to say the BBC might be imperfect but

It's like saying because you gave air time to a nuclear detonation you have to give equal air time to a fireworks show.

It's much more like saying because you gave airtime to the Republican candidate you have to give equal airtime to the Democrat candidate.

But... since Trump's speaking that day added up to at least an hour, how should a news show, after the fact, have presented it?

Accurately?

This

he did actually say all those things, albeit with other things in between.

@user427654 said, 'I did a nuclear detonation'

You did actually say those things, albeit with other things inbetween. It doesn't wash, does it?

Panorama version: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

What he actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The 'fight like hell' quote was from near the end of the speech and appeared to be referring to electoral security.

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial

This is a shocking misrepresentation. It doesn't matter that he's a dangerous arsehole who I'm sure relished the insurrection. It's still a terrible failure of our national, publicly funded broadcaster which has a Royal Charter to uphold accuracy and impartiality. To point over there and say 'but Trump ...' in an attempt to deflect from that failure simply compounds it.

There's been a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to the Darlington nurses employment tribunal on the Six O'clock News on the BBC. After deafening silence throughout the hearing.

I wonder why tonight.

Actually, no I don't.

Not the way they did. You'll have to watch it, to see how they manipulated his speech. There was no obvious cut between the phrases that they quoted out of place. No fade out, no idea that it wasn't one sentence.

I cannot get past their constant pushing of gender ideology aimed solidly at children within their child focussed media. The Trump thing is stupid and embarrassing, who honesty thought they could do that and get away with it? I don’t think I want them gone entirely but there has to be some accountability.

Small-c conservative in terms of culture, with ostentatious nods to liberal ideas of inclusivity and tolerance, which it can indulge without fear of actually changing anything. Politically right of centre, in that undentable English way that typifies the WI, the CofE and M&S. It has to be risk-averse, but it's too big to control all its limbs, so when a member spasms in an unwelcome way it simply, as we have seen, cuts it off.

But actually, as I've said, I think the BBC's political influence is insignificant in relation to the cable channels, the social media and anything on the internet. So I really don't care too much where it sits on the political spectrum. I think the important bit is the entertainment.

Which is not to say I like all - or even most - of the entertainment. On the contrary, I dislike most of it. But all of it is liked by someone, and that's what the BBC's for.

Do you mean you’re ok if people just remove words in between to change meaning?

Absolutely unbelievable OP - I never, ever thought I'd say this but maybe the BBC should be disbanded. They've been on thin ice for a while - if Trump successfully sues, it will be completely deserved. What an appalling mess.

You said no-one had suggested that the documentary was anything other than fair and balanced. I am pointing out that that has been very strongly suggested.

I am asking whether each of the claims in the memo is true and if so, what the BBC has done about it.

We know it's true that Trump's speech was doctored. What have the BBC done about this since it was highlighted to them six months ago?

Is David Grossman's claim true that in that documentary there was one pro-trump supporter v. ten against?

Was there any critical coverage of Harris in other programmes?

You seem to be claiming that the documentary was balanced but also that it doesn't matter that it wasn't balanced because it's what a UK audience wanted. I think that's a huge assumption and UK audiences might have appreciated coverage that went some way to explaining Trump's popularity (beyond the usual 'they're all thick bigots' line) and why US voters were not keen on Harris. The result must have been thoroughly bemusing for those who relied on the BBC as their one 'impartial' news source.

I don't care why Prescott wrote the memo or whether he was feigning shock or not, although I am yet to see convincing evidence that he wrote it in bad faith. I care about whether the claims are true. Have any of the claims, which cover a variety of topics, been shown to be false yet?

So true op!

if you have lived elsewhere and seen the state of news and other programming you would realise what we have.

the panorama thing was last winter, nobody cared until the torygraph started a politically motivated campaign

This is the Argument to Moderation fallacy.

As a retired journalist (not UK media) I was horrified and outraged by what the BBC did with the Trump quote.
I beggars belief that they thought could do this, even more that they somehow thought they had the right to do it.
I'd have been sacked forthwith if I had done anything remotely comparable during my 30-year career. Indeed, colleagues were shitcanned for less.
I find myself increasingly disappointed by the BBC and think a radical overhaul of the institution and its funding is long overdue.

The COI was regarding Prescott's proposed role in helping to select the next chair of OFCOM. Obviously any industry insider helping to choose who regulates them is a COI.

https://archive.ph/9nv4J

Is it a conflict of interest for an independent adviser, board or exec committee member or other senior BBC staff to have previously worked for other media companies? If so, there are probably quite a few people who need to go!

The idea that being friends with someone on the board is a COI is laughable.

@PencilsInSpace - are you taking each separate allegation in Prescott’s memo as having been proven?

A lot of that seems performative to me - the idea that a documentary on Trump (one of the most divisive and talked about figures of the decade) would need to be followed a week later by another hour long documentary on the (frankly not hugely exciting) Kamala Harris just to even things up feels to me like a misunderstanding of how impartiality is supposed to work (and definitely a misunderstanding of what the UK audience was actually interested in watching!).

I’d also be interested in hearing a broad cross section of views as to whether the documentary was actually biased. I’ve read other reports that overall it was very balanced (and it is is also allowable for a programme maker to form a judgment based on evidence).

If this was being broadcast in the UK during a UK election and was about a person standing in that election then I’m sure the rules would have been much, much tighter. But it wasn’t, it was a documentary about politics in another country, shown to a UK only audience almost entirely made up of people who were interested in the personality of Donald Trump, but not able to vote or affect the result in any way.

I really don’t think Prescott was actually “shocked” buy this for one moment - but he certainly wanted to give the impression he was for when the memo was handed to the Telegraph.

I think it's probably too far gone as the major problem seems to be the people, and you can hardly sack all of them and start over. The vast majority of employees seem to share the same worldview, which has diverged significantly from the public. Maybe this is because so many seem to have gone to the same schools and universities, and have hopped between the same few companies like the Guardian and Channel 4. And anyone who is not from this background is being hired by people who are, with orders to respect 'BBC values'. It's unlikely many rabid Reform voters are going to even apply, and if even they did it's difficult to see how they'd get - or keep - the job when their interviewers regard them as worse than Hitler!

As a pretty centric definitely-non-Reform voter who doesn't believe putting a dress on a man makes him a woman, I wouldn't apply there as I'm pretty sure I'd find it an intolerable workplace. And I imagine if I had worked there, I would have tried my hardest to leave a few years back. I doubt I'm alone. So the people working there and those applying will be the exact same as the people who have caused this mess, who don't even seem to understand what they've done wrong, and so can hardly be expected to have the ability to put it right. And going by the list of potential replacements for Davie I saw, they don't show much interest in learning from their mistakes; they're all either BBC or Channel 4, or both.

I don't disagree with your assessment either when you put it like that (so we're agreeing not to disagree 😁)

However they were absolute idiots to imagine that, in today's climate, then someone somewhere wouldn't find out what they had done, put the worst possible spin on it, and use it to call for heads on blocks. This is why I am angry with them on this topic - for scoring such a spectacular own goal.

On the "trans rights" (anti woman) and pro Hamas issues - I am actually angry with them. It's beyond disgraceful. I am angry with them for reprimanding a woman for a slight eye roll on the basis of 20 complaints (some of which, I have heard, came from BBC staff themselves). A little while back there were 103 complaints to Radio 4 about the language being used at 6.30pm on Call Jonathan Pie. The complainers, from what I gathered when I heard the report, were basically told that they were over sensitive. Double standards bloody everywhere.

They really are digging their own grave here. I don't want the BBC to go. I want them to be better.

So you don’t think that loads of people voted for all that NHS money on the bus?
And Project Fear was correct.

Except we have no readable local news websites, absolutely covered in ads and you can hardly read down a story without another window opening, or subscribing after reading a paragraph of what might be a really important local issue. Facebook is utter trash for ‘news’ and anything local issue just to generate comments from mostly hateful people. I use the BBC website for news and longer reads, it’s actually really good for that and included in the licence fee. I’d hate to see ad free news axed and I can decide for myself if there’s biased views in the headlines.

I agree on the trans point, although perhaps that is an example where some people believe (with absolute certainty) that their opinion is so objectively correct that it represents a fundamental democratic principle (ie they see their position as representing the view that no one should be discriminated against). , That leaves them unable to acknowledge that the opposite view is valid and also needs to be heard.

When that sort of blind spot happens it is hard to convince people it is even there, which is why achieving perfect impartiality can be so incredibly challenging.

In this case the focus was on a 12 second excerpt from an hour long documentary produced for the BBC by an independent production company. No one seems to have suggested that the documentary was anything other than fair and balanced (as long as you watched the whole thing, and not just those 12 seconds).

Yes they have. From Prescott's memo:

One week before polling day, the BBC aired an hour-long Panorama special called: Trump: A Second Chance?

I watched the programme and found it to be neither balanced nor impartial – it seemed to be taking a distinctly anti-Trump stance. Critics of the Republican presidential candidate vastly outnumbered those who argued for him. What examination there was of reasons for Trump’s popularity seemed to me insufficient given the overall balance of the programme.

Given what I took to be the anti-Trump nature of the programme, I of course assumed there would be a similar, balancing Panorama programme about Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris the following week. I remain shocked that there was not.

I raised my concerns at the EGSC and David Grossman was asked to review the programme.

He concluded the main contributors to the documentary were heavily weighted against Trump, with just one supporter against ten who questioned his fitness for office.

Worse still, David highlighted alarming concerns about how Panorama had edited Trump’s speech to his supporters on January 6*, 2021, the day of the Capitol Hill riot ...

It has become increasingly clear that the BBC and its proponents, as well as many left-leaning politicians, journalists and media outlets, would prefer it if everyone focused solely on those 12 seconds of shamelessly doctored footage and ignored the overal bias in the Panorama episode and the BBC's wider coverage of the US election.

Also to be ignored are the BBC's inaccurate and irresponsible claims regarding racism and the role of BBC Verify in these, the selection bias of its push notification service, particularly regarding immigration stories, its failure to engage with criticism of the overly simplistic and distorted narratives put forth in its factual history programming, the effective censorship over several years of any views critical of gender identity ideology by its LGBTQ news desk, coupled with its constant drip-feed of stories celebrating all things trans (and for some unfathomable reason, drag queens), its failure to cover huge stories such as the leaked WPATH files or the Darlington nurses' tribunal, or give any coverage to detransitioners, the role of its style guide in its misleading news coverage of violent male offenders who say they are women, the systemic problems within BBC Arabic which have led at times to it becoming a blatant mouthpiece for hamas, and the newsnight programme which repeated dangerous inaccuracies about the humanitarian situation during Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Most of all, the BBC would prefer it if we ignored the failure of its executive committee to effectively deal with any of these issues.

As background to all the coverage of a storm in a teacup about a 12 second clip of someone everybody knows is a wrong'un anyway, and the stories of the whole thing being a right-wing coup, it's worth reading the memo in full, available here:

https://archive.ph/F5K38

Even if Trump is a wrong'un who deserves to be misrepresented, and even if there is some kind of power grab going on by right-leaning members of the board, there are still important questions to be asked. Are the issues raised in the memo true, and if so, have the BBC responded adequately to them? Are we happy with a BBC that behaves in the way descibed in this memo?

I know I'm not.