suggests, y'know, look, clay isn't her favourite surface, and she didn't really want to be challenged, about, by the media, should she underperform in Paris...Is there any merit in that school of thought?"

"Look I believe Naomi Osaka is quite a shy person. If she had a weakness in her game, for instance, if she had an underperforming backhand, y'know an elite athlete would work on that...so if media is not her strength is that not something to work on? Because players have their responsibilities and commitments to sponsors and the media."

Transcribed it for the record and to reassure myself i'm not, in fact, going mad.

what the fuck

How much better to be a miserable surly cunt like Andy Murray and treat the media like the shit on your (tennis) shoes.

in her own hideous way she is actually doing a very grand job of justifying Naomi's decision 1000%

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2yadaLXMAA0dLU?format=jpg&name=900x900

apologies for CWS content NV, but this one was pretty good I thought!

I've sent a formal complaint, never thought I'd be that kind of listener

disgraceful. Barry Cowan on sky sports news earlier blithely stating that scrutiny is just part of the game and you can't change the rules for one player. BARRY COWAN FFS! what did you ever achieve other than wild cards into Wimbledon you miserable fuck?

Thank fuck all these broadcasters don't have to do mental health awareness for 51 weeks of the year

disgraceful. Barry Cowan on sky sports news earlier blithely stating that scrutiny is just part of the game and you can't change the rules for one player. BARRY COWAN FFS! what did you ever achieve other than wild cards into Wimbledon you miserable fuck?

Even his name is terrible.

Good for you NV. Even if nothing substantial comes of it those complaints get read and are responded to and at the very least her producers will know about it. There is a massively paranoid culture at the BBC around audience complaints so they may even feel a momentary twinge of terror.

i didn't ask for a reply, just felt like it should be registered. these will be the same idiots who wring their hands when a celebrity kills themself, utterly unaware of the slow steady drips they add to a poisonous narrative themselves

Holby City is being axed after 20+ years. Meanwhile, when the Euros start, Eastenders is going to have each week's worth of episodes put on iPlayer on the Monday so they can be watched at viewers' leisure. Both of those decisions make sense to me (Holby is terrible, in a way that even Casualty manages to not be), but it feels like a significant move in how UK drama is valued.

I agree with Chiles.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/02/its-not-just-naomi-osaka-no-one-really-likes-post-match-interviews

what the fuck is going on with this programming

Abused By My Girlfriend
I Am a Men's Rights Activist
I Am Not a Rapist
Inside the Secret World of Incels

first one might be fine idk but there's clearly a pattern here & I don't like it

how many winston marshall types do they have working there now I wonder

Citizens of Somewhere - BBC Radio 4
John Harris of the Guardian presents a new series telling the story of the UK in 2021 through the voices and stories of ordinary people in four places with ...

oh fuck me they are really doing this

lol read that in 'radio times' this morning and thought about you.

he might be a bit self-conscious about repeating the things he did + was heavily criticised for in his print version safaris if he wasn't such a self-clowning arrogant prick

For your information I’ve been asked by BBC management to delete the tweet with regards to the Mail’s articles about Jess Brammar as they say it’s an internal matter for the BBC.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) August 22, 2021

Gotta say I am finding it hard to care.

The point about the attack on Jess Brammar & Jim Waterson is that, despite the gross invasion of privacy and bin-rummaging level of social media stalking, it strikes me as *not* personal, in that it is intended to set a *general* precedent about what private views are acceptable.

— James B (@piercepenniless) August 23, 2021

Robbie Gibb, The Tory board member who’s trying to block it, appears to have lied on his declaration of personal interests. He was also an executive member of a Tory lobbying group called Enterprise Forum at the time he was appointed but failed to mention it. All reference to him has now been scrubbed from Enterprise Forum’s website.

Here's my interview with white feminist Emma Barnett this morning. When confronted about how white blonde women continue to hoard all the power...she refuses to engage with the material of the book and asks stupid questions. https://t.co/MYliYbnDEG

— Rafia Zakaria (@rafiazakaria) September 9, 2021

Emma Barnett successfully proving the point of Rakia's book, firstly she starts schooling a brown skinned woman from a w/c background on class and spends the rest of the interview refusing to engage properly with what she is saying and arrogantly shuts down the absolutely burningly otm criticism Rakia directs at Priti Patel with the tendentious bollocks that you aren't allowed to criticise Tories if they aren't there to answer back.

BBC chairman Richard Sharp confirms Jess Brammar has been appointed #RTSCambridge

— Anita Singh (@anitathetweeter) September 15, 2021

The culture secretary has privately expressed her fury at the BBC’s Nick Robinson after he told the prime minister to “stop talking” during a tense interview.

Nadine Dorries, who is overseeing the negotiations between the government and the corporation on the future of the licence fee, told allies: “Nick Robinson has cost the BBC a lot of money.”

Dorries recently issued the BBC with an ultimatum, telling bosses that she would not talk to them about the licence fee settlement until they brought forward reforms to address bias and elitism. Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, is set to make a “significant intervention” on impartiality in the coming weeks.

shocked to see Nick Robinson allegedly doing harm to the BBC's otherwise impeccable record on impartiality and how threats towards the license fee are being used to demand nothing less than total obsequiousness from now on. I thought they already had something quite close to that tbh

If Dorries wants more Man Like Mobeen and Kurupt FM she should just say so

I’d be interested to know how stuff like today’s bizarre transphobic piece, or the series of interviews earlier in the year on channel crossings by a journalist with very clear far-right ties, actually make it to publication / air. Are there central editorial teams that have to sign things off? Independent units with different interpretations of a code of standards?

Any point in people complaining?

It works for Nadine Dorries.

not just The BBC but I am so fucking sick of seeing trans people's right to exist presented as a "debate" or a "row"

It is definitely worth complaining formally. Complaints are taken seriously. If a complaint is upheld it's a real blemish on the responsible editor's record.

I'm not that close to News but aiui there isn't a 'central' team,* it's very much down to the editor of the individual programme. That editor has the choice to get a view from Editorial Policy and/or Legal but they're not obliged to follow the advice they get.

*with cost-cutting and consolidation this will be changing to an extent. There will be teams who produce material that is used across many different programmes

I just sent my complaint, zero faith anything will happen even if the complaints about it are a decent volume but it felt worth doing

Thanks TH.

Are there central editorial teams that have to sign things off?

no idea about the structural details but the thing is the higher-ups are 100% ideologically behind this

today's piece is sub-fox news, an incredible new low

this plus Stephen Nolan's Stonewall podcast, i hope they're proud

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints/make-a-complaint/#/Complaint

Thoughts on this thread, TH?

Complaining to the BBC: a thread.

— Clagz McCla (@ClagzMccla) October 26, 2021

That’s about right. ime the Executive Complaints Unit is very good at what they do. I’ve been contacted several times for complaints against shows I’ve worked on and they’ve usually already got a draft response that’s better than anything I could have written. (The complaints were 90% from racist trolls who were complaining about why there’s no special programme for white people etc, the other 10% fact-checking some irrelevant date)

It’s not perfect obviously and I don’t know what other broadcasters’ processes are like but the fact that you actually get a response, and that escalation is actually possible, and that the complaints are actually brought to the attention of the responsible staff seems almost like a miracle when you consider the volume of complaints the BBC gets and the volume of the output.

Got a predictably sorry-not-sorry reply from the beeb today, anyone else?

The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.

Some argue that the article is flawed because it is “based on a survey of 80 people”. The article itself states there is little research in this area; that the survey featured was conducted on social media and is therefore self-selecting; and even the author of the survey admits it may not be a representative sample. Furthermore, there is a link to the detail of the findings which enables the reader to make up their own minds about the replies the sample generated.

But the article is more than just the survey.

The journalist’s work involved months of speaking to many people about the topic and the article includes testimony from a range of different sources and provides appropriate context.

As a public service broadcaster we explore a wide range of issues and perspectives. And we believe it deals with a matter worthy of investigation. We have a strong commitment to impartiality, which means we constantly consider and evaluate which stories to cover and how. Impartiality is fundamental, and includes covering stories on any point of the spectrum of debate. And stories should be seen not just individually, but in the broader context of our wider coverage.

I got the same response. I'd be interested to see if anyone got anything even slightly different given there were many different grounds you could make a complaint on, this certainly didn't address anything I mentioned in mine.

I mostly focused on the survey, which puts me in a tricky position in replying - since pointing out the nature of the "range of different sources" they point to would mean bringing up new points of complaint, which according to twitter thread above is a no-no.

Oh well, hopefully still contributed to some statistic.

I think you can still say it's not good enough

The reply says "we were justified in using junk evidence to support our claims because there isn't and good evidence"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/dec/01/andrew-marr-to-join-new-statesman-as-chief-political-commentator

Guardian running a lot of articles on Andrew Marr and which specific outlets he's going to work for.

So he's going to write for the NS more often than he already does. Should that be a major story?

Lower down the article, the account of major BBC news figures and their big new roles is depressing. Reactionary scum boosting each other and playing musical chairs, and that's presented as an intriguing story.

(I except Mishal Husain who's seemed better.)

Statement on interview with Alan Dershowitz pic.twitter.com/MlXkqdJI8u

— BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) December 30, 2021

ffs