Back in March 2023, Deborah Turness (who for the occasion was referred to as the BBC News and Current Affairs CEO, Transparency and Trust) gave a keynote speech which, in a flash of inspiration, she titled ‘Transparency and Trust’. The speech was delivered as part of the Trust in News project, under the aegis of the Trusted News Initiative. To ensure that everyone could see that Turness could be trusted in everything she had to say regarding BBC trustworthiness, the speech was conducted as if she were answering questions posed by the BBC’s own Disinformation Correspondent, Marianna Spring. So a supposed expert on how to tell if someone could be trusted was interviewing someone who just happened to be an expert on how to be trusted. What more could you want?
Well, one could start by asking why Auntie Beeb felt it necessary to go to such lengths to ram home the point that it was the very quintessence of trustworthiness. For many years now the BBC is supposed to have basked in a reputation for journalism of the highest integrity, so why the sudden lack of confidence? What could possibly have caused the new CEO to expend so much corporate rhetoric in an attempt to convince the public of something the BBC had hitherto taken for granted as part of its world-wide reputation? Could it be that the recent reality has not been living up to the hype, and that this has come to the attention of an increasingly distrustful public? Or is it that, in a world of fake news, Turness saw a perfect opportunity to remind us all of the characteristics that supposedly set the BBC apart – its famous impartiality and authenticity?
Well I think the answer comes a little bit from column A and a little from column B. What I believe we are seeing here is a British institution and oracle whose reputation is now more than a little tarnished. It stands accused of taking partisan positions on issues as varied as Brexit, the Covid pandemic, American politics and the Israeli/Gazza conflict and yet it still strives to address a genuine concern for the damaging effects of mis- and disinformation emanating from what it perceives to be ‘bad actors’ reading from ‘playbooks’. It recognises a threat to society and genuinely believes it is ideally positioned to deal with it, but only after it has first dealt with the ‘fake’ accusation that its own claims for impartiality cannot be trusted. News items are now delivered under the ‘BBC Verify’ banner in order to address mis- and disinformation, but the subtext on every such occasion is that the claim that the BBC is no different to anyone else is just a lie. But is it?
To be fair to the BBC it should be acknowledged that it seems to sincerely believe itself to be impartial and scrupulously thorough, and it can point to a great many efforts it has gone to in order to uphold its hard-earned reputation. Turness does a good job of advertising those efforts in her speech, illustrating throughout by reference to a glossy PR campaign. Trust has to be earned, she opines, and you earn it by being transparent. Which is only true to a certain extent. Trust can be gained by being transparent whenever convenient, but trustworthiness can only be attained by being transparent at all times. So does the Turness concept of transparency render the BBC trustworthy, or is it simply designed to ensure it is trusted?
Take, for example, the BBC’s role in reporting the news throughout the Covid pandemic. What the nation needed, and what the BBC purported to provide, was an independent observer, capable and willing to challenge the authoritarian response to the crisis – whether it be in the form of the supposed imperative for lockdowns, mask-wearing, school closures or a mass vaccination that had little need of demography. Understandably, in view of the novelty of the crisis, expert opinions differed on many issues, and so one would expect that the UK Government’s insistence that it was only following ‘the’ science would be met with suspicion. However, the output of the BBC during the crisis did not carry that flavour. Indeed, the BBC was as keen as anyone to promulgate the narrative that there was information, as provided by the Government, and then there was the disinformation provided by a multitude of ‘fake’ experts who just happened to disagree with government policy. Is this because the BBC disinformation correspondents had used their technical prowess to examine and evaluate the various claims made, before coming to an impartial conclusion that just happened to endorse government policy? Or might it be because the BBC was alone among news gatherers in attending the somewhat Orwellian titled ‘Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum’, chaired by ministers and senior civil servants? As Turness says, trust is earned through transparency, and yet the very existence of this government unit was hidden from the public until it was exposed by the Daily Telegraph. The BBC was represented on the forum by none other than Jessica Cecil, founder of the Trusted News Initiative, and yet when asked to explain the purpose of its involvement, the BBC would claim only to have been an ‘observer’, before generally downplaying its significance. At no stage did the BBC see fit to inform the public of its compromised position.
Such behind-the-scenes intriguing will be familiar to anyone who has heard of the so-called “28Gate” scandal, in which the BBC claimed that a forum of 28 scientists had advised that a truly balanced climate change debate would require the de-platforming of sceptical views. The reality is that this advice had been received during a secret BBC meeting attended predominantly by environmental activists. In an effort to maintain the pretence, the BBC spent considerable time, effort and tax-payers’ money to fight FOI requests seeking the names of the supposed 28 scientific experts that had advised the BBC. Presumably, somebody had just momentarily forgotten that trust is earned through transparency.
The reality is that the BBC, like any other news-gathering organisation, is fuelled by ideology, for good or for bad. There exists a BBC culture, just as there exists a Daily Telegraph culture or a TalkTV culture. In the case of the BBC, the culture is notoriously intellectual, left-wing liberal in its nature. The same can be said of all of the organisations that have signed up to the Trusted News Initiative, which is, let’s be honest, little more than a liberal-leaning cartel of information-trading platforms. But what sets the BBC apart is its ability to leverage a reputation for impartiality and trustworthiness. It is this apparent credibility, and the ability to point to a plenitude of evidence in support of its reputation, that makes the BBC potentially so very harmful. The reality is that it is trusted (although not so much nowadays), but it is clearly not trustworthy, otherwise it would not have so readily betrayed its journalistic obligations to impartiality during the Covid pandemic. And it certainly would have not done so whilst continuing to proudly proclaim a transparency that in reality is so circumspect and selective.
It may be overly cynical of me to suggest this, but the very fact that the word ‘trust’ is now so prominent in the BBC’s branding and self-promotion is reason enough to reserve judgement. In a world that now marinades in information, it can be difficult sometimes to know exactly what’s cooking. So one can understand why the BBC would wish to counteract mis- and disinformation as perceived. But one should remember that all perception is framed ideologically. The BBC understands this, but when it comes to its own reputation, it would rather that the public didn’t. I do not doubt Deborah Turness’s sincerity but she didn’t get to where she is today without gaining an expertise in managing image. However, the next time she involves herself in a publicity stunt that involves a sham grilling from one of her own intrepid journalists and truth-seekers, she might want to choose as her interlocutor someone who isn’t accused of having previously lied on her CV. Yes, trust is indeed earned through transparency, but the trust still has to be well-placed.
Climate Scepticism 
BBC – 100% prime, home-grown British disinformative reporting, AAA-rated by its own independent ‘fact-checking’ crack team of journalists working under the trusted ‘BBC Verify’ brand. You know it’s genuine – because you pay for it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“Trust” and the “BBC”. An oxymoron.
It seems that influential sections of the MSM have only within the past 24 hours discovered …
https://x.com/MhehedZherting/status/1743686721504452723?s=20
E.g.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/news/uk/bbc-apologises-for-reporting-hamas-claim-without-corroboration-2z6zz68rd
https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-forced-apology-hamas-israel
If only a fraction of the BBC’s ‘Veri Iffy’ budget was spent on verifying its own output, it’d gain more trust.
LikeLike
John you are sure testing my New Year’s resolution not to be so provocative. Your article might seem deliberately constructed to cause me to write yet again in support of the large parts of BBC, but I shall resist the temptation. Consider that I have done this, because my attitude has changed nary a jot.
My only new criticism is that it was not the BBC that produced and broadcast the recent Alan Bates vs the Post Office quasi-documentary.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The BBC still very much tries to follow Joseph’s dictum of ‘tell a lie often enough’, with inevitably unconvincing outcomes.
‘Impartial’, ‘transparent’, ‘professional’ and of course ‘trust’ have in their hands become farcically silly claims.
Not long ago, in a vain attempt to cement this, their court of last appeal on any dubious opinions, accuracy, etc was ‘The Trust’. A body of eminent BBC employees paid a lot to catch anything that slipped through the BBC Complaints initial hurdles and ridiculously over promising BBC ‘Executive Complaints Unit’.
It was of course canned in favour of the exact same thing, if no more trusted or independent: OFCOM.
LikeLike
From The Trusted News Initiative:
“Why climate change should be at the heart of modern journalism”
https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/why-climate-change-at-heart-of-modern-journalism
LikeLike
With respect Alan I will disagree about the last part.
Earlier I wrote : The idea that ITV’s Post Office Scandal drama is a gamechanger, is a FALSE Narrative
It’s an accident of timing that the scandal was culminating right now
cos PO kept stalling
Other media have raised the issues extensively in the past
eg Private Eye in Oct 2011 https://twitter.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/120864362452885504
Nick Wallis’s Sept 2011 blogpost a month before his Private Eye article
deals with CPS and Ed Davy issues etc. that many people seem to think are new
The comments give so much info too
https://becarefulwhatyouwishfornickwallis.blogspot.com/2011/09/post-office-story-in-private-eye.html
I will praise the BBC for it’s earlier coverage ..it covered this stuff many times Nick Wallis was a BBC Radio Surrey presenter in 2010, 2011 etc.
His podcast about the scandal is 35 episodes
and his co host says she broke the story in May 2009 after a second person wrote to Computer Weekly in 2008 after the had sat on the Alan Bates story sent in in 2005..they found many people with similar stories ..and lawyers said publish despite fear Fujitsu would jump on them
Ah I have found a 2008 Daily Mail article which predates the ITV drama by 15 years
“Village whipround saves postmistress from prison after she admits £36,000 fraud”
To get around the Fujitsu and Post Office lawyers the article used this line
Hamilton, 51, blamed the fraud on the fact that she “didn’t have a clue” about using the post office’s computer system.
Then the article makes it clear it wasn’t actually her fault
Prosecutor Richard Jory said that when Hamilton took over the post office services in 2003, she found it difficult to get to grips with the computerised system. A Post Office audit in 2005 revealed a shortfall of £36,644.89.
Hamilton told the organisation’s bosses that she was suffering “systematic difficulties” with the computerised system.
However, she did not accept that she had taken the cash.
Mr Jory said that despite her initial insistence that she had not taken the money, by her guilty pleas she had now accepted acting dishonestly.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-512914/Village-whipround-saves-postmistress-prison-admits-36-000-fraud.html
LikeLike
Stewgreen you disagree with me about the Post Office scandal, suggesting it’s just a matter of timing, whereas I appreciated its power to provoke emotion (especially rage) and calls for action.
Today the Guardian has an article that compares the ITV mini-series with previous TV programmes that have provoked viewer concerns, often enough to encourage action.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alan,
I am well aware of the high regard you have for the BBC and the annoyance I cause you whenever I criticize them. However, this article was not written with you or anyone else particularly in mind. It is not my position that the BBC isn’t or cannot be trusted; nor do I wish to discount its valuable contributions made in the world of journalism. But there is something that troubles me regarding the hype that surrounds the BBC, much of it generated by their own public relations efforts. It isn’t that we must never trust the BBC, but rather that we would do well not to grant it any special status when it comes to trustworthiness. As Turness says herself, trust is earned through transparency, so every instance in which the BBC blatantly fails to act transparently serves to contradict the claims of trustworthiness that she would wish us to accept unquestioningly. As I said in the article, it is the BBC’s reputation for integrity, and any reality of it, that threatens to mask the equal reality that they are not actually impartial, nor could they possibly be – despite their protestations. If you think I pick on the BBC so much, it is probably because they seem to stand head and shoulders above other news outlets in professing a unique ability to be trusted implicitly. Hence, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’.
LikeLiked by 1 person
John R, thank you for the reminder about the BBC’s ’28gate’ affair. I find it useful to recall what the late Christopher Booker wrote about the BBC and its coverage of (and stubborn behaviour in regard to) climate change …
The following quotes, primarily from page 65 to 67, are taken from ‘The BBC and Climate Change: a triple betrayal’ by Christopher Booker, GWPF Report 5, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-9566875-5-5
( https://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/booker-bbc.pdf ).
“As we have seen in these pages, however, it was at just the time when the BBC decided more than ever to throw its weight behind this cause [i.e. the global warming/climate change consensus] that the real global warming story began to change. So convinced had those running the BBC become by the righteousness of their cause that an ever wider gulf began to open up between what they saw from inside their ‘bubble’ and what was going on in the world outside. It was this which led them ever more obviously into what, in my foreword, I called the three ‘betrayals’.”
Betrayal 1. “The first was the BBC’s betrayal of its statutory obligation to report on the world with ‘impartially’. In its own mind it got round this by creating its own definition of the meaning of the word. The IPCC, the scientific and political establishments, Al Gore, the developers of wind turbines and heaven knows who else, were all so unanimously convinced that man-made global warming was an unchallengeable fact that the BBC decreed that these were the only people who should be listened to. Anyone who dissented from this orthodoxy could be ignored as belonging to just a tiny minority of cranks, or venally corrupted hirelings of Big Oil, whose views it would be improper for the BBC to publicise.”
Betrayal 2. “Ever more evidence came to light to suggest that the IPCC was not the unimpeachably objective and honest scientific body it was claimed to be.
It was all this which helped to illuminate the extent of the second ‘betrayal’ in the BBC’s coverage of the story, the way it betrayed the principles of professional journalism. So committed to the cause were its journalists that, when important questions began to be raised as to whether the story was really as unarguable as was claimed, their only real response was simply to dig in their toes to defend it. They could no longer step outside the ‘bubble’, as independent-minded journalists should have been able, to consider all these questions in their own right. They could only stay within the mindset they knew, talking only to those within the orthodoxy who could provide them with the answers they needed to fend off all these tiresome ‘deniers’ appearing from outside the ‘bubble’ to ask awkward questions …”
Betrayal 3. “… the third of the three ‘betrayals’ to which I referred at the start, the consistency with which the BBC’s coverage of this story has shown so little understanding of the basic principles of science. We have seen how again and again they have put out programmes designed to promote their cause which have contained quite rudimentary scientific errors. They have loved to wheel out front men such as Sir David Attenborough, Dr Iain Stewart or Sir Paul Nurse, claiming to speak with all the authority of being ‘a scientist’ – but who have then been shown, on matters outside their own disciplines, to be out of their depth. These people have been used to lend the prestige of ‘science’ for the purposes of what amounted to no more than clumsy exercises in propaganda.”
Since Booker wrote his report some 12 year ago it is also worth noting his foresight as to the BBC’s unwillingness to change – from the report’s Summary, page 12, we read, “This report’s conclusions discuss some of the reasons for the BBC’s inability to recognise why its coverage of climate change has been so fundamentally flawed, and why there seems little likelihood that, at any time in the immediate future, it will amend its policy to comply with its statutory obligations.”
Regards, John Cullen.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Agreed with John C, it’s very valuable to have some reminders of 28gate and all it’s led to. On the general issues raised in 2024 I noticed this from Cath Leng today
The phrase ‘male-born females’ was used by the intrepid BBC reporter in this case. Leng’s piece is called A quiet assasination, published courtesy of Graham Linehan’s Substack. It’s still shocking to me. Trustworthy? You’re having a laugh.
Googling for Leng took me to this from late yesterday, also about a BBC report
She gives other examples and some counterexamples.
As it happens on Sunday night I watched a BBC programme on One Life, the new film about Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport that saved so many Jewish children from the Holocaust. I thought it was excellent
So I’m with Alan up to a point. But what a mixed bag. Thanks John.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Did anyone notice the subtle allusion to Ricky Gervais there? (See his old BBC series Extras, back on the iPlayer at the moment.) One reason for that no reader could be expected to know. I gave my brother Graham Linehan’s recent (and in my view brilliant) book Tough Crowd for Christmas. It arrived in time in Hong Kong, by some miracle of Amazon logistics, and Hugh commented after reading it:
It’s notable then that Gervais’s excellent recent sending up of trans ideology has been on Netflix. The BBC has gone woke and may end up broke, as the saying goes. Here’s hoping.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Richard,
It has been noted above that the BBC missed a trick in letting ITV scoop them with their Post Office scandal dramatization. Which is ironic, because when it came to its chance to dramatize a case of egregious false accusation the BBC went with that well-known TV sensation, ‘The Trick’. It just goes to show that it is not just about getting your facts right; it is also about involving oneself in stories that really matter to your public, rather than ramming corporately held ideology down their throats. Perhaps if the BBC had not invested so much of its effort and licence-payers’ money on the execrable Doctor Who, lecturing to us that even aliens and boggy monsters must have preferred pronouns, they might have not taken their eye off the ball. I saw yesterday that the BBC was now all over the Post Office scandal, from a mass interview of sub-postmasters and –mistresses on its breakfast programme, through to a late night Panorama special.
Too late my friends — far too late.
LikeLiked by 3 people
P.S. For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn’t trying to suggest that ‘The Trick’ got its facts right, only that the BBC seemed to think it had.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ah, the Al Beeb, bastion of left wing bias and junk reporting
LikeLike
Phew. You were about go into my “sceptics that have lost the plot” list! But the point you make about what I would see as misdirection from our state broadcaster is key. Cath Leng has been making the same point today about a different, disturbing area:
And talking of Graham Linehan – who must be one of the most repentant climate alarmists in the country by now – this was him in Spiked yesterday.
That’s to Armando Iannucci and is worth reading in full. The BBC is running guns for the extremists (Pink News, Extinction Rebellion) in a number of such areas.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The BBC’s ‘Operation Save Face’ continues unabated today with a lengthy article on its News website claiming that none of the recent post office furore would have been possible were it not for the BBC’s fearless truth-seeking of the past:
“Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Horizon whistleblower”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67884743
Apparently, “The BBC can reveal” that it is all down to a Panorama programme shown in 2015:
“Mr Green [lawyer acting for the sub-postmasters] later told Panorama how important the 2015 programme had been to their victory. He said: ‘I’m not sure that this litigation would’ve happened as it did had Panorama not made that programme’.”
Fair enough, but that isn’t why the Government has now been forced to intervene. It’s not until the very end of the article that the BBC tosses a chicken bone of credit to ITV, and even then they are only alluded to:
“But it took several trials, more than 90 overturned convictions and a TV drama for the Post Office scandal to get the attention it has long deserved.”
I don’t begrudge the BBC wanting to add its bit to the storyline (its article provides a fascinating insight), but it all comes across as petty jealousy seeking to undermine the primary importance of ITV’s intervention. Why, if it was a scandal long deserving of greater attention, did the BBC not choose to dramatise it?
But maybe even now it’s not too late. Given the BBC’s flair for creativity shown in ‘The Trick’, they could still make a drama emphasizing the role that transphobia played in the Horizon scandal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha!
Just to recap a little, 28gate was for me a key moment when corruption got entrenched in the BBC modus operandi. The same approach – and worse, even more blatant – has since been used in the gender debate.
I greatly appreciated Geoff trying to cover the ‘big picture’ in the post before this one. But …
The more I think about it the descent into gender madness was vital to mention here. And it was never just the Left. Lord Deben and Chris Skidmore meet LGBT+ Conservatives.
And in both areas the ‘complicit, incurious journalists of the BBC’ as Linehan puts it were joined on the relevant panel by the great and good of government, punditry or entertainment – like Armando Iannucci. The fear factor has become massive in the desperate attempts to ignore or at least downplay the genuine victims.
No answers on how this will unravel. But things weren’t looking too good in the 18th century either.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I should add that it’s a great thing that the concerns of the ‘genuine victims’ of the Horizon scandal are no longer being downplayed. ITV deserves great credit. But (and this is why John’s joke is painfully funny) they weren’t the kind of victims – small business people, probably with traditional views of gender and the importance of energy supplies – that the BBC has increasingly wanted to highlight. A good moment to take stock.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Richard, quite a few of them were brown, but even that doesn’t appear to have inspired the left wing media to come running to support their cause.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Richard,
I’ve just gone back to watch the 2015 Panorama programme, and there are a couple of points that struck me:
1) For every allegation made by the programme, the BBC made sure that the Post Office’s refutation was clearly stated. This may be as a result of the pressure placed upon the BBC at the time but one unfortunate effect was that the programme gave the Post Office the perfect opportunity to publicly accuse the victims once again. The tone of outright and unquestioned support for the sub-postmasters that existed in the ITV drama was absent in the BBC documentary. Yes there were questions to be asked, but the programme’s producers stopped short of offering their own answers.
2) All the basic facts in the ITV documentary were covered by the earlier BBC documentary. However, the ITV drama placed the human impact at the centre of the story, whereas the BBC documentary focused more upon the IT issues and matters of litigation. It lacked emotional power. Only three postmasters were interviewed and two of them were allowed to come across as being little more than miffed.
So two cheers for the BBC. It covered the story as strongly as its lawyers would allow, but the main BBC concern seemed to be a potential failure of due diligence rather than the subsequent destruction of lives. Clearly the BBC had some sympathy for the middle Englanders affected but not enough to place its neck on the block for them. Or was it just that the BBC’s strict rules regarding impartiality prevented them from coming down firmly and uncategorically on one side? If so, it didn’t seem to matter so much when it came to ‘The Trick’.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I must admit, I wasn’t aware that the BBC had a dedicated news category for highlighting transgender issues:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cwlw3xz01lxt
Fill your boots!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, it’s very organised.
LikeLike
Sorry Jaime, just spotted that comment stuck in spam.
LikeLike
“DR Congo floods: Chaos in Kinshasa as river rises to near-record level”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-67957778
The flooding was worse in 1961. There appears to be no evidence that this is related to climate change. Yet we are told this:
“Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.”
It seems they just can’t help themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alan , the Guardian is not based in the real world
The situation is a cart before a horse
PO scandal is not news cos of the ITV drama
ITV CHOSE to release the drama right now, cos they know the inquiry was about to culminate and make big news
… secondly before the inquiry threats from lawyers made it complex
but now they are free to broadcast stuff cos the dam gates have broken
LikeLike
I think the BBC has a vastly disproportionate number of trans staff compared to other firms
LikeLiked by 1 person
Try reading this, then ask yourself if the BBC can be trusted. The section on deaths from heat and cold is particularly dishonest. The rest isn’t much better:
“COP26: The truth behind the new climate change denial”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59251912
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark, I refer you to the mists of time:
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oops, I had forgotten about your excellent article. I (re-) discovered the dreadful BBC “Reality check” agitprop piece by accident, because it has been filled by the BBC in the “Verify” section of its website. So much for trustworthiness; that BBC piece really does hit rock bottom.
Everyone should read your article in order to appreciate just how low the BBC has sunk.
LikeLike
Mark,
The article you cite is one of a huge collection that the BBC has now ammassed under the pretext of bringing you the news. The point, of course, is that there is no news content in it. It is just an opinion piece making a number of claims, many of which can be themselves critiqued (as Jit did at the time). This is a particular problem with the BBC because their tactic has led to the leveraging of their reputation for accurate news reporting in order to bestow undue credence upon their commentary. The ‘fact check’ is the ultimate exemplification of the problem.
If you look up the Robin Aitken piece that I reference in my article, when talking about BBC culture, you will see that he traces the problem back to the mid 1990s when John Birt amalgamated the previously separate news and current affairs departments. Since then, all sorts of BBC campaigning has been pursued under the pretence of delivering so-called news items.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stewgreen. The BBC broadcast almost all the essential information pertinent to the Post Office Scandal back in 2015 in a Panarama programme. What the BBC didn’t do (to its shame and now its regret) was to focus upon the human and personal stories. It was these that made the ITV programme so very powerful and effective.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Duplicate comment. First went straight into Spam!
Highly relevant to this discussion. The Daily Sceptic today:
“Perhaps the worst and most destructive misinformation spewed out at us by members of the Trusted News Initiative is its members relentless propagandising anthropogenic global warming (or climate change or global boiling or climate crisis or whatever it’s called this month) nonsense. There are several reliable individuals who have repeatedly exposed the utter tripe fuelling the global boiling cult. These include Tony Heller’s RealClimateScience, Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, Anthony Watts’s Watts Up With That?, the Daily Sceptic‘s Chris Morrison and my own modest contribution – the book There is No Climate Crisis.”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/13/why-should-we-trust-the-bbcs-trusted-news-initiative/
LikeLike
Jaime,
I note that the Daily Sceptic article features Marianna Spring prominently. I resisted the temptation to do the same in my own article, but now seems as good a time as any to elaborate. If you watch the Deborah Turness keynote speech you will note that she blows fifty shades of smoke up Marianna’s proverbial. So Turness obviously doesn’t think that lying on a CV counts as a lack of transparency. And when I say ‘lying’, I mean claiming that bumping into someone in a corridor qualifies as having worked with them. The classic, of course, was Spring’s plea for some sense of proportion, as she was quick to point out that “Everything else on my CV is entirely true”.
Time for a Reality Check, Marianna and Deborah: Transparency doesn’t mean “I’m not lying all the time”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime, Sorry about that. I have deleted what is now a duplicate of your comment from Spam.
LikeLike
LikeLiked by 1 person
On Climategate, it’s worth noting that Andrew Montford of BishopHill and the GWPF, and Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky spent countless hours and (I think) their own money trying unsuccessfully to wring the identities of their 28 climate “experts” out of the BBC, and that they were finally identified by Maurizio Morabito of this parish (see sidebar, though he’s never contributed, more’s the pity.)
There was just one scientist among them, a marine biologist with no particular expertise in climate. Among the other “experts” was a Greek lady with a degree in environmental science who seems to have been a close friend of the bloke from the Open University who drew up the guest list, and who is now a director of her daddy’s hotel chain.
The BBC hid their lies and corruption in a defence of the action brought by Montford & Newbery that involved four barristers paid for out of your license fees.
If a newspaper had acted like that, readers would have deserted, share values would have tumbled, editors would have had to resign.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“BBC review: Ofcom to gain more powers over BBC News website”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68041713
I didn’t know this:
“Currently, Ofcom oversees the BBC’s TV, radio and on-demand output, but it has no formal enforcement powers for BBC online material.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
I didn’t know that either. I had taken it for granted that all BBC output was already subject to Ofcom scrutiny. Also, it is interesting to read the BBC’s response to the concerns raised and the need for such action to be taken following a government review. First there is the government statement of the problem:
“The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said impartiality remains ‘an ongoing issue for audiences’ and cited ‘a lack of public confidence’ in the way the BBC currently handles complaints.”
And of the required changes:
“These changes will better set up the BBC to ask difficult questions of itself, and make sure Ofcom can continue to hold the broadcaster to account.”
To which the BBC replies:
“We’re pleased the government’s findings reflect that overall these [BBC self-governance and regulations] are working well.”
No sign there of the BBC starting to ask difficult questions of itself. Yes, it still has the highest trust rating amongst its competitors but it is falling significantly and is only so high now because it started from such a very high position. I think this should be what the BBC is focused upon and they need to do more about it than just ramp up their PR campaign.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m no fan of the BBC but I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by last night’s countryfile. They did a feature on plans to drill for oil/gas in some AONBs. As well as talking to various protesters, they did a reasonable interview with the boss of one of the companies involved. They also talked to residents of a small village which has an oil site nearby, similar to that being proposed. Their response was that it was well-screened and most locals didn’t know it was there.
A second feature was on a wetlands project in S. Wales which has been established on the old dumping ground for fly-ash from a coal plant which closed 25 years ago. It is flourishing with great wildlife, despite being build on top of 5 metres of ash: a good, positive story.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Spiked’s report on the German farmer protests:
The BBC’s approach:
“Germany’s far right seek revolution in farmers’ protests”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67976889
LikeLike
Jit,
Another gratuitous use of the BBC Verify branding in an attempt to strengthen very weak beer.
LikeLike
Speaking of BBC Verify:
“North Sea oil and gas claims fact-checked’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67945281
In fairness, it appears to start with an attempt to make a serious analysis of Government claims. But it ends by trotting out quotes from the CCC and the IEA, as though the views of those less than impartial organisations are determinative of the matter. No need to fact check them, apparently, since they support the BBC line.
LikeLike
Why is the BBC Country file magazine doing this?
https://www.countryfile.com/the-power-of-nature-harnessing-the-elements-for-a-greener-energy-future
LikeLike
Remember the magazine is not owned by BBC . They sold it off years ago
LikeLike
Mike the quiet oil well is in my region. Hence the people featured are friends of friends so I trust them
However the greater region does benefit from a £100K per year community fund from the project
I have made extensive notes and transcripts and I raised a discussion on Open Mic and on NotALot https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/01/21/school-closes-six-times-in-three-months-because-of-net-zero-agenda/#comment-274833
LikeLike
Ah, thanks stew.
LikeLike
Stew,
I don’t normally watch Countryfile anymore but I happened to watch that particular episode. I agree entirely with your analysis of the coverage. Credit to the BBC for including alternative views but the coverage was still far from balanced.
LikeLike
Stew; maybe a case of the eye of the beholder. I wasn’t paying strict attention but gained the overall impression that it wasn’t as one-sided as I’d expected which came as a surprise.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Duplicate comment. Hopefully this is not sent to Spam too.
The BBC was *allowed* to misrepresent the risk of Covid infection, i.e. they were permitted and encourage to deliberately misinform the public on the real risk of getting infected by SARS-CoV-2. Sounds like a conspiracy to disinform to me, for the obvious purpose of promoting fear in order to promote and gain compliance with lockdowns and other NPIs. So who allowed them? OFCOM, the government I presume.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime,
It’s funny you should say that, because this is how yesterday’s Woolhouse testimony was summarised by the BBC this morning:
> Disease expert Prof Mark Woolhouse said he warned Scotland’s chief medical officer, Dr Catherine Calderwood, about coronavirus in January 2020 but felt the risks were not being taken seriously
> The professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University of Edinburgh agreed with the suggestion that officials “froze” in the face of the evidence about the virus
> Prof Woolhouse also said Dr Catherine Calderwood was “not listening” to his warnings
> He said the stay at home order introduced during the pandemic was “never necessary”
> The academic also argued that schools stayed shut far longer than necessary and said he was “baffled” by their closure in January 2021
No mention there about the professor accusing the BBC of being complicit in a conspiracy to overstate the risk – quite the opposite, in fact. From the BBC summary, it sounds like he was concerned that initially not enough was done to take the risk seriously. Since the BBC is the epitome of trustworthiness, I can only assume that the Telegraph and everyone else are telling porkies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-68080038/page/5
LikeLiked by 2 people
Apologies Jaime, I have been busy today and am just catching up. I will delete the original comment that did indeed end up in Spam
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Daily Sceptic is on that “BBC misrepresenting covid” story too:
“Misrepresented” Covid Risk to Boost Lockdown Support, Says Top Government Scientific Adviser”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/25/bbc-misrepresented-covid-risk-to-boost-lockdown-support-says-top-government-scientific-adviser/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
Everybody now seems to have reported upon accusations of a BBC Covid-19 disinformation campaign, except the BBC.
Turness wants everyone to accept that the BBC is transparent, yet it alone took part in secret government meetings aimed at ensuring that the government’s own narrative was promoted as being uniquely science-driven — or, to put it in the government’s own words, to ensure that disinformation was highlighted and debunked. The BBC’s exaggeration of the Covid-19 risk has to be understood in that context. Whilst the BBC was decrying others as being part of an anti-scientific disinformation cabal, they were themselves peddling falsehood because it suited the government’s intentions. And, now the finger is being pointed at the BBC in an open inquiry, it hasn’t even got the integrity and transparency to acknowledge that fact in its own reporting of the inquiry.
I know that the BBC is not alone in indulging in partisan reporting but I do feel that the BBC’s position is uniquely disingenuous.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Jaime & others – thanks for the above links – from the Telegraph article Prof Woolhouse says –
“He said further evidence of this was provided by a briefing dated March 22, 2020, by a sub-group of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) that focused on the public’s behaviour.
This stated that “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group… the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.
Prof Woolhouse said the “misperception” created by the BBC’s coverage that everyone was at risk was a “barrier to targeting interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from Covid”.
Wonder what other “crisis” requires – “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging” and gets it in spades by most MSM?
LikeLike
As a regular critic of the BBC, may I suggest that this story highlights the difficult task that is seeking to be objective. One person’s bias is another person’s objectivity, and vice versa:
“CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’
Insiders say pressure from the top results in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias
Given the difficulty of sifting the media and trying to establish what is true and what isn’t, it’s a shame that I no longer feel that I can turn to the BBC for trusted objective commentary. It would be nice to have a media source that I could trust without reservation. Unfortunately, they all have an agenda, even (perhaps especially) those that claim not to have and to be trustworthy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The past couple of days has seen a lot of BBC articles defending Joe Biden’s brain. This is rather bizarre. There are stories on the website today of Democrats rallying around to say how sharp Biden seems in meetings, and what a political hatchet job the (non) charging decision was. Yesterday on the radio – I think it was on The World At One – guests came on, one of whom was adamant that claiming to have met Mitterand, the President of Germany, in 2021 was not an issue for Biden. Or ditto Helmut Kohl. Or referring to President Al-Sisi as the leader of Mexico, who didn’t want to let Palestinians over the border or something, at the very press conference where he had set out how robust his mental state was.
They have been keen too to draw parallels between Biden’s flailing around and Trump’s own gaffes – which as far as I can see have been of a far more minor sort.
Should Rishi Sunak have claimed to have met Mitterand, German President, when he was Chancellor, we would decide, rightly and instantly, that he was no longer fit to be PM. Why is the BBC so fixated on defending Biden? It can’t be down to support for the Democrats, because Biden’s replacement would surely be more electable than he is.
LikeLike
COPY POST.
The latest example of the BBC’s righteous campaign to protect the public from disinformation and misinformation is labeling a formally recognised vaccine-injured person as an ‘anti-vaxxer’:
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apologies Jaime, I have been busy today and have just released this from spam.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The UK has a huge problem with people taking big Twitter claims as true.
Malhotra supplied no video or details to back his claim against the BBC
Rather on ITV at that time PaulMasonNews did use that label.
#2 whilst many people have genuine vax harm
John Watt’s claims seem flawed
due to the details I gave on BiasedBBC this morning
LikeLike
I assume Stew means this comment at BiasedBBC
https://biasedbbc.tv/blog/2024/02/13/midweek-14th-february-2024/#comment-1278079
I’ll come back to it.
LikeLike
Today’s unpicking
Were NY cops nearly beaten to death by belligerent illegal youths , who then smirked as court let them free without bail
OR did nasty cops pick on Yellow Jacket without reason and friends merely step in to “de-arrest him” ?
It’s America so both sides spin like crazy
to start with a nearby store had just been raided by such youths stealing handbags
Those 2 cops don’t seem that badly injured
but the bodycam video was doctored before release to cover the moment the cop pounced on Yellow Jacket
BTW Two weeks later one of these brawlers was arrested for being in a shoplifting gang
LikeLike
I said “I’ll come back to it” exactly a month ago. To what exactly? To an error Woods123 made, then Dr Aseem Malhotra made, then (among many others) my friend Jill Gardner, who I first met in 2018, made:
Then Jaime Jessop, then Richard Drake (through my Like of Jaime’s comment here).
Stewgreen didn’t make the same error but made another one. It was Kevin McGuire speaking on Good Morning Britain who said the offending (and genuinely stupid and offensive) thing about Norman Fenton’s vaccine-injured friend BRING_THE_NOISE. The BBC wasn’t in fact guilty at all. In this particular instance.
I’m calling this type of error a Grievance Adjacent Error.
Speaking for myself at least. Because I came to this thread having just watched this video:
What the Milton Keynes funeral director John O’Looney had to say to John Campbell was gobsmacking. Not least the Chief Coroner’s attitude to UK deaths shortly after receiving a Covid vaccine.
There was nothing, that I remember, about the BBC’s silence on this subject. But that surely, in a fair-minded review of all the UK news at such a crucial time, was a legitimate grievance I had coming onto this thread. (And many others had.)
And so I made a Grievance Adjacent Error.
Genuine mea culpa. I’m not trying to shift responsibility.
More to come about why I singled out Jill Gardner, of all taken in on X by the ‘fake news’ of the BBC wot dunnit. Strong stomachs and deeper empathy required there.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Spectacular misinformation from the BBC on the flagship 1 o’clock news today (BBC1). At about 10 past the hour, the feature was about the “unprecedented” March warmth. At about 1:14, this graphic was flashed up:
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, that is quite spectacular. They were milking the ECHR judgment and the “unprecedented” March temperature (globally) on Radio 4’s World at One today too.
LikeLike
what is simply amazing (and deplorable) is the fact that there is no mention of volcanism putting masses of water into the stratosphere, increasing that GHG by at least 10%. But then this lack is not confined to the BBC. It’s a scare story and it would be counterproductive to reduce this scare by mentioning other possibilities. I’ve yet to see any calculated temperature increase that this mechanism would produce.
Of equal responsibility are the meteorologists and “climatologists” that are surely remiss in not providing the alternative explanation for hotter conditions that volcanism and stratospheric water increases provides.
And where are the volcanologists? Asleep or restrained?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alan,
To my amazement, an “expert” from the IPCC mentioned Hunga Tonga, almost in passing, on the World at One. However, she was pretty dismissive of it, claiming that it and other factors between them couldn’t explain the ongoing “heat” (none of which has been in evidence where I live). Needless to say, she wasn’t challenged or pressed on the point.
LikeLike
I’m sorry, but am I being remarkably stupid here, or is that y-axis proof that no one at the BBC has heard of the decimal point. Is that not the most spectacular aspect of the graph?
LikeLike
Jit – thanks for the screenshot, watched the news item & the graphic, but it was not clear who the source was.
from your screenshot it was ECMWF Reanalysis v5 | ECMWF but I can’t find an easy way to find the graph.
As per John’s comment above, I still can’t get my head around what they mean by “temperature anomaly (C)
LikeLike
I presume it was made by Justin Rowlatt, with data from ERA5 (which sounds suspiciously like it’s partly a model). He presumably failed to label it correctly, though I don’t know how anyone could eff up that badly.
Yes John – that was my gripe. I had more or less zoned out as they told me how terrible it all was.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry, Jit. I became a little confused because you referred to ‘spectacular misinformation’ when all I could see was spectacular stupidity. Hence me thinking I must be missing something.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jit – can’t believe Justin (pee your pants over climate change) Rowlatt would be capable of that.
but you never know 😦
LikeLike
The Cass Review is another area where trust in the BBC is at a low point in some quarters. Including my quarters. This was a snapshot of my phone the morning the report came out, 10th April. And after this the story was dropped like a hot cake, compared to many other UK news outlets. Has that got anything to with the ‘LGBT and identity producer’ on the byline here – and his apparently extensive and highly influential group?
More bad news about the future balance of our state broadcaster in this area, just like its wretched record on climate, has followed.
Meanwhile another feted broadcaster was less than sensitive online with a friend of mine, whom I already mentioned earlier in this thread, last year
Jill’s daughter’s perfectly healthy breasts were indeed sliced off in May last year. I was devastated to learn about this in February. I am deeply grateful to Hilary Cass for her scholarly and incisive report about the area of ‘gender care’. I won’t say more now. But there is I’m sure a tie-in with climate and how we absolutely must make progress.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Richard,
The BBC has at least correctly reported on the scandalous disinformation that the Cass Report discarded 101 out of 103 studies in order to come to its conclusions:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68863594
Disinformation which was recently parroted by Dawn Butler in Parliament:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/21/dawn-butler-is-spreading-deranged-disinformation-about-the-cass-review/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime: Thanks, I hadn’t seen that interview of Cass by the often excellent More or Less.
That sums things up very well, due thanks to (this part of) the Beeb. And the less said about Dawn Butler the better.
I also appreciated what the same author Jo Bartosch said in another Spiked article this weekend:
Venice Allan deserves all the recognition she is now getting – and a lot more. She was behind the meeting at Camden Town Hall in June 2018 through which I first met Jill Gardner, at which Posie Parker spoke. We were told to wait in Costa because all Venice’s previous meetings had encountered physical attacks and intimidation, including the notorious assault on Maria MacLachlan at Speaker’s Corner in September the previous year. This was the first that didn’t. Many of those considering the Cass Review right now are no doubt unaware of the scale of this intimidation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Unfortunately, the intimidation continues and Dr Hilary Cass herself is the target, not helped by Butler spreading disinformation in the Mother of all Parliaments:
Given the fanatical, ideological and intimidatory nature of those pushing gender transition on kids, I’m not quite so inclined to give many of those in clinical practice the benefit of the doubt in that they were “doing their best”, as Cass suggests, even if they were doing wrong, because it should have been pretty obvious to trained clinical physicians and others qite early on that there was considerable doubt about the necessity of the treatment being offered plus available information on its potential serious harms. Similar situation as with the NHS pushing the Covid jabs really.
LikeLike
Jaime: I think Cass has shown she is very careful with her words. “I think that in many instances where people have been looking after these young people clinically …” (my bold). She knows, and many long-term observers know, that some have acted and spoken out of fear, to the very great detriment of immature young minds and bodies. The refusal to keep data or to give out what they have to her is indeed a scandal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cass has evidently also had careful words with Dawn Butler:
Those fighting on behalf of vulnerable and damaged children are making much more progress in the UK political space than climate sceptics. I want to think more about that. But, for the moment, good news about incentive structures shifting to be encouraged by.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Richard,
Butler seemed happy to ‘clarify’, but I note that she felt no need to apologise, only the need to deny that she had hijacked the Cass report and to allege that the ‘anti-trans’ had done so.
In fact, there are no anti-trans people to do such hijacking. No one is anti-trans. But there are plenty who are against people like Butler who froth at the mouth when confronted with well-evidenced research that challenges her harmful and ill-conceived ideologies.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“she felt no need to apologise”
Correct. That’s another stage.
LikeLike
The BBC is now outrageously suggesting that Antarctic wildlife is going to need protective sunglasses because of an ‘ozone hole’ created by the Australian wildfires which, as we all know, were caused by climate change. There is no end to their lies and distortions. Reporter Victoria Gill is writing about a recently published study and cites one of the study’s authors:
“The biggest thing we can do to help Antarctica is to act on climate change – reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible so we have fewer bushfires and don’t put additional pressure on ozone layer recovery.”
So it’s not just the Beeb plying misinformation. The study does mention Hunga Tonga but only in the context of “aerosols”. The fact is, it was the unprecedented injection of water vapour high into the stratosphere which is primarily responsible for ozone loss due to Hunga Tonga, which both Professor Robinson and Victoria Gill pointedly neglect to mention.
Here’s a nice picture of Victoria on X:
And this is her plugging her propaganda hit piece:
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jaime, Paul Home wood is on it too:
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime,
Is that what the transgender community would be calling a ‘bonus hole’, or am I getting my culture wars confused?
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s no doubt that the BBC loves itself, but perhaps it should invite BBC Verify to run the ruler over this one:
“BBC’s The Green Planet ‘boosted UK economy by £7.4m'”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5n350e9plo
LikeLike
Jaime – on 1st read I thought the “nice picture of Victoria” was the jokey seal pic 🙂
But following your X link, I see she is cuddling her cute doggie – with this short bio
“@BBCNews science bod. Radio/podcast blabberer. Northerner. Feminist. Has world’s cutest dog. (Frivolous travels / pet worship on insta: sciencey_vic)”
So maybe the seal & blubbering are not that far of the mark!!!
Maybe she should read Cool the Planet or We Kill the Dog – Climate Scepticism (cliscep.com) by Tony who quotes Naomi Oreskes on the subject.
LikeLike
dfhunter,
I’m afraid I was mistaken:
THIS is a nice picture of Victoria:
Plus of course, it is scientifically proven that my own dogs are the cutest in the known Universe (commiserations to the slightly smelly little bundle of utter gorgeousness).
LikeLike
In the latest iteration of BBC trusted news reporting, Issy, a pro Palestinian student protestor at Leeds (it’s not known whether she is also a member or supporter of the local Green Party) is allowed to claim, uncorrected at the point of delivery, and to remain uncorrected in perpetuity apparently, that Israel has been found guilty of a “plausible genocide” by the International Court of Justice. Knowing the claim to be false, the BBC is happy to let it stand:
The supremely arrogant and unconcerned BBC apparently consider that a false statement is now a “widespread interpretation”:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/09/bbc-failed-to-correct-student-over-israel-genocide-claim/
So, if a large number of Issy-fitting fanatical student protestors interpret a ruling falsely, then, in the eyes of the ‘trusted’ BBC, that false interpretation becomes legitimate and broadcast worthy without need of correction. Bear this in mind with the BBC’s climate coverage.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Jaime I really am surprised, I have come to greatly appreciate the skill and especially the kindness of Amol Reagan’s interviews. His ability to negotiate complex subjects with experts is also extremely good. The lapse probably should be laid at BBC’s research staff, and not to correct it is close to being scandalous.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Amol Rajan (damn evil spellchecker)
LikeLike
I am reminded of what journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel said in their seminal tome, ‘The Elements of Journalism’. Amongst the basic elements were that ‘Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth’, ‘Its essence is a discipline of verification’ and ‘Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.’
So that’s a triple failure there then, Jaime.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jaime: Thank you very much for this.
That’s also a message for those appalled by its coverage of transgender/child abuse.
People are doing their own Verify and drawing their own conclusions.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Deborah Turness has been holding forth again on the subject of BBC impartiality:
https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-sparks-fresh-impartiality-row-cant-be-trusted-anymore
In the above article, Turness is quoted as saying:
By ‘impartial news, she means, of course, the news from the BBC. As far as she is concerned, the claim that the BBC is not impartial is just a symptom of ‘echo chamber’ thinking – unlike hers!
Also, I have to say that my opinion of Liz Kershaw has gone up since watching the embedded video in the above article.
LikeLiked by 1 person
John,
It never occurs to the likes of Deborah Turness that they might be the ones occupying an echo chamber. Interesting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
The point being that Liz Kershaw says that living in an echo chamber is exactly what her colleagues at the BBC did, in her time there. They lived in their own bubble. That’s why they fail to understand the real reason why they are nowadays so often accused of not being impartial.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Speaking of the Trusted News Initiative, this what they have been up to in the guise of Australia’s national broadcaster:
LikeLiked by 2 people
What an outfit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The BBC’s campaign to present itself as the world’s foremost trusted source of information has just cranked up a notch:
BBC boss vows to tackle Britain’s ‘crisis of trust’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5p8z27z8o
“Tim Davie has used a speech to set out measures he says will allow the broadcaster to play a leading role in reversing a breakdown in trust in information and institutions, as well as combating division and disconnection between people.”
Well that would be great were it not for the fact that the BBC is part of the problem. But you’ve got to hand it to any organisation that claims it knows how to ‘combat division’ between people. So pray tell us, Tim, what steps do you have in mind to achieve such a remarkable feat?
“They include expanding fact-checking service BBC Verify, giving children lessons about disinformation, and doing more to scrutinise local politicians.”
God give me strength! They are even talking about handing out qualifications, as Davie pledged to “Give every child ‘proper training on disinformation’ and potentially develop qualifications in disinformation studies.”
Something for Cliscep to look forward to, methinks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
John,
The BBC opened that article up to. Have Your Say. I suspect they are regretting it, as many comments are scathing. I particularly like this one:
Absolutely hilarious! The lack of self awareness on the part of the BBC is breath-taking!
Don’t they realise that the BBC itself is one of the major reasons for distrust in the UK?
If the BBC was serious it would review the comments and take on board the criticisms. But it won’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Can the BBC stoop any lower than this?
LikeLiked by 2 people
John,
That’s a very calm and pretty damning indictment. It ought to receive wider publicity than I imagine it will get. I’m still happy not to be a licence-payer!
LikeLike
LikeLiked by 2 people
John R – thanks for the vid (3 Nov 2025 The Daily T Podcast), BBC Trump bashing/bias is no surprise, I have always wondered if they give quotes in context, seems they play with spliced clips to influence audiences, same as some US news channels. Makes you wonder who else they target for this Disinformation.
PS – just noticed your 14 May 25 comment. Partial quotes from the article –
“The BBC’s future would involve “doubling down on impartiality, championing free, fair reporting alongside landmark investigative journalism, investing in BBC Verify and InDepth as well as increasing transparency and holding our nerve amidst culture wars”, he said. The BBC can “help turn the tide” and improve trust by “dramatically increasing” the amound of news coverage on platforms like YouTube and Tik Tok have a stronger presence amid the online noise.
It will also combine AI agent technology with BBC journalism to create “a new gold standard fact checking tool”, he said, but without relinquishing editorial oversight”.
And, as you highlight –
“Give every child “proper training on disinformation” and potentially develop qualifications in disinformation studies”
Thought I would refresh my understanding re ” Royal Charter for the continuance of the British
Broadcasting Corporation” – “https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/2016/charter.pdf”
Not read it in full, but relevant I think –
“The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows.
To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and
engage with the world around them: the BBC should provide duly accurate and
impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s
understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content
should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and
depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news
providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing
freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local,
regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the
democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”
Won’t bother to dig deeper, but no doubt the BEEB think it’s “Give every child “proper training on disinformation” is part of it’s remit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jit beat me to it as usual, was trying to link to that BBC news promo vid. It implies BBC news is fighting disinformation 24/7. Turns out they may be helping to propagate it 24/7.
LikeLike
Mark,
“It ought to receive wider publicity than I imagine it will get.”
Well I can’t imagine it appearing as a featured news item on the BBC website. And yet, had this crime against journalism been perpetrated by a different news outlet, I’m sure that BBC Verify would be all over it. The double-standards on display here are beyond disgraceful. And let us not overlook that Michael Prescott’s exposé includes details of a whole lot more of this sort of underhand bias.
LikeLiked by 2 people
John,
BBC Verify is busy on the BBC website today, but funnily enough, they don’t seem to be interested in this story. Nor does anyone at the BBC (and, after all, the BBC usually likes nothing better than stories about itself). Similarly, it’s tumbleweed at the Guardian.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oops, I take it back:
“Badenoch calls for sackings at BBC over edited Trump speech”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzkyk7knzo
LikeLike
Mark,
Likewise, but I hadn’t taken into account the possibility of Badenoch getting involved. Even so, I will maintain my accusations of double-standards until the day when BBC Verify runs an article disecting the subterfuge.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The story is moving on:
“BBC has questions to answer over edited Trump speech, MPs say”
It’s still the same link.
LikeLike
On the day that the BBC is found to be criminally doctoring footage of Trump’s J6 speech, it publishes the following headline on X:
The actual truth: conservative right wing anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson was found not guilty and the judge in question heavily criticised the police who arrested him for doing so unlawfully, based on their perception of his politics.
The BBC is a dead limb. It should be cut off, not just allowed to wither.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime,
It should be abundantly apparent that I dislike the BBC as much as you, but I am going to give them a small amount of credit regarding the story of the Tommy Robinson acquittal – there was a very fair and balanced piece about it on PM this evening on BBC Radio 4.
But speaking of Tommy Robinson (and I am not a fan), why does the BBC always go on to say “whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon” after the words “Tommy Robinson”? I wouldn’t mind so much if they were consistent. For instance, Zack Polanski (again, I’m not a fan), the new leader of the Green Party, also changed his name, but the BBC never says “Zack Polanski, whose real name is David Paulden”.
For that matter, nor do they say “Sir Elton John, whose real name is Reginald Kenneth Dwight”. No, they reserve that treatment solely for Tommy Robinson. I wonder why? (sarc).
LikeLiked by 3 people
Jaime,
Yes, I read that news item and had exactly the same thoughts. Tommy Robinson is right up there with Trump as the average BBC executive’s favourite effigy for burning on bonfire night.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m not one to tell anyone how to vote, but I do wonder how this ‘news’ article by the BBC fits in with its pledge to remain politically impartial in its reporting:
What a UK government led by Reform would really look like – BBC News
LikeLike
Allison Pearson, in the Telegraph:
“The BBC has just signed its own death warrant
This paper’s revelations about the corporation’s bias will be the last straw for many, and should spell curtains for the licence fee”
https://archive.ph/ty3YB#selection-2967.4-2971.136
The BBC has been a cornerstone of our national life. For as long as I can remember, a Britain without the BBC was unimaginable. Well, that is changing. A growing number would now be glad to see the back of this once globally admired institution, or at least they no longer want to pay the TV tax only to be insulted. The corporation may well have signed its own death warrant with a shockingly partisan Panorama report in which two clips from a Donald Trump speech were soldered together to make Mr Trump appear to say, “We’re gonna walk down the the Capitol, and we fight” when he actually called for a peaceful march.
As we know, the president is perfectly capable of damning himself out of his own mouth without any help from Leftie BBC editors who played right into his hands with this outrageous display of what the Donald calls, with good reason, “fake news”.
We have become accustomed to BBC journalists lying by omission and the prioritisation of pet subjects – I swear there isn’t a spark caused by two sticks rubbed together in southern Europe that hasn’t been seized on by climate editor Justin Rowlatt as evidence of man-made global warming. But here we have a flagship factual programme deliberately misrepresenting the words of the most powerful man in the world. There can be no defence for inventing criminal speech – for that is how incitement to riot would be seen in a court of law. I do hope the president sues, don’t you?….
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s criminal what the BBC have done. Shouldn’t the US be seeking an extradition order for the producers of Panorama? Not that that would get them anywhere, as Starmer says he has “full confidence” in the Beeb, even after they’ve been caught red-handed doctoring the words of the US President to make it appear that he incited an insurrection. I can’t quite work out if our Prime Minister is genuinely retarded.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime,
Would Trump be that bothered? He’s already let it be known the contempt in which he holds the BBC. Isn’t the disdain of the world’s wisest and most powerful man punishment enough? To be honest, I think he is currently more interested in gaining the world’s adoration and respectful fear than he would be in getting caught up in litigation with the national fake news outlet of a has-been country.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yesterday I suggested that the average BBC executive wouldn’t be able to decide between Trump and Tommy Robinson as their effigy of choice for bonfire night. Well, it seems the great British public had no trouble making their choice:
Edenbridge effigy of Sir Keir Starmer unveiled for bonfire night – BBC News
LikeLike
John – thanks for your 9:34 BBC link above. After a quick read of the article, this statement near the beginning stuck out for me –
“To some the fallout was undoubtedly damaging and has prompted questions about whether this insurgent party, that is consistently topping national opinion polls, really is a credible force ready to run the country – something they are trying to prove.” – bold by me.
I have heard the word “Insurgent” used in reports about rebels trying to overthrow governments/regimes in other countries, but can not recall it being used in connection with a UK party. So looked up the meaning of “Insurgent” – to be honest different definitions abound.
INSURGENT | English meaning – Cambridge Dictionary – world history
a person who is a member of a group that is fighting against the government of their country
INSURGENT Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster –
“Insurgent is not a particularly novel coinage; it has been in use as both a noun and an adjective for well over 200 years. Appearances of the word began to spike in the early 21st century, however, due to a combination of factors (including the appearance of such combatants in conflicts and the desire among journalists to avoid words that might seem biased, such as terrorist or freedom fighter).”
Anyway, I was about to wonder why & criticize “Alex Forsyth Political Correspondent” for using that term until I Googled “insurgent party“. Seems she’s not the 1st insurgent party – Search
LikeLike
Getting back to the Tommy Robinson acquittal, here is a full explanation of what went on, given by a barrister:
SERIOUS Police Failings. Here’s Why!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Police don’t need reasonable grounds to detain you under the Terrorism Act; they can do so arbitrarily. But what they cannot do is use unreasonable grounds (i.e. your notoriety, your political beliefs) to exercise that power. Robinson was unlawfully targeted.
LikeLike
That is the main conclusion is it not? I’ve only watched 8 mins. Why are all these youtube videos so long winded?
LikeLike
I guess because the judge’s summing up was also very long winded, albeit thorough. But what a waste of precious time and money just to persecute one man for his anti-Islam political activism. That is a measure of the grip that pro-Islamic policies have upon the British state I suspect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jaime,
The Blackbelt Barrister’s videos are always long-winded. I rarely make it to the end, but with this one I did. The gist is that the police do not need a pretext to demand your phone’s pin number, but they can’t do it following an unlawful stop, which is clearly what this was. The unlawfulness of the stop should be the headline, but of course it isn’t. The media prefered to go with ‘far right thug escapes terrorist charge on technicality’.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Quite hilarious from the BBC, which has tied itself in knots over this story:
“Martine Croxall broke rules over ‘pregnant people’ facial expression, BBC says”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3epwz08ewzo
It’s the correction below the article that amused me:
Correction: This article originally said the ECU found that Martine Croxall’s facial expression as she spoke expressed a “controversial view about trans people” and has been amended to make clear that they instead found that her expression gave the “strong impression of expressing a personal view on a controversial matter”. The article also mistakenly quoted the judgement as referring to “trans ideology” and has been amended to correctly refer to “trans identity.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Meanwhile, Allister Heath in the Telegraph – well worth a read:
“The awful truth about the BBC is now too monstrous to hide
Our national broadcaster has promulgated a pernicious Leftist orthodoxy that has taken hold of our institutions”
https://archive.ph/F02Ng#selection-2177.4-2181.115
…Its output, riddled with group-think, lapped up by our decrepit establishment, reeks of oikophobia, economic illiteracy, soft socialism, suicidal empathy and luxury beliefs. Seduced by critical theory, the BBC backs the “anywheres” against the “somewheres”, supports global institutions, from the EU to UNRWA, and barely conceals its disgust at those who prefer power to be located at the national level.….
And much more in similar vein.
LikeLiked by 2 people
And today we learn that:
BBC to review bias in climate change coverage
So, once again they’re going to mark their own homework.
LikeLike
As reported by the BBC just now:
BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd9kqz1yyxkt
PS: but is that enough?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apparently, Deborah Turness knew about the Trump edit back in May and kept it quiet. That would be Deborah Turness, CEO Transparency and Trust.
LikeLike
Tim Davie’s resignation letter says “… there have been some mistakes made…”
And therein lies the problem. Mistakes may be forgiven, but these weren’t mistakes. The BBC set out to mislead its viewers by a calculated and deliberate act to splice together disparate parts of a Trump speech to create the impression that he incited violence among his supporters when urging them to march on Congress.
That wasn’t a “mistake”. It was an attempt to use disinformation to cause trouble for a man it hates. The fact that Davie can refer to it simply as a mistake demonstrates that the people at the top of the BBC don’t get it. I believe that in all probability the BBC is beyond redemption.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I am watching the BBC’s coverage of this on their own news channel. So far, I have heard:
The BBC is still by far the most trusted news organisation.
There has been a culture of BBC knocking recently.
The edited coverage was only a tiny part of an otherwise excellent programme.
The editing was just a technical error
The evidence that there is any institutional bias in the BBC is scant.
The Trump edit was not serious enough to warrant resignations, but it may have been a final straw.
The mistakes made have been ‘unfortunate’.
Farage, Farage, Farage.
And much more in the same vein
LikeLiked by 1 person
John,
As usual, the Guardian and the BBC are in lockstep:
“Why is the BBC expected to apologise over a Donald Trump speech edit?
Boris Johnson and White House criticise the corporation, but some journalists say criticism is part of campaign to destroy the BBC”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/09/why-is-the-bbc-expected-to-apologise-over-a-donald-trump-speech-edit
…Others have put the row down to the rightwing press’s ideological obsession with undermining the BBC.
The BBC presenter Nick Robinson said on the Today programme there was a “genuine” concern regarding the broadcaster’s editorial standards and mistakes, however he said he believed there was a “political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation”.
The veteran broadcaster John Simpson said Robinson was “exactly right”.
The British journalist Adam Boulton, a former political editor of Sky News, said on X that he thought claims of bias on this occasion were “BS [bullshit]”, adding it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”....
Can you imagine how the Guardian would have reacted if, say, GB News had been caught acting towards a left-wing politician as the BBC did towards Trump?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hang on, there’s more:
“The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it’s given in
The corporation should have stood up to the Telegraph, Trump and the Tories. Now, its enemies know how little it takes for it to fold”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/09/bbc-attack-trump-telegraph-tories-tim-davie-resignation
…Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage, and the BBC’s own baffling inability or unwillingness to defend itself over the past week. But the row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion.…
…[Prescott] is “shocked” that after an hour-long Panorama documentary dealing with Trump and the January 6 insurgency, there was no “similar, balancing” programme about the Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.…
Then there’s the conclusion only that a mistake was made:
…None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection. The BBC is expected to apologise on Monday over the Trump edit. That should have been enough.…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
Oh well.
LikeLike
As the Beeb itself says, “Trust is earned. This is our BBC” i.e. it is nobody else’s BBC; it belongs to the anointed and to them alone.
LikeLike
From Turness’ resignation letter:
…In a polarised world, BBC News journalism is more vital than ever, and I could not be prouder of the work that you do. Together we have bucked the global trend, to grow trust in BBC News, and I want to thank you, wherever you are in the world, for your courageous work to deliver that.…
Three years ago, the Press Gazette reported:
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/times-telegraph-trust/
“Five-year decline in UK news media trust sees BBC, Times and Telegraph have biggest drops”
…The BBC also saw a 20 percentage point drop in trust since 2018…
I strongly suspect those figures have declined substantially in the subsequent three years.
Even the BBC acknowledged the decline in trust (though not the scale of the decline) as recently as May this year:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5p8z27z8o
…The BBC says it is the most trusted news provider in the UK, with 45% of the population naming it as the source they trusted the most in 2024. That is down from 57% a decade ago.…
Given that, how can Deborah Turness claim “Together we have bucked the global trend, to grow trust in BBC News“? That smacks of disinformation, even within her resignation letter! It makes one wonder if BBC executives inhabit a parallel universe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
2018 is also the date of the editorial policy excluding deniers – as the Guardian link reminds us, we have banished for 7 years.
Audi alteram partem, as they say.
LikeLike
Jit, I will need to check in my reference books but I think the deniers exclusion policy goes back well before 2018. After all, the BBC conference at the root of their 28-gate scandal dates from 2006. Regards, John C.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark – your Guardian links make cringe worthy reading. The article title “Why is the BBC expected to apologise over a Donald Trump speech edit?” sets the scene for the “BBC is the victim” rant that follows.
From your “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in” link. Partial quote –
“Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage, and the BBC’s own baffling inability or unwillingness to defend itself over the past week. But the row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion.
Prescott stresses he has never been a member of a political party and that his views “do not come with any political agenda” in the introduction to his 8,000-word note. Yet each criticism of BBC coverage comes from the anti-progressive culture-war playbook.
For example, he is “shocked” that after an hour-long Panorama documentary dealing with Trump and the January 6 insurgency, there was no “similar, balancing” programme about the Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.”
Wonder where that “climate denial” 2018 link takes you – BBC admits ‘we get climate change coverage wrong too often’ | Climate science scepticism and denial | The Guardian
Partial quote –
“In a briefing note sent to all staff warning them to be aware of false balance, the corporation has offered a training course on how to report on global warming. The move follows a series of apologies and censures for failing to challenge climate sceptics during interviews, including Nigel Lawson.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
John C – I’m sure there was a lesser ban prior to that. I happened to be reading Carbon Brief’s article for the exact quote used so I could put it in the encyclopaedia post. According to that record, the new guidance followed an interview with Nigel Lawson in August 2017.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dougie – the BBC “dossier” compiled a broad degree of pro-Kamala bias. The BBC used her talking points to lead coverage, but not Trump’s. They also focused heavily on an outlier poll that had Kamala winning. The Guardian’s “wrong-headed” idea of balance deliberately omits the fact that it was not just the Panorama programme – it was throughout. But of course those who only read the Guardian will come away with the idea that the BBC has been unfairly targeted by the Right.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Getting back to last night’s coverage, there was one point when one of those being interviewed said that this was all an outrage concocted by the right wing press to bring down the BBC and if we let them succeed then there will be nobody to stop a Farage populist government gettng into power. There was nothing from the interviewer to counter that such an outcome would nevertheless be the result of a democratic process.
They just don’t know when to stop.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jit, it may have been “a lesser ban” according to some metrics. However, was it not a very effective ‘lesser ban’ that has essentially kept sceptics off the Beeb’s airwaves for many years?
I hope to dig up more data on this matter but, for the next few days, I have domestics to attend to. But I will keep a weather eye out for what you and others post here. For now I scrape my memory to recall that (i) the 2006 seminar resulted in the Beeb taking “the science is settled” meme as its guide to its climate policy, (ii) prof. Jones(?) [a nematode worm expert?] wrote a report for the Beeb a couple of years later in which he called for more climate censorship rather than less! I think this was all dealt with in the long report on the BBC, called Triple Betrayal((?), that the late Christopher Booker wrote for GWPF.
Best wishes, John C.
LikeLike
I commend this TCW article for your consideration:-
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-bbc-is-a-stinking-augean-stables-of-bias-and-fabrication-whose-licence-fee-is-no-longer-tenable/
Regards, John C.
LikeLiked by 1 person
According to the Daily Sceptic:
“The BBC has launched an internal investigation into the woeful shortcomings of its climate coverage. Did the Director-General read Paul Homewood’s article documenting 50 instances when the BBC has published or broadcast climate misinformation?”
Foregone conclusion comes to mind….
LikeLike
The BBC’s rolling coverage of the resignations includes some interesting stuff today. First, there is this portrayal of the problem:
“The Telegraph published a leaked BBC memo suggesting the programme pushed two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021.”
No, it was not a suggestion. That the programme did push two parts of the speech together is an objective fact. Secondly, that the editing created the impression that Trump explicitly encouraged the riots is also an objective fact. The only thing that is open to debate is whether it was done deliberately by an organisation that has an agenda, or whether it was an ‘unfortunate error’, and the programme producers simply failed to do enough to clarify that the speech was being grossly abridged. Whilst everyone is entitled to their opinion on this, I know which side I am on, and it isn’t on the same side as the useful idiots.
Secondly, they have run a ‘who is Deborah Turness’ piece. Nowhere does it mention her title as ‘CEO Transparency and Trust’. Nowhere does it mention her role in setting up the Trusted News Initiative. Nowhere does it mention her leadership of the BBC’s ‘Trust is Earned’ campaign.
https://www.bbccreative.co.uk/project/bbc-news-trust-is-earned-2/
So no, she didn’t go because of a right-wing coup within the ranks; she went because her continued presence had become a severe embarrassment to the organisation.
LikeLiked by 2 people
John,
Note also that the memo was “leaked”. This is always the word the BBC uses when it disapproves of the information coming to light. When it approves, it’s never a leak, and the person responsible is then a “whistleblower”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
Yes, I did notice that. I suppose we must be thankful that they didn’t refer to stolen memo.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This extract from an article in the Guardian this morning epitomises what the BBC and its many supporters really believe;
‘… the row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion.‘
LikeLike
No understanding there, at all, that the Guardian, and their friends at the BBC are at the forefront of spin and distortion, and – in the case of the Panorama programme – deliberate disinformation.
LikeLiked by 2 people
From an article on the Spectator site by Anthony Browne:
“Every day the editors of BBC news programmes get together in a morning editorial meeting to decide what the main stories are, which stories to kill, and what the line should be on all those they cover. I occasionally had to attend if one of my stories was expected to be the lead. This morning editorial meeting is group think in institutionalised form. It stops any independent thinking amongst programme editors. I understand the desire for consistency across its output, but the explicit purpose of this meeting is to prevent plurality across half the UK’s TV and radio news.
This centralised editorial decision making is why groups like Stonewall can capture the entire BBC output, or why the BBC across its vast outlets is incapable of reflecting the views of the licence-fee paying public on issues like immigration or Brexit.”
We saw this MO in action at the notorious “28 gate” conference and the consequent editorial policy wrt climate change. It’s a puzzle why anyone would expect them to behave differently on any other major issue or theme.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Just to put the record straight, I spoke earlier of Deborah Turness’s role in setting up the Trusted News Initiative. This was very misleading in so far as Jessica Cecil was its instigator, actually. Turness just led the BBC’s contribution to the TNI in the guise of her ‘Transparency and Trust’ campaign.
LikeLike
The next BBC boss to resign should be whoever has responsibility for the online blurbs and credits of the Beeb’s radio dramas. The writer/adapter sometimes isn’t named; cast lists are sometimes missing too; when cast lists are included, actors’ names are sometimes misspelt and/or assigned to the wrong characters; episodes are sometimes misnumbered; and sometimes the blurbs don’t even bother to say what the stories are about.
A shame. The Beeb still makes some excellent radio dramas (despite a top-heavy commissioning system, which writers have been complaining about for many years, and despite ever-increasing wokeness*) and Radio 4 Extra is a treasure house. Crappy blurbs and credits disrespect both the people who make the progs and the people who listen to them.
===
*Tomorrow’s Drama on 4 is a climatey thing about ‘a Middle Eastern nation [that] is struggling to survive rising temperatures and rolling power cuts’. It was organised and perhaps funded by OKRE, a sciencey Wellcome Trust-funded org that is ‘supporting the creation of entertainment which challenges our perceptions…’ by ‘…Opening Knowledge across Research & Entertainment’. (OKaR&E – geddit?) ‘OKRE manages a curated research network. We make valuable connections between academics, lived experience and the entertainment industries.’
I think OKRE’s last Drama on 4 was broadcast about a year ago. It was a ‘romantic comedy about climate anxiety and carpentry’ in which a lesbian wheelchair-user is saved from the effects of climate change in Solihull by her sexy and, as it turns out (spoiler alert!), lesbian handywoman. (I have an uncurated lived experience of that one: I quite enjoyed it. Woke isn’t always broke.) The one before that was about a Tory politician attending a climate COP with a talking mosquito. (Not as fun as it sounds.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Guardian (naturally) is leading the fight-back – it’s all a right-wing coup:
“BBC board member with Tory links ‘led charge’ in systemic bias claims, say insiders
Sources say Robbie Gibb amplified criticisms of Trump, Gaza and trans rights coverage, and had ‘a lot of oxygen in the room’”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/10/bbc-board-member-tory-links-led-charge-systemic-bias-claims
A BBC board member with links to the Conservative party “led the charge” in pressuring the corporation’s leadership over claims of systemic bias in coverage of Donald Trump, Gaza and transgender rights, the Guardian has been told.
Sources said Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief who was appointed to the BBC’s board during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister, amplified the criticisms in key board meetings that preceded the shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness.
In an article for the Guardian, the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, called for Gibb to be removed from the BBC’s board before the search for a new director general begins.…
…While BBC insiders accept the Prescott letter contains some failings, there is also concern that it has formed part of a political attack on the corporation from within.
Concerns centre on the relationship between Prescott and Gibb. Sources said Gibb, who has previously been accused of interfering in editorial matters, had “led the charge” at two BBC board meetings that discussed Prescott’s memo. The most recent was last Thursday.…
Read the whole article, and you could almost feel that the BBC is the victim here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It gets worse!
“‘Make no mistake – this was a coup’: the extraordinary downfall of the BBC’s top bosses”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2025/nov/10/make-no-mistake-this-was-a-coup-the-extraordinary-downfall-of-the-bbcs-top-bosses
LikeLiked by 1 person
Evidence, we might say, that the Guardian and the BBC are allies in so much.
LikeLike
“Evidence, we might say, that the Guardian and the BBC are allies in so much.”
Two sides of the same coin.
LikeLike
John R – following your 10 Nov 25 at 11:14 am comment, I’ve just reread the header post by you dated 10 Jan 24 which for some reason I didn’t give a “like” at the time (sorted).
Easy to say “I told you so” in retrospect, but that post resonates with me WRT the mess the BBC now find themselves in.
ps – Interesting that, from your post – “As Turness says, trust is earned through transparency, and yet the very existence of this government unit was hidden from the public until it was exposed by the Daily Telegraph”
LikeLike
Andrew Neil on this topic:
LikeLiked by 1 person
As I understand it, the splicing was just a mathematical trick. They’ll make a drama about it one day.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mark – from your latest Guardian link –
“While Gibb was not the only voice pressing the board’s concerns over Prescott’s claims at the meetings, insiders said the board’s lack of editorial expertise meant he had “a lot of oxygen in the room”. Some newer members agreed with Gibb, who had held the post for four years. To compound things, a board member who was supportive of the BBC’s editorial efforts was away. Others felt they were not qualified to intervene. “Robbie and his acolytes are organised and the other side is not,” one source said.
It was after that meeting that BBC insiders believe Turness concluded support for her was ebbing away. She decided to quit.”
“insiders said” “a board member … was away” “one source said”.
The whole article reminders me of the Climate Hockey Stick “circle the wagons” & this relevant post from 2009 at Climate Audit –
Curry: On the credibility of climate research « Climate Audit
LikeLike
An oldish “circle the wagons” from the Conversation, date Published: June 6, 2025 6.31pm CEST
Trump’s attack on the BBC is part of an endless campaign to undermine public trust in information
LikeLike
dfhunter,
That Conversation article is a sight to behold. Going for Trump, and seemingly seeking to exonerate the BBC. It’s almost as though the BBC is the victim here. I said earlier that the BBC and the Guardian are two sides of the same coin. If a coin had three sides, the Conversation would be the third side.
As for the BBC board, if they’re all as inexperienced and useless as the Guardian makes out – meaning that they are easily swayed and a single board member can manipulate them and call the shotes – how on earth did they get appointed to the board and what is the point of them? Funny that the Guardian had no problem with them before now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Everything that’s wrong with the Guardian:
“If you care about the BBC, stand up and defend it: this could be the beginning of the end”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/10/stand-up-and-defend-bbc-right-resignations
Gotcha! The BBC’s enemies have taken two scalps and inflicted maximum damage. The shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness, make it look as if the BBC accepts that it does indeed suffer from “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights. But in this political coup, only the BBC’s sworn ideological foes think a cherrypicked sample of journalistic errors amounts to “systemic” bias.
It was indeed a bad mistake to splice together two bits of Trump’s speech; but it needed a quick apology, not a decapitation….
A more deluded analysis is difficult to imagine. It’s not a political coup, but the Guardian and the BBC are swift to spread such disinformation. They’re not a cherrypicked sample of journalistic “errors”: they’re particularly egregious examples of the systemic bias that Toynbee seeks to deny. It was not “a bad mistake” to splice together two bits of Trump’s speech. Someone made a deliberate and calculated decision to manipulate the content of Trump’s speech to make it appear that he said something he didn’t – something particularly problematic. Someone at the BBC wanted to create the appearance that Trump had urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight, and others at the BBC were happy for that fake news to be broadcast. I’ve been watching quite a bit of the coverage from the likes of Times TV, Spectator TV and Telegraph TV and, as quite a few people have pointed out, Trump’s speech was bad enough as it was. Trump is perfectly capable of shooting himself in the foot. The BBC didn’t even have to do what it did to make Trump look bad, but it just couldn’t help itself. That alone points to systemic bias – certainly to Trump Derangement Syndrome.
In the next paragraph Toynbee says:
Attackers calling the BBC a bunch of lefties should remember [Nick] Robinson is a former chair of the Young Conservatives.
So what? I very much doubt he votes Conservative now. Thirty years ago I was a Labour Party activist, but I don’t vote Labour now. It’s a distraction technique, a complete non-sequitur.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mark, it appears that the result of the woke left’s inevitable contact with harsh reality has initiated a stunning and simultaneous renewed flight from reality, kind of like the spectacle of millions of geese taking to the air at the sound of a gun shot. But they’re exhausted and undernourished and this time they won’t be landing to feed on a luxuriant carpet of new growth fresh green virtue, they’ll be dropping out of the skies onto an increasingly barren scorched earth. The good times are over and the Guardian and BBC are busily securing their places in a mass extinction of the kind they have been warning us for decades would occur in the natural world if we continued to burn fossil fuels. Poetic justice.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was channel hopping last night when I dropped in on BBC Newsnight. Obviously, they were talking about the resignations, and one of the panel was in the process of decrying the ‘aggressive bullying’ that Trump was engaging in by threatening to sue. Yes, you heard that right. The scandal here isn’t that a country’s national broadcaster has sought to fraudulently portray the leader of an ally country as a criminal, guilty of insurrection; it is that he is now seeking legal redress against such an egregious subterfuge. The more the BBC seeks to deflect and downplay, the more it shouts out to the nation how hopelessly lost it is in its own delusional bubble.
Meanwhile, back at Have I Got News for You, some two thirds into the programme, they finally thought it necessary to mention the scandal in passing (admittedly, the resignations had not been announced at the time of broadcasting). Hislop refers to the edit as ‘clumsy and stupid’. The comedienne host says something about how, given that Trump was obviously ‘inciting violence’ in his speech, it was probably unnecessary to edit it so as to make it even more obvious. Hislop nods sagely and, putting on his trademark smug smile, agrees that these are very wise words. Cue round of applause from the audience. More pathetic, North London, liberal, woke TDS on show.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As another indication that the BBC’s problems are such that it is unable to recognise what they are, I note the following as part of an ‘analysis’ appearing on the BBC’s own website today:
“If the BBC is to survive, bosses will need to work out how to better handle any future missteps, and get back to convincing the public of the corporation’s importance and relevance as it prepares for the Charter renewal that will determine its future.”
Note: It’s how to better handle any future missteps, not how to ensure they don’t happen again.
Note: It’s how to get back to convincing the public prior to Charter renewal, not how to get back to fulfilling the Charter.
To the BBC this has just been one big PR debacle that can be solved by better PR. Everything else I have heard from the BBC in the last 48 hours has fallen into the same pattern. It is clear that with the Prescott memo they lost control of the narrative. Solution: regain control.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There has been some interesting discussion as to whether and, if so, where, Trump could sue the BBC. The suggestion is that he couldn’t sue in the UK, where there is a one year limitation period for defamation actions. The argument is that the Panorama programme was broadcast on 28th October 2024, so the limitation period has expired. I don’t know how that works if the programme remained available to view on BBC iPlayer until less than 12 months ago. If we assume the limitation period has expired here, then the suggestion is that he might issue proceedings in Florida, where there is a two year limitation period for defamation.
However, the key point here is that the programme was broadcast just over a week before last year’s US Presidential election. Is it conceivable that what the BBC did was a deliberate attempt to try to influence the election against Trump?
If anyone thinks that’s fanciful (how many US voters would be swayed by a BBC programme broadcast in the UK?) it might be worth reading this:
“How a Harris win in US election could depend on Democrats in London
About 200,000 Americans live in the UK, and Democrats Abroad members are campaigning hard to get them to vote”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/13/how-kamala-harris-win-in-us-election-could-depend-on-democrats-in-london
“…The potential role of overseas Americans voters – who do not appear in national polls – should not be underestimated. In 2020 their votes made all the difference when it came to delivering the key swing states of Arizona and Georgia to Joe Biden.
With the race so tight and the stakes this high – Wolfe’s voice cracks as she insists that US democracy is imperilled in a way not seen since the American civil war – Harris supporters in the UK have raised their game….”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
I believe the letter sent to the BBC clarifies that they are issuing proceedings in Florida. The Blackbelt Barrister covers this quite nicely, although, as is his wont, he takes quite a while before he gets to the point:
President Trump v BBC; Who Will Win? – YouTube
LikeLike
John,
I have little doubt that any proceedings will be issued in Florida, if they are issued at all. My ramblings on that topic were, however, simply a preamble to what I think may be the real story, a story which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by the Telegraph et al.
Did the BBC seek, maliciously, to cause Trump to lose last year’s presidential election? If so, it matters not that they failed. And if they did, it puts in the shade all the misinformation about Trump’s first presidential victory being down to (unevidenced) claims of Russian interference.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark,
Call me a cynic, but I’ve never doubted that the BBC’s purpose was to damage Trump’s reputation at a critical time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The intent was obvious. It was not an “error” as the lunchtime news described it. We are not talking about 6th-formers making their first video.
In another universe, where the race was tight, the outcome might have been altered by this. It seems extraordinarily unlikely even then, as not many US fence-sitters would have seen it. But the smell is of the BBC doing all it could to ensure that the right result happened.
All the BBC has to do is listen. The roll of those defending it and attacking it should tell it all it needs to know about its inherent bias.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jit,
I couldn’t agree more. But they do not think of it as bias; they call it ‘doing the right thing’.
LikeLike
The Beeb was, as in their “climate crisis” and much else on their agenda, simply trying to ensure a “just transition” from Biden to Harris. Regards, John C.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The real reason centrists are crying over the BBC crisis”
Brendan O’Neill on Spiked: https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/11/11/the-real-reason-centrists-are-crying-over-the-bbc-crisis/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jit – thanks for the link, which linked to (missed It at the time) – The first step towards saving our precious BBC: remove Robbie Gibb from the board | Ed Davey | The Guardian
Maybe already covered so just a short quote from the top –
“The BBC is under attack as never before. Donald Trump and his cronies have it squarely in their sights – and there are no prizes for guessing why. The BBC is the world’s number one source of trusted news, so of course snake-oil salesmen such as Trump see it as their enemy. If your power is built on conspiracy theories and distortions of the truth, the last thing you want is respected, independent journalists exposing that and holding you to account.”
Can’t be bothered to read the rest after that, need to clip my toenails.
OOHH – I lied & skipped to the end, which echoed my own thoughts –
“The centrist fawning over the Beeb has been next-level cringe. Ed Davey, bungee-jumping leader of the Lib Dems, says the BBC is like ‘a wayward family member’ – ‘I don’t always like what it does but I will always love it’. You sad bast*rd.”
LikeLike
oops – that last comment quote was from the Spiked article.
LikeLike
Bloody Ell, the “circle the wagons” crowd are in full denier mode. “The corporation is again being put to the test. Now is its chance to double down on reporting that serves the people of the UK. Roger Mosey is a former head of BBC TV News” –
I’ve seen the BBC flat out on the canvas before. Brave journalism is the best way to hit back | Roger Mosey | The Guardian
“There is only one response, and that is to get up and fight. As digital nonsense and lies swamp us every day, and tech billionaires in foreign countries decide what we see and hear, there is a stronger case than ever for British content and for journalism that serves the people of the UK – with some of those old-fashioned things such as honesty, accuracy and truth. Despite all the attacks upon it, and the whippings it administers to itself, the BBC is the country’s most trusted broadcaster. Its reach and its universality are why its foes hate it.”
So, if I get this right, the victimised BBC has “enemies, foes, tech billionaires in foreign countries” all trying to point out obvious BBC bias. but they are nasty & evil and the virtuous BBC needs “to get up and fight” using “some of those old-fashioned things such as honesty, accuracy and truth”.
Maybe I am selective in quotes used, but WTF.
LikeLiked by 1 person
dfhunter,
This is how the Guardian sees the world. It is also how the BBC sees the world. The fact that the Guardian is campaigning so aggressively to defend the BBC actually makes the case against the BBC, but they’re too arrogant and blinkered to see it. In fighting to defend the BBC, the Guardian is fighting to defend a bastion of the media which sees the world as it does and which projects its (the Guardian’s views) widely across the UK and across the world. Would the Guardian fight like hell to “save” the BBC if the BBC didn’t share the Guardian’s biases? No, of course it wouldn’t.
The fact that both the Guardian and the BBC are now pushing the lie that a right-wing coup has taken place here is also telling. Although it’s not true, in pushing the claim, they are both admitting that the BBC is biased against the right – if the BBC was balanced in its reporting, rather than anti-right, why on earth would the right want to mount a coup against the BBC’s leadership?
One final thought, inspired by comments I saw on the excellent Telegraph podcast yesterday evening: both the Guardian and the BBC (in lock-step, as usual) are seeking to make the story about the BBC and Trump, and side-lining the many other areas of BBC bias contained in the whistle-blower memo. In their eyes, if they can make it a story of good (the BBC) -v- evil (Trump) then they think they are on much stronger ground. They also think they can garner more support that way. It’s why both the BBC and the Guardian are pushing the irony that it’s Trump (of all people, Guardian eye-roll) who is threatening to sue the BBC for fake news. I agree that it’s ironic, but it doesn’t excuse the BBC’s egregious behaviour towards Trump. Nor does it make all the other systemic biases at the BBC disappear, however much the BBC would like them to do so.
LikeLiked by 4 people
And as if to make my point for me, here’s Marina Hyde at the Guardian, right on cue:
“It’s the BBC v Trump, Farage and co. Who in their right mind would want to be its new boss?”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/11/bbc-tim-davie-donald-trump-nigel-farage-boss
Actually, it’s not a bad article. It’s the headline that gives the game away.
LikeLike
There is also the irony that all of the defenders of the faith are so willing to use the ‘fight’ rhetoric themselves. Obviously, they are not inciting violence, but with the right editing ..
LikeLiked by 2 people
Indeed, John. From today’s BBC report on the story:
“Davie said: “We have made some mistakes that have cost us, but we need to fight”…”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9d5m54350o
LikeLiked by 1 person
It would be fun to see someone take a speech by Davie and “edit” it in a similar fashion to the hatchet job on Trump’s speech…..
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s increasingly clear that the Guardian has decided to focus on the Trump element of the story to take attention away from the fact that the real story is about systemic bias with regard to many aspects of the BBC’s reporting. Here’s the latest article seeking to deflect attention away from the bigger picture:
“The BBC’s editing error was serious, but the response is way out of proportion
The broadcaster should not cave to Trump’s demands”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/bbc-trump-news
…The BBC’s error in a documentary film about Donald Trump was a serious one. During the editing, two clips of the president speaking to his riled-up crowd of followers in Washington were juxtaposed, even though there was nearly an hour between the two. The edited version could have made viewers believe Trump had made an unmistakable call for violence at the US Capitol that day. He did make inflammatory statements, of course, and he does bear significant responsibility for the riot at the Capitol that day, but he skirted the direct instruction that the film suggested.
So, yes, this was a bad mistake that was not adequately acknowledged or corrected when there was a chance to do so. That is something that calls for internal examination and external acknowledgment, some of which has occurred.
But the current aftermath of the long-ago error – the film was published last year before the US presidential election – is significantly out of proportion...
The problem with this article (apart from its obvious attempt to make Trump the story) is that while it acknowledges that:
The edited version could have made viewers believe Trump had made an unmistakable call for violence at the US Capitol that day…
it doesn’t draw the dots and contemplate that in doing this just over a week before the US Presidential election, it may well have been a very deliberate attempt to use disinformation to undermine Trump’s campaign. Instead we get this:
But the current aftermath of the long-ago error – the film was published last year before the US presidential election – is significantly out of proportion.
I wonder what the Guardian’s response would have been if, say, GB News had done something similar to footage of a Kamala Harris speech just days before the Presidential election, in an attempt to influence it’s outcome in favour of Trump. I suspect it wouldn’t have been so generous in such a scenario.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It is both fascinating and horrible to see the wheels of outrage turning slowly within the heads of those in denial. We now have the spectacle of Sir Kier Starmer saying this in response to a parliamentary question from Ed Davey:
“Where mistakes are made, they [the BBC] do need to get their house in order, and the BBC must uphold the highest standards, be accountable and correct errors quickly. But I will always stand up for a strong, independent BBC.”
Once again, the narrative is one of mistakes that have been made, and the BBC’s biggest sin appears to be not correcting them in a timely fashion. Clumsy, inefficient BBC!
Starmer also said:
“…in an age of disinformation, the argument for impartial British news service is stronger than ever.”
No, what is stronger than ever is the argument for a British news service that is not at the vanguard of those fabricating disinformation, whilst simultaneously posturing as the sword of truth.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crre8gnzg10o
LikeLiked by 3 people
Mark,
That Guardian article is too pathetic for words. It’s an almost infantile line of reasoning, made all the more shocking by the realisation that the author may actually believe it.
LikeLike
Editing error? Not really. Their edit couldn’t have occurred by accident. That’s the whole point – they cheated and can’t wriggle out of it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lest we forget that the BBC’s reporting of climate issues has been unbalanced – arguably unhinged – for years:
“Decades of Crying ‘Fire!’ in the Climate Theatre Have Left the BBC with Net Zero Credibility”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/12/decades-of-crying-fire-in-the-climate-theatre-have-left-the-bbc-with-net-zero-credibility/
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The BBC’s Delusional Belief in its Objectivity”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/12/the-bbcs-delusional-belief-in-its-objectivity/
LikeLike
An extract from the Chris Morrison (Daily Sceptic) article to which Mark refers above:
By rights the current BBC upheaval should bring about a completely fresh and properly balanced approach to its climate reporting. But I don’t suppose it will.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Hi Mark, thanks for the link. I will follow Robin with this partial O/T quote –
“In 2022, four Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti published a paper in Nature that said there was not a climate crisis and there was little evidence that extreme weather was getting worse. All hell broke out when the paper went viral on social media and a group led by a Guardian writer, Marlowe Hood, and World Weather Attribution head Dr Frederike Otto banded together to get it retracted. They succeeded, with Otto, a regular commentator on attribution for the BBC, claiming the paper had not been written in “good faith”. Hood was even more forthright, sneering: ”It may be akin to removing a speck of dust from a rubbish heap, but I confess to taking satisfaction in seeing this egregiously bad climate study retracted.”
For his part, Pielke observed that the retraction was one of the “most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen”.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
On Net Zero, climate change and Covid, the BBC has grievously betrayed the nation. The chickens are coming home to roost. Or maybe that should be ostriches.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/12/a-bbc-reckoning-for-the-covid-lockdowns-is-overdue/
LikeLike
Maybe the COVID clown show made the BBC believe they could sell any old story they liked to an unsuspecting public, but their hubris got the better of them with the self-inflicted Trump fiasco.
LikeLike
As I suggest in my article, it is very difficult to construct a convincing case for the BBC’s impartiality and trustworthiness during the Covid crisis when it alone amongst news outlets is invited to the Government’s clandestine Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum. When it comes down to it, the BBC is in tow with the Government, and there is no way that it is going to be set adrift without a fight.
LikeLike
A comment on this topic from Alan, who is having difficulty with WordPress.
LikeLike
Jit,
I was hoping Alan might comment! It’s good to know he’s lurking here at Cliscep.
Alan makes some good points vis-a-vis Trump, and I largely agree with them.
However, there is so much more to the story than that. As I suggested in an earlier comment, the BBC and the Guardian are keen to limit the damage to the BBC by making this into a story of good (the BBC) -v- evil (Trump), because that’s a narrative that will get people on board. Then the story about institutional bias can be swept under the carpet. But that there is institutional bias, I have no doubt. The BBC has misinformed the public about COVID, climate, Gaza, trans issues, Trump, and much more. It’s a shame, because despite my criticisms, I remember with fondness the BBC as it used to be, and I would love it once more to be an institution we can all be proud of.
However, it has behaved badly for a very long time. My brother has just reminded me of a sorry tale from 1993. The organisation for which he worked was in the news for the wrong reasons. His chief executive was anxious to appear on a local BBC news programme (I forget whether it was Radio Newcastle or the TV programme Look North) to set the record straight. He duly went to be interviewed and returned to the office delighted at the fair hearing he felt he had enjoyed. He wasn’t so happy the following day, after the programme was broadcast, with his comments having been spliced to make it sound as though he had said the opposite of what he actually said. Sound familiar?
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Newsnight accused of selectively editing same Trump Capitol riots speech as Panorama
BBC show accused of editing speech to make it appear as if Trump made a more explicit call for violence from his supporters”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/13/newsnight-accused-of-selectively-editing-same-trump-capitol-riots-speech-as-panorama
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes …. but surely it’s all an evil right-wing coup. (A rather long lived coup going that it now seems has be going on for two years.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apparently, this is another Daily Telegraph scoop, so, yes, definitely a far-right coup.
Also, a Republican was interviewed on that Newsnight programme and he immediately pointed out, live on air, that the footage had been fraudulently spliced. There was no response or acknowledgement from the presenter. I think this throws some light on Alan’s speculations.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It seems that the lack of journalistic integrity extends beyond the BBC and has taken root in its spawn — the Trusted News Initiative. Its TNI soulmate, ABC Australia, has also been caught red-handed:
“Aussie broadcaster ABC deceptively edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech much like the BBC did: ‘Same journalistic sin’.”
https://nypost.com/2025/11/12/us-news/aussie-broadcaster-abc-deceptively-edited-trumps-jan-6-speech-much-like-the-bbc-did-report/
Note that, whilst the BBC and ABC Australia both ply their propaganda-disguised-as-news under the banner of ‘Trusted News’, neither the Daily Telegraph or the New York Post have felt the need to join that club.
Mind you, since we are talking about ABC Australia, I should remind you that they had gained a reputation for being a scummy outfit long before today:
LikeLiked by 2 people
Interesting article on the Daily Sceptic about the BBC losing its impartiality. These paras caught my eye:
“So when did this all change? Well I think I can just about date it to 2014 or so and the issue was climate change. For the first time the BBC said to its staff that this cult of impartiality should no longer apply. So no more platforming of critics of climate change like the former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson, the popular TV botanist David Bellamy, or indeed Piers Corbyn, the brother of the Left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn. The science was conclusive, said the BBC, declaring that there should be no ‘two sides-ism’ which might lead viewers to think that there was a legitimate argument against climate change…….
Now I agree that the scientific consensus is clear and that anthropogenic climate change is happening and that we are partly responsible for it. But the trouble with refusing to debate an issue is that it is no longer tested. It becomes a dogma. The whole crucial issue of what to do about climate change went by default. Whatever the popes of climate change said was automatically assumed to be true.”
I think the date is a bit out since this goes back to the notorious climate conference which was quite a few years beforehand.
The full article: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/14/the-bbc-my-part-in-its-downfall/
LikeLiked by 1 person
While out in the car this morning, I listened to the news on the BBC World Service. The piece about Trump confirming he intends to sue the BBC, despite the apology extended to him, was interesting.
He basically said that it was about trying to ensure the BBC doesn’t do it to anyone else, but he also alluded indirectly to the process of disclosure that litigation involves – basically, he wants to use this to force the BBC to disclose why they did what they did and how often they do it. This, rather than his absurd financial claims, is what should concern the BBC.
The report then (unlike the Radio 4 news I heard later) went for comment to a Guardian journalist based in the US, who didn’t talk about that crucial issue, and spent some time being negative about Trump and his behaviour. It seems the BBC doesn’t get it, and just can’t help itself.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mike H,
I think one can make a case for a number of seminal moments in history in which the BBC jumped the shark. One candidate I mentioned some time ago on this thread was when, in the mid 1990s, John Birt amalgamated the previously separate news and current affairs departments. From that point onwards the high standards of the news department became compromised by the partiality of your typical BBC political commentator.
LikeLike
Mark,
I still don’t think the BBC has fully grasped the enormity of the peril that its bone-headed stupidity has placed it in. Then there is the peril this country is now in due to the likely diplomatic fallout (massive tariffs down the line, anyone?). They can bleat on all they want to about Trump being a litigious bully, but the fact remains that he was defamed, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see this. People keep going on about how high the bar is in the USA courts to prove malice, but to think that this will protect the BBC from losing the case is delusional. They now say that they have a duty to protect tax-payers’ money by refusing to offer compensation to Trump. How about if they were to have protected the tax-payer by not engaging in such reckless defamation in the first place — particularly given Trump’s litigious reputation?
And another thing, the next time they insult my intelligence by saying we all have to stick up for the BBC lest we lose fine programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing or The Traitors, I swear I will lose it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
John,
I think the BBC deludes itself if it thinks Trump won’t be able to establish malice. We now have two programmes when his speech was spliced. The first was broadcast while Congress was investigating the role he may have played in inciting the disgraceful events of 6th January. The second was broadcast just over a week before the 2024 Presidential election, at a time when the Guardian had just opined that the votes of Americans in the UK might be the difference between Harris winning or Trump winning.
Ironically, the BBC’s expressed defence to his claim for damages is that he went on to win the Presidential election (i.e. no harm was done). That almost sounds like an admission that it was an attempt to make him lose the election.
I have no doubt that Trump would like to receive a lot of money from the BBC, but I don’t think it’s his primary motivation here. I think his real aim is to force the BBC in Court to disclose exactly how it operates and why.
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s barely a moment goes by without a BBC apologist being quoted on the BBC news website. This time it is the turn of Lord Hall, former Director General. According to the item:
Does it not occur to any of these people that they should be trying to work out why it did take the BBC so long to recognise the ‘error’? Yes, recognition should have been a lot earlier, but it wasn’t. Rather than just simply stating the fact, these commentators need to supply the reason. And can they supply one that doesn’t lead to the inescapable conclusion that the reason for the delay is the same reason why it wasn’t an ‘error’ in the first place?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0yz13057do
LikeLiked by 1 person
This saying springs to mind – “The proverbial saying “fool me once, shame on you” means that you let someone get the better of you the first time, but it’s not going to happen again. The phrase is the shorter version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
It’s a way of saying that you should have realized people were trying to con you, but you fell for it, taking responsibility for the outcome. After learning your lesson, it’s unlikely that the person will catch you out again.”
LikeLike
I have been on a long car journey today, so have been listening to BBC radio, and have witnessed the best and worst of Radio 4. The Infinite Monkey Cage and In our Time were both interesting and informative. But this scraper the barrel:
Strong Message Here: “Moral Failure and Deadly Negligence”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002mbxl
LikeLike
The BBC is out today to show that it has no trousers – I mean, no sense of humour. In response to gadfly comments on social media about how the UK was getting a good dose of global warming, or witticisms along those lines, they felt the need to point out that
SNOW DOES NOT DISPROVE GLOBAL WARMING YOU LITTLE INGRATES
Actually, what they said was
“November UK snow doesn’t disprove global warming”
The comments…
“…confuse weather with climate. While weather refers to short-term changes in the atmosphere, climate describes long-term weather patterns over extended periods.”
They even have to get a soundbite from the – what was his infernal title again? The “head of climate attribution” at the Met Office.
Lighten up, dudes and dudettes of BBC Stupify.
@12.03 at the above link.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Of course snow doesn’t disprove global warming, and weather isn’t climate. Why, then, does the BBC have regular articles linking “heatwaves” to climate change? When is the World Weather Attribution Service going to tell us how unlikely November snow is thanks to claims change?
LikeLiked by 2 people
This sense of humour fail whenever the public sarcastically use cold weather and snowfall to have a dig at the global warming crowd is a perennial feature. When Trump remarked 8 years ago that the US could do with “some good old global warming” they completely lost their minds:
https://cliscep.com/2017/12/30/how-extreme-us-cold-a-trump-tweet-little-ice-age-chatter-triggered-a-warmist-meltdown/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Another skeleton from the BBC’s ossuary:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-bbc-covered-up-the-bashir-scandal/?status=Active
It’s probably paywalled. Here are a few key snippets:
“Still, serious questions remain to this day about the way the Corporation covered up the scandal. We are asked to believe, for example, that John Birt, then the BBC’s DG and overall Head of News and Current Affairs was never told that Bashir was a liar – something he has consistently denied. Birt was an executive obsessed with every detail of his BBC empire ……. Was he really not told that the biggest scoop in the history of the Corporation was based on deceit and lies? Really?”
“Bashir was under the complete control of his producer. But, and it’s a huge but, his producer was the editor of Panorama himself, Steve Hewlett, my old boss. Hewlett is a journalist for whom I had and retain the utmost affection. But by becoming Bashir’s producer, he removed the crucial firewall between producer and editor, created precisely to protect the BBC against bent reporters.
This perhaps explains the lengths the BBC went to in order to bury the story. Once it knew the truth about Bashir, it could easily have turfed him out. But what to do about his producer who carried full editorial responsibility for the disaster? They couldn’t just hang out to dry the editor of Panorama, then one of the most powerful journalists in Britain. That would seriously tarnish the BBC’s most influential current affairs programme, along with all the BBC brass right up to the DG himself.”
“Why did this institution suddenly turn rogue and spend a fortune lying, deceiving, dissembling and evading? Was this all just to defend one bent reporter? I don’t think so. And so the conspiracy continues”
The article was written by….”Tom Mangold is a broadcaster, journalist and author. For 26 years he worked as an investigative journalist for BBC Panorama.” Apparently he made 121 Panorama episodes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Regarding the snowy/cold snap some in the UK are having and how it’s reported by most MSM/BBC weather forecasters is a bugbear for me.
When the jet stream draws up warm air/temps from the equator the UK gets a bit warmer than average & the forecasters make hay, with statements/warming narrative like “it’s x% warmer than it should be at this time of year”. But when a cold snap hits the UK (jet stream draws down air/temps from Artic) they resort back to “it’s just weather”.
Said it before, do they not understand what “average” means (and don’t get me started on heat maps which only seem to shown when it’s “hot”).
LikeLike
On climate -v- weather:
“Scotland records UK’s lowest November temperature in 15 years”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy07nl5g12xo
We still seem to be awaiting World Weather Attribution’s take on how likely this was rendered due to climate change.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mark – bet they say something like – “after a above average warm start, November ends with a cold snap. but warmer winters are still set to increase”.
LikeLike
Yesterday a British legislator was jailed for taking bribes and the judge said the culprit undermined trust in democracy. I immediately drew a parallel between that case and the situation that the BBC is in with its embedded biases. Am I alone in making that comparison? And will the BBC end up in court? It needs to mend its ways at the very least. But can it reform? Will it? Regards, John C.
LikeLiked by 2 people
John – I sat down to eat my sandwich yesterday and switched on the BBC news – to see a judge excoriating that guy for his sins. I flicked over to the Lords to see Therese Coffey (excuse the lack of accents) talking about her amendment to the state-sponsored suicide bill. Bored of that after ten minutes, back to the BBC, which was still on the judge delivering her sentence.
Then, minutes later, the 1 o’clock news, and the same villain’s head flashed up left of screen – centre of screen Farage appeared – with a reporter’s comment such as “Farage has not been implicated…” (But they innocently “drew a line” visually between him and the villain with their graphics.)
The thought that occurred to me was, if you can get 10.5 years for taking brown envelopes and making pro-Russian statements that actually amounted to nothing in terms of direct harm to this country, it’s rather incongruous that politicians operating without bribes, but eagerly hollowing out what is left of this country for purely ideological reasons, will never be called to account. This is not a party-political point as it has been going on for 20 years – seems like a relatively short time, but it’s surprising how easy it is to trash a perfectly good country in two decades.
I don’t know how best to describe us now – as a fentanyl addict passed out in an alley, or a battered wife.
We probably think we are quite low now, but there are darker places.
LikeLiked by 3 people