https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07m2v1z4evo
Interesting article by Katie Razzle speculating on the BBC mess.
She says
It appears there has been a rift between the Board and the news division with some arguing the BBC has, for too long, failed to address institutional bias inside the BBC and others questioning whether what's unfolded has been an orchestrated - and politicised - campaign against the corporation which has claimed two big scalps.
For the best part of a week, since the Telegraph first broke its story, I haven't been able to understand why the BBC did not get on the front foot in the face of a deluge of damaging headlines about claims of systemic bias.
It needed to divide the allegations into two distinct stories.
The first, about the edit of the Trump speech in the Panorama programme, needed addressing immediately. Either with a swift apology - or indeed a case made for why the BBC believed it had not mischaracterised the president's words.
That would have allowed the BBC to come out fighting more widely on behalf of its journalism. Remember, it was being accused of institutional bias. Of a lack of impartiality. Accusations that cut to the heart of its news operation.
With an apology for the mistake around the Panorama (or a robust defence), it could have gone on to try to refute the other claims about institutional bias.
It could have said that the BBC had already been taking action to ensure editorial impartiality, and had already acted, for example, on issues at BBC Arabic.
Instead the BBC allowed the story to fester - and we ended up in a situation where the Trump White House was calling the BBC "fake news" and it had some traction.
My understanding from multiple sources inside the BBC is that a statement on Panorama had been ready to go for days.
The BBC planned to say on the Trump edit that it hadn't intended to mislead the public, but that in light of looking at it again, it believed there should have been some kind of white flash or wipe, to make clear to audiences that these were two distinct parts of the speech.
I understand Deborah Turness became more and more angry and frustrated as the week went on because she was prevented by the Board from putting out that apology.
Instead the BBC Board decided a letter to the Culture Media and Sport Committee was the way to go.
(Others have told me it's not as clearcut as this characterisation. That it took some time for news bosses to accept the Panorama edit had been an error and that there were discussions on all sides on how to respond.)
Many, both inside and outside the BBC, see the failure to respond as a grave mistake. The Telegraph's drip feed of allegations was damaging - and the BBC wasn't tackling them head on.
I have been told that Turness then went into a board meeting on Thursday to discuss the crisis around the Telegraph stories and was "ripped apart", as some have described it.
Those who have called the BBC's journalism into question would call that accountability.
But another source characterised it as the culmination of a "relentless critique of BBC journalism over two years by members of the Board and advisers - all of whom come from same political persuasion".
But another source characterised it as the culmination of a "relentless critique of BBC journalism over two years by members of the Board and advisers - all of whom come from same political persuasion".
They point to Robbie Gibb, a former BBC editor who left to become Downing St director of communications for Theresa May and who is now a member of the Board.
The former Sun editor, now BBC presenter David Yelland has called it "nothing short of a coup". He claims the BBC Board has been undermined and "elements close to it have worked with hostile newspaper editors, a former PM and enemies of public service broadcasting".
But another former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, had a very different take. Speaking on the BBC News Channel, he said the resignations were "the right thing to do - this was an issue that was never going away".
The editing of the speech, he said, could have led to Trump suing or the BBC being banned from the White House. "If you can't be trusted on that [the speech of the US president] what can you be trusted on?" he said.
It's not a coup.
It's a redress of unchecked power and a lack of accountability in politicisation within the BBC.
It's characterised as being a right wing political take over. It's not. It's people accurately saying that the bias at the BBC which has long been driven by the BBC has become that problematic that it ultimately threatens the integrity of the BBC.
The BBC should have apologised straight away, but actually the issue there is it would have just moved on and not addressed the underlying issues of bias if it had done that.
Kevin MacKenzie is spot on saying if you cant trust the BBC on basics then it's fucked. People will try and make out this is a 'right wing coup'. I honestly don't think it is. We've seen all the accusations here about being far right if you are GC or that you are being led by the American right and all its money for being GC.
It isn't the case.
It's about a failure of the left to address its own overreach and how levels of censorship and bias have been unchecked for so long that the Corporation is now out of step and alienating the public.
The BBC SHOULD be using language accurately and not in a political way. This is why the Martine Croxall verdict is so poignant. She was told off for using plain language in general usage rather than the approved political language which destroys the visibility and power of women. We are told that it's 'right wing' to refuse to want to get into the business pronouns but as we know on MN a lot of those fighting hardest against pronouns here and much more politically left wing or centrist than any of these activists are willing to admit.
It's about a removal of power from ordinary people and the language they use day to day to institutionally approved language which the public never agreed to and there is no public support for. It's about this top down power - it's BBC over reach for many years.
It's notable that even now in its coverage of the subject the BBC has removed references to biological sex from quotes. You have no choice but to ask why. This seems to be something they are super keen to repress and don't want to tackle head on. This ISN'T a right wing coup to want to talk about biology. Let's get this straight, just how many of us feel politically homeless because the left won't recognise sex.
This is the BBC terrified that if they don't use accurate language they'll have a bunch of young people abandon the channel. Let's be honest, those young people aren't watching anyway and actually the issue is that they are pandering to an overly amplified noisy bunch of activists who don't really reflect young people all that well anyway. They are fairly unrepresentative. You have a weird thing of many young people saying they believe x,y and z when asked by authority because they've been taught if they don't say that they get ostracised. In practice their private views often are much more complex and still developing. If the BBC abandons reality to chase them they seal their own fate by dooming themselves to irrelevance for just talking nonsense and not reflecting the wider public and not reflecting this ongoing issue with top down power and distortion by social media.
It needs to be seen in the context of a series of public scandals of this nature where both the public and private sector have claimed there's no issue / there's no complaints etc etc and yet there's a shed load there that's not too hard to find - but has been hushed up or been invisible to power from above because it's not ticked their boxes. We KNOW that complaints go under the radar. We KNOW that not everyone answers truthfully when authority asked a question. We have to be aware of identifying public mistrust and institutionalised misrepresentations. This is the bread and butter of journalism that the BBC is currently missing precisely because it's guilty of many of the same institutional problems. You have to start asking WHY there is such a back lash, is it actually a right wing backlash or is it a deliberate political mischaracterisation precisely to uphold a political narrative of its own.
We KNOW here that the biological backlash in the UK is NOT a right wing thing? How else do you explain the internal strife WITHIN the SNP, Greens, Labour and the LD if it's a right wing thing. The political issue of the last decade has been about how the focus in politics has shifted from left and right wing concerns to concerns about liberalism versus authoritarianism. The BBC have NEVER got to grips with this - they made an almighty pigs ear of it over Brexit and they continue to do so precisely because their issue is about internal authoritarianism.
It's effectively about a systematic suppression of internal critical complaints which deliberately seeks to undermine and consider the complaints of certain groups - PARTICULARLY women - because they don't fit the agenda and what the institution wants to here.
You can't have journalist integrity AND go around telling your staff that they have to be trained to lie about sex or erase sex - it's so integral to lived experience and the meaning of a story. Hence why courts are saying it's not ok to sanction women for refusing to call a male, male in a sex related court case.
You can draw a clear line connecting political hot potatoes of the past decade like the Post Office Scandal, Grooming Scandal, Grenfell to the same sort of problem. All have similar features about why these issues continued - it was about the institution being more concerned about the institution and protecting itself rather than addressing problems and dealing with how it was impacting on those it had a duty of case to - it's about powerful people versus the people. It's about institutional power being used against grassroots.
Katie Razzle is a good journalist. But even in trying to report this fairly she can't get to the heart of the problem because she has to engage in both siderisms rather than acknowledge its about a failure to commit to the principle that journalism sometimes isn't about pandering to political disagreements - it's about getting outside of that and seeing if it's actually raining outside and reporting on that.
The heart of this issue is that it doesn't want to look at whether it's in step and in tune with what the public are noticing. The fact we all know here the dynamics of the problem speaks volumes. Katie Razzle still can't describe what we can all see because she is tied to BBC protocols which just ultimately aren't working. She's institutionalised herself.