Interesting Article on BBC's Complete Disconnection With Reality About Covid

[Advance]

Intro:

"I’ve seen from the inside how the corporation has failed in its reporting on the pandemic

I have been a BBC journalist for many years, and in that time I have been committed to impartiality and the corporation’s Reithian values to inform and educate. My despair about the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic though has been steadily growing for some time. And in early December, as I listened to a BBC radio broadcast, I felt the corporation reach a new low."

Here is a link through the paywall:
archive.md/EIZZW

Maybe a whistle blower from The Guardian will do one soon!

I’ve stopped listening to BBC news during the pandemic, the coverage has been so awful.

It was a boring article for sure.

It is an interesting article. It seems to be the same here in Canada with the CBC - they completely stopped any attempt to offer balanced journalism or to ask questions of the authorities about the balance they were attempting to strike. All of their chosen experts and special correspondents were not only holding the government line, most went beyond it.

Ironically I think this has had the effect in the end of convincing those who were of a more skeptical turn of mind to consider that perhaps there might really be something going on with this, some agenda or dishonesty.

Completely agree. BBC news used to be my go to place for news content but I ended up subscribing to a newspaper during the pandemic as I couldn't bear the one-sidedness of it.

The turning point for me was quite early on (about May 2020) when Fergus Walsh wrote an article confirming he'd tested positive for Covid antibodies and made mention of the fact he'd had a nasty fluey/chesty cough illness in early Jan 2020. But he concluded that the antibodies of course must not be related to that illness and must be from an asymptomatic infection at some later stage. Why??? It seems far more likely that a well travelled person like him would have caught Covid in Jan 2020 but that didn't tie up with the line of Covid only arriving on our shores in February so he completed dismissed the alternative out of hand. Completely unbalanced in my opinion.

Yes it's a great article and has been widely shared in anti-restrictions circles.

I'm sad that the pandemic has eroded my trust in institutions that I had previously held in such high regard, especially the BBC.

I too now subscribe to a newspaper (the Telegraph) and it has been a breath of fresh air for me.

This doesn't surprise me at all. The BBC is the governments mouth piece and I find that their reporting on any issues is heavily censored.

This might be interesting -
www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding
“ We are grateful to the wide range of funders, including national governments, the UN and other international organisations, foundations, corporate partners and private individuals that supported us in 2019/20.

Significant donors included the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union, several UN agencies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and many others.”

In the US, Pfizer sponsors a lot of media so the bias will be similar.

We gave up on the bbc right at the beginning of the pandemic as their coverage was ludicrously scaremongering about a virus that kills a tiny proportion of those it infects and which can be treated at home in the early stages with cheap off patent drugs. In general the bbc is just a government mouthpiece that justifies government policy and agendas and as one poster mentioned, even goes beyond government policy to an extreme extent.

@DarknessAndLight

This might be interesting - www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding “ We are grateful to the wide range of funders, including national governments, the UN and other international organisations, foundations, corporate partners and private individuals that supported us in 2019/20.

Significant donors included the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union, several UN agencies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and many others.”

In the US, Pfizer sponsors a lot of media so the bias will be similar.

@DarknessAndLight That isn't the BBC's funding - it's funding for the BBC Media Action charity which helps to support marginalised groups to communicate and provide effective information to their populations. Its totally separate to the BBC and a charity, which is why it gets govt and NGO funding as it works in some of the world's poorest countries.

Nothing to do with the BBC's news reporting.

Interesting article. I find it hard to make head or tail of all the different opinions. Don’t know who I can trust anymore. Even scientists disagree. And it seems like everyone has to have a ‘stance’ these days. There’s no space for uncertainty or ambiguity or changing your mind. Everyone has to have a label - like anti vaxxers, or pro lockdown or whatever.

I completely agree and sadly it’s turned me off the whole of the BBC and even programmes I loved. It feels dirty and corrupt

I can’t trust anything said now

I also subscribe to the Telegraph and talk radio has been an absolute breath of fresh air!

@ILookAtTheFloor

Yes it's a great article and has been widely shared in anti-restrictions circles.

I'm sad that the pandemic has eroded my trust in institutions that I had previously held in such high regard, especially the BBC.

I too now subscribe to a newspaper (the Telegraph) and it has been a breath of fresh air for me.

Ah yes the telegraph... That bastion of truth and integrity 😅😅😅🤣🤣

Two things have made me lose faith in the BBC. Firstly, the quality of grammar on their website is poor. Secondly, the factual inaccuracy lately. During the petrol supply issues, they had a headline along the lines of “95% of petrol stations have no fuel” - it turns out that the network of independent petrol stations had said that 95% of their members had no fuel. The big chains such as Shell, BP and the supermarkets were reporting no such thing. I wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate attempt to mislead or stupid “journalists”.

@DazzlePaintedBattlePants

Two things have made me lose faith in the BBC. Firstly, the quality of grammar on their website is poor. Secondly, the factual inaccuracy lately. During the petrol supply issues, they had a headline along the lines of “95% of petrol stations have no fuel” - it turns out that the network of independent petrol stations had said that 95% of their members had no fuel. The big chains such as Shell, BP and the supermarkets were reporting no such thing. I wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate attempt to mislead or stupid “journalists”.

Same! Quality of writing on the BBC news website was becoming painful. Appalling punctuation errors! And then the constant hyperbolic doom and gloom was added with Covid. I deleted the app off my phone and switched to sky news instead. Not that it's perfect, but it certainly seemed to have a more factual, less emotional tone and the grammatical accuracy is pretty good.

Where does everyone get their news from? The Telegraph was always nicknamed the Torygraph growing up so I have an innate dislike of it. Am prepared to change my mind tho if someone has a good argument! What about The Times? Although I’m supposed to be not reading the news coz it’s so depressing and makes me feel hopeless. So maybe radio is better. Or maybe nothing!!

@SwanShaped

Where does everyone get their news from? The Telegraph was always nicknamed the Torygraph growing up so I have an innate dislike of it. Am prepared to change my mind tho if someone has a good argument! What about The Times? Although I’m supposed to be not reading the news coz it’s so depressing and makes me feel hopeless. So maybe radio is better. Or maybe nothing!!

People often like Thier news to reflect Thier own thoughts, views and prejudices etc. One thing is true, that many do like a good BBC bashing😅

@DarknessAndLight

This might be interesting - www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding “ We are grateful to the wide range of funders, including national governments, the UN and other international organisations, foundations, corporate partners and private individuals that supported us in 2019/20.

Significant donors included the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union, several UN agencies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and many others.”

In the US, Pfizer sponsors a lot of media so the bias will be similar.

You do realised that's the World Service funding profile.

Not the main domestic services

On balance, I think Nick Triggle has been very balanced throughout, often in contrast to the rest of the site.

I read the FT and the Economist now, for news. I also have an NYT subscription although that is pretty much a USA version of the Guardian.

I consider myself to the right of centre but the Torygraph is too mental for me; I don’t read the Mail but they certainly aren’t blindly pro-Government by all accounts.

BBC website has dumbed down enormously in recent years, it's a useful place to check a few headline stories but not much beying that. I very much dislike the amount of entertainment news that has crept in, and even worse covert trailers for BBC programmes.

That said, the left always complains BBC is too right wing, and the right that it's too lefty, so perhaps it's doing something right despite the new popularism.

I think on the scientific side, they are reporting where the vast, vast weight of (global) scientific opinion is found. That pisses off the Tory rebels and those like minded. But there's a history to this - started with climate change - when they started off giving equal weight to all fringe theories (misplaced attempt at neutrality and showing all opinions).

People often like Thier news to reflect Thier own thoughts, views and prejudices etc. One thing is true, that many do like a good BBC bashing😅

And I'm sure you're no different. Where do you get your news from @SLH2003?

People often like Thier news to reflect Thier own thoughts, views and prejudices etc. One thing is true, that many do like a good BBC bashing that’s true. I just wondered where is most balanced. Maybe nowhere.

Read a variety of sources, don’t expect to find one that is perfectly objective.

The BBC and so called journalists like Laura Kuenssberg really disgraced themselves during the pandemic.

They stopped sticking to facts and asking questions/challenging politicians on all sides and instead became a docile government mouthpiece.

Silly really, because the Tories will cut their funding and even get rid of the TV licence eventually so they did all that boot-licking and lost people's trust in the process for nothing.

Little bit off topic, but I completely lost faith in the BBC long before the pandemic. As I became more interested in womens and trans rights and they way in which they intersect, I realised that not only was the BBC horribly biased but actually they're fact reporting was awful.

But I've been a beeb follower since forever and it's completely changed the way I viewed the BBC.