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!

This is why media studies should be compulsory in schools.

If the article writer's genuinely committed to impartiality I'm only surprised they still have a job

But as I've said so often, the BBC are in hock to the government who hold the purse strings, so if it comes right down to it they've no choice but to act as a mouthpiece no matter how much they pretend to be independent

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

Forgot to add that I very much agree with this

You might as well search for rocking horse droppings as look for genuinely impartial reporting these days, and that includes a lot of the scientific community as well, so it seems the only thing left is to take a wide range for balance

@Berlinkreuzberg

What is concerning is the way that individuals like Steve Bannon (former Trump advisor) and other members of the alt right are insidiously influencing public opinion to mistrust institutions like the BBC. Remember the 'defund the BBC' trope that mysteriously appeared. All part of the plan to encourage the plebs to fight amongst themselves and undermine genuinely neutral figureheads. Much like Brexit. All from the same stable. Wealthy elites pretending not to be...

Us4Them springs to mind too.

The article makes a good point about the way the BBC and other broadcasters have completely ignored the costs and negative effects of restrictions, focusing only on covid case rates, numbers of deaths and ‘protecting the NHS’.

Nobody in the broadcast media is asking why governments are currently behaving like nobody was vaccinated when the reality is that >90% of people, including me, are. And why we were told that vaccines were our way out of this nightmare, until suddenly they aren’t. A cynic might suggest that this isn’t about public health anymore but about an authoritarian right-wing government using fearmongering to control the population.

This government isn't authoritarian, they couldn't authority their way out of a paper bag. Anyone would think we were actually in lockdown.

‘A cynic might suggest that this isn’t about public health anymore but about an authoritarian right-wing government using fearmongering to control the population.’

They might, if they were not only cynical but also paranoid and didn’t understand that even a mild-for-most illness in a 90% vaccinated population still has the ability to overwhelm the health system if too many people get it.

Fwiw I think you are absolutely right there is fearmongering but it seems far more likely the aim is to try to get people to change their behaviour of their own accord so the government doesn’t have to enforce unpopular authoritarian measures. Barely anybody wants a lockdown and certainly not the government.

@PlanetNormal 74% of people in UK are vaccinated not >90%. Lol authoritarian ? Libertarian you mean. They aren't even checking goods entering the country anymore. As far as they are concerned as little government as possible is what turns them on, especially the ERG types.

@PlanetNormal - I’m in Canada and my provincial government has been very restrictive and our current provincial government is the equivalent of Labour. Our federal government has also been full-on about Covid and is considered centrist.

A bit late here, but god yes @SantaClawsServiette !! The CBC news tv and radio is absofuckinglutely useless. Entirely a government mouthpiece. The only time they’ve shown any whiff of interest in asking questions is about why we (in BC) have never been able to get access to home tests if we want them. The rest is just constant bother about being “safe” and the deification of the Provincial Health Officer.

When you are sneering about having a keyboard cleaned you should get a hold of yourself.

Why? Why is it wrong to highlight the absurdity of things being done “just in case” or to look good, when actually they do no good at all? Covid isn’t transmitted via surfaces so all the hyper-vigilant cleaning does is generate an awful lot of (often plastic) waste, and create another obligation on people.

Do you genuinely believe that edicts and rules should not be challenged?

@ElectraBlue

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.

Yes, this is why I find it so annoying when you get people saying things like "oh, every source has a bias, you just don't like the BBC bias."

I don't know whether such people are just very young, or have short memories, but there was a time when journalists in general, but especially journalists of the state broadcaster, considered that an integral part of their job was to hold up the government to critical viewpoints, to ask ministers and other government officials difficult questions about their policy decisions.

All the more so when those policy decisions were fairly controversial or seemed to have likely very extreme consequences.

The belief was that if these views and policies were in fact justified, the ministers and officials would be able to answer the questions and give good account.

That is not at all what happens now. Instead the BBC seems to spout the government viewpoint from their own staff, and gives ministers and often civil servants types a platform where what they saw goes completely unchallenged in any meaningful way - on the contrary whatever they say, the BBC amplifies it in their own commentary and reporting choices.

It's not news at all, it's propaganda.

I do think it is a shame that the BBC's reporting and analysis is so appallingly bad. Covid is a new phenomenon, which means that there is no truth laid down in stone, just questions that we are not allowed to ask. And this all makes people feel that they are being lied to.

As for the scaremongering, I don't live in the UK, but I was shocked when a couple of weeks into the pandemic, Radio 4 news went into endless details of how people were dying and relatives having their hearts broken. Why? We were scared enough as it was.

@Berlinkreuzberg

What is concerning is the way that individuals like Steve Bannon (former Trump advisor) and other members of the alt right are insidiously influencing public opinion to mistrust institutions like the BBC. Remember the 'defund the BBC' trope that mysteriously appeared. All part of the plan to encourage the plebs to fight amongst themselves and undermine genuinely neutral figureheads. Much like Brexit. All from the same stable. Wealthy elites pretending not to be...

This is just so disingenuous, I don't know if you mean to be, but think about this.

People are not growing in mistrust of these institutions just because people like Steve Bannon tell them to.

They are growing in mistrust because they are increasingly seeing their reporting as really shit quality, or worse, misleading.

I grew up listening to the CBC all day, and as an adult I continued to do so. I did and still do belong to a group that was founded to fight cuts to and calls to disestablish the CBC. Having attended a school with a large journalism program I know a lot of people who work at the CBC. I am a strong believer in public broadcasting.

However, I no longer listen to the CBC apart from one show, and frankly I have come to think that perhaps they ought to be disestablished as they seem increasingly dangerous. For me this didn't start with covid but with a few other issues - I can think of three other issues where I now would never trust their reporting to be, not even unbiased, but factual. There are too many instances where I have caught them, on issues I know about, being counterfactual or suppressing facts, and I cannot trust they are not doing this in other areas. Their content is also overwhelmingly concentrated on identity issues, and often anti-Catholic tropes.

It doesn't help that I know many of their near retirement age journalists or those who have retired are also thoroughly disgusted, some have taken early retirement and some have even spoken out. Others have switched to different news agencies.

The CBC IMO is worse than the BBC - probably due to an overall smaller media here - but the problems at the BBC seem to be pretty parallel. People who were long-time supporters have not inexplicably started being influenced by SB, for goodness sake, and telling them that what they are seeing is just them being stupid is the opposite of convincing.

What it sounds like is you are saying "there there little plebs, just carry on trusting the BBC, no matter what you see."

@Theregoesmyhomebirth

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

You can tell by the writing that Nick Triggle wrote it, and he does cover two sides of the issue in a balanced way.

It stands out a mile from the rest of the hyperbolic content on the BBC website.

@SantaClawsServiette obviously you know nothing about the alt right. So you deny the influence that Steve Bannon and the rest of the alt right, Dom Cummings etc and their instruments Cambridge Analytica have had insidiously on how the public views certain institutions, the encouragement to see certain sections of society as elites and traitors. No one is suggesting that Steve Bannon is telling people what to believe but his acolytes like Farage are and much of it is 'the BBC is crap' kind of stuff, that 'we don't need experts', the rubbish about ' metropolitan elites'. All the same weird populist mix. Funnily enough I found the BBC's coverage of Brexit mind numbingly simplistic and driven by the desire to appear balanced. The covid coverage was spot on and managed to depict what the frontline was experiencing.

[quote Berlinkreuzberg]**@SantaClawsServiette* obviously you know nothing about the alt right. So you deny the influence that Steve Bannon and the rest of the alt right, Dom Cummings etc and their instruments Cambridge Analytica have had insidiously* on how the public views certain institutions, the encouragement to see certain sections of society as elites and traitors. No one is suggesting that Steve Bannon is telling people what to believe but his acolytes like Farage are and much of it is 'the BBC is crap' kind of stuff, that 'we don't need experts', the rubbish about ' metropolitan elites'. All the same weird populist mix. Funnily enough I found the BBC's coverage of Brexit mind numbingly simplistic and driven by the desire to appear balanced. The covid coverage was spot on and managed to depict what the frontline was experiencing.[/quote]
It may be comforting for you to believe that people who previously were positively disposed towards the BBC have simply been unconsciously influenced by the alt-right, but that is a very easy answer and conveniently one which avoids actually looking at those institutions.

The problem is evidenced in the way people like yourself talk about news media bias, as if there is simply good and bad bias, and the question of journalistic standards and journalistic ethics are not part of the picture. There has always been various editorial biases present in mainstream media, but those were maintained alongside of good journalistic practice including being able to rely on the basic facts being reported with accuracy.

It also meant questioning of policy put forth by government, questioning facts and figures. This is a really important function of the media, and especially the state media.

The BBC has no one to blame but themselves when they have alienated so many of their traditional supporters by simply not doing the most basic parts of their job.

I am always intrigued when people accuse the BBC of institutional bias, in whichever direction, how does it work in practice? Who decides what the editorial stance should be? Whose agenda is it? It's easy to understand in the context of a newspaper with an owner and a very clear political affiliation but less so in tv news where impartiality is required by the regulator.

How is the agenda communicated to journalists? Are they all really prepared to break Ofcom rules on impartiality without complaint?

@PlanetNormal

The article makes a good point about the way the BBC and other broadcasters have completely ignored the costs and negative effects of restrictions, focusing only on covid case rates, numbers of deaths and ‘protecting the NHS’.

Nobody in the broadcast media is asking why governments are currently behaving like nobody was vaccinated when the reality is that >90% of people, including me, are. And why we were told that vaccines were our way out of this nightmare, until suddenly they aren’t. A cynic might suggest that this isn’t about public health anymore but about an authoritarian right-wing government using fearmongering to control the population.

The problem isn’t now though, it’s that very few journalists pointed out at the time that Johnson was talking obvious rubbish. And that includes the Spectator. Or at least I don’t remember their article on how we are in the middle if a global pandemic and the situation changes and so the response might have to. Johnson should never have been able to have got away with all that one way road map, we can vaccinate our way out of it bollocks and have it splashed all over the front pages.

This isn’t just an issue with Covid. There are very few publications/journalists capable of holding the government to account right now. Although I don’t think it helps that anyone who had written a halfway decent story on why getting vaxxed was the best thing we could do now, but why that might not last in the face of expected new variants would probably have been accused of doom mongering.

@Bovrilly

I am always intrigued when people accuse the BBC of institutional bias, in whichever direction, how does it work in practice? Who decides what the editorial stance should be? Whose agenda is it? It's easy to understand in the context of a newspaper with an owner and a very clear political affiliation but less so in tv news where impartiality is required by the regulator.

How is the agenda communicated to journalists? Are they all really prepared to break Ofcom rules on impartiality without complaint?

One of the ways an institution like the BBC has historically tried to maintain balance is to hire journalists from a variety of backgrounds and political stances, and to also be somewhat hands off in terms of editorial policy and politics. So that tends to result in a fairly broad but somewhat centrist set of positions being shown in their editorial decisions. The other thing is journalism is typically much more broad if you have journalists from different class backgrounds and this is something that has affected journalism more than anything else over the last 30 years.

But the other element is a commitment to questioning government policy in an intelligent way, whichever party happens to be in power. And also the view of the opposition.

What we should have seen with covid was lots of robust questions about how policies could be justified, what the real evidence base for them was, how the statistics were being compiled and what they really meant, much better questioning about things like civil liberties and how to balance them against restrictions and how civil liberties organisations were responding to the kinds of measures being invoked, much more contextualization of some of the information - things like how many people die of other illnesses, how people in care facilities usually die, how the system makes decisions about who to spend resources on.

You can find stuff, some of it very good, written about these questions, but not often by the BBC. And that's a difference from 50 years ago and it's very sad.

The problem isn’t now though, it’s that very few journalists pointed out at the time that Johnson was talking obvious rubbish. And that includes the Spectator. Or at least I don’t remember their article on how we are in the middle if a global pandemic and the situation changes and so the response might have to. Johnson should never have been able to have got away with all that one way road map, we can vaccinate our way out of it bollocks and have it splashed all over the front pages.

What's interesting though is that this isn't just the BJ message. It's the same message politicians have been pushing in a lot of countries, even though many medical people realized the messaging was misleading. So I wonder if the issue is not just a UK one but something that happened at a global level?

I think it started way back at the beginning when a lot of leaders seemed to realize that there were just going to be many people who caught covid, no matter what, and there would be lots of deaths especially of elderly people.

That was where there was this failure because people absolutely flipped their lids. Because they couldn't see the difference in saying, at a population level analysis, lots of old people will die (duh) and saying, we don't care if old people die. And instead of trying to do their job to help people understand that the western media decided to capitalize on it to build outrage.

I have wondered, if Trump hadn't been in office at the time, would they have taken a different approach?

@SantaClawsServiette
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding but are you saying that part of the problem is that the BBC's journalists are too diverse? That things were better in the past before there was such a mix of classes at the BBC? That's interesting if it's what you mean. Many people criticise the BBC for being unrepresentative of the society that pays for it. Too white, too middle class, too many degrees from the same few universities etc.

Regarding the lack of questioning of policy by the BBC, is that because they hire poor journalists or because someone somewhere has decided that the editorial stance of the BBC is never to question government? Or because tv news and the way the schedule operates now is not as conducive to this kind of investigative depth? Or because budget cuts have forced them to focus on reporting?

@Advance

All very BBC bashing and conspiratorial here.

You don’t know how lucky you are the have the BBC

HIGNFY got it right when one of them pointed out how loaded is the BBC's oft used question 'How worried should we be?'

It's sad that institutions like the BBC have failed to probe at the real philosophical issues during the pandemic in favour of mass panic.

I'm staying with my parents for Christmas and knocked on the door to say hi to my old nextdoor neighbour. She's an elderly lady and has shielded since the beginning of covid. Since then she's declined mentally to such an extent that it was like the lights were on but no one was there. I've known her since I was 7 years old but I'm not sure she even recognised me. She'll never get that back now. What on earth was the point.

I think the bbc is pretty good - we are so, so lucky to have it. When I’ve spent periods of time abroad the world service has been a real companion. Of course the bbc isn’t perfect, nothing is.

The people I hear criticising it most loudly seem to be from the both extreme ends of the political spectrum- so that makes me think it’s doing a reasonable job of representing the sane middle ground. As others have said reading a variety of sources is important (but not just the telegraph and spectator if you are after balance).

We have some right-wing, brexity, types in the family and they are very off the bbc at the moment- it’s because they can’t stand the fact that their view is no longer considered automatically to be the default, they loathe hearing the opinions of a range of people that they consider themselves superior too.