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 can’t believe it took the pandemic for pepper to mistrust the BBC.

And then throw themselves into the arms of the equally biased Torygraph. Enlightenment beckons for sure.

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

Been a while since I read it, but I think this is one of the conclusions Toby Green comes to in his book, The Covid Consensus. To very much over-simplify, he characterises it as the international centrists and left basically doing their very best to ensure the populist right get one in the eye. It seemed a bit of a reach and I feel I am still trying to digest his rationale.

reading a variety of sources is important (but not just the telegraph and spectator if you are after balance).

In my experience, that's rather been the problem. If one was looking for an alternate view, you had to look quite hard.

The BBC certainly wasn't providing it. Traditional bastions of enlightenment (NYC, Guardian) basically towed the government and consensus line.

I agree the publications you mention do not constitute balance on their own, but there wasn't much else.

For example, it was only around September this year, that the Economist gave space to some academic work that considered the cost/benefit of lockdown.

I am not surprised if less educated folk got distracted and end up in hoc with the hard right, crazies and conspiracy lot.

The article is interesting - but for balance - I can say that (bar the 'proximity' buzz thingys) my office had the same approach of arrows, lift restrictions (up not down) etc so I think that's just standard infection control protocol and shouldn't be added to the debate on whether the news is impartial.

FFS providing an opposing view is not balance when it comes to a science based story. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people like Heneghan still being given airtime when professionally he’s now just a laughing stock.

And perhaps the BBC should have dealt with some of the social media rubbish about deaths of old people at a population level or all catching it anyway and that might have helped disabuse a few people of the notion. It could probably have done a better job on dealing with the economic harms of lockdowns vs doing nothing but I don’t think they are alone on that. I do think that the experts could have done a better job of communicating the economic damage from locking down vs the economic damage from not locking down or not controlling the virus. At the moment it’s far too easy for people to claim it’s never considered or that people were only looking from a narrow scientific/health point of view.

Doesn't your argument exactly make the point, though, @InCahootswithOrwell?

"At the moment it’s far too easy for people to claim it’s never considered or that people were only looking from a narrow scientific/health point of view."

Providing that opposing view, and exploring the argument carefully and openly would have removed the space for people to make such a claim.

Yet here we are...

The international centrists sound like a dangerous lot to be sure.

FFS providing an opposing view is not balance when it comes to a science based story. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people like Heneghan still being given airtime when professionally he’s now just a laughing stock

Highly anti-scientific sentiment expressed here. 🙄

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

In comparison to Pravda and China Central maybe, but a great deal of it is government propaganda all the same. Trouble is, as puppeteer correctly said, it's not always easy to find a diversity of views, but that's no reason not to try

[quote Bovrilly]@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?[/quote]
Uh, no, not sure how you got that.

Politically it's much less diverse than it was.

As for class representation, it's not just the BBC, across all mainstream media there is a huge lack of class and educational diversity compared to the past. It's been one of the biggest impacts on how the media represents issues, and it's a serious problem. They've traded for a certain amount of visible race sex and sexuality related diversity, but ultimately they are all coming from almost identical educational backgrounds, and the way journalists describe their political and class affiliations has narrowed a lot.

I am not surprised if less educated folk got distracted and end up in hoc with the hard right, crazies and conspiracy lot.

The Spectator and The Times are hardly "hard right" though, and certainly not alt-right. Nor is the Daily Mail. All of them are relatively mainstream politically, albeit the DM can be much more tabloidish. But even the DM has had some really good journalism on some topics.

They are cretainly not less balanced or reliable than something like The GUardian, or in the US the NYT, both of which have a clear progressive type political bias and The Guardian in particular has become very questionable in terms of it's factual material, something I would not have said 30 years ago.

Really, when reading The Spectator is seen as hard right there is some very odd thinking in evidence.

FFS providing an opposing view is not balance when it comes to a science based story. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people like Heneghan still being given airtime when professionally he’s now just a laughing stock.

Science very rarely has the level of consensus you seem to imagine and it most certainly has not with covid. There has been plenty of scientific disagreement about covid from reputable sources, in the normal way you see in the sciences, and many scientists have spoken out about being silenced in a way that they had never seen before in their careers for offering dissenting views.

Covid in particular is not even just a purely scientific issue, it's a public health issue which means much more than laboratory science, it's more than anything about human behaviour and includes a holistic view of health as well as things like economics. One of the big stories with covid is the degree to which standard practices in public health have been ignored or abandoned, and things that we know from decades of public health experience have supposedly been overturned. Look at the way the mainstream media treated the Swedish approach which was just as reasonable a guess about how to handle it as any other.

No one who has studied what public health approaches say about getting hesitant people to vaccinate - something we have decades of experience with - could find the way countries like Canada, NZ, or Australia are managing it sensible. The major civil liberties organizations in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and NZ have been very concerned with the covid measures and their legalisty - something that is not being covered by these mainstream news sources in any serious way.

Can you really imagine the BBC or Guardian of 30 or 50 years ago ignoring those kinds of questions? I can't. They have completely left the field though and it seems only the center right papers and news agencies are even giving these ideas a look now.

The BBC have scaremongered throughout. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Clive Myrie in some hospital or the other talking to nurses and mortuary staff and saying how awful it all is. BBC Scotland are just as bad, last week it was all "Scottish hospitals coming under increasing pressure" - and they're in there with a film crew interviewing patients and staff, getting in the way and increasing the pressure even more!

BBC and the Guardian newspaper have always taken whatever story or study has just come out, and spun it to be the worst case scenario possible. The Telegraph and Mail have been more positive.

@SantaClawsServiette
Sorry not had much sleep and misunderstood your post. I find the idea that the BBC is less diverse than it used to be just as odd though tbh. There are people who as far as I can tell are at home on the left and on the right. And there are women, people of colour, people with regional accents, all of whom were much less represented 30 years ago. I'm sure that these days there are fewer people educated at grammar schools, but then there aren't as many grammar schools as there were in the 60s.

Another excellent post, SantaClaws
I especially liked that you highlighted that there really is a divergence in scientific views, except that - as with some other issues - only certain ones are focused on

Not helpful IMO ...

Excellent post santa

The term “far right” has been used by the BBC and the Guardian in respect of any protests.

I don’t think this helps at all.

[quote Bovrilly]@SantaClawsServiette
Sorry not had much sleep and misunderstood your post. I find the idea that the BBC is less diverse than it used to be just as odd though tbh. There are people who as far as I can tell are at home on the left and on the right. And there are women, people of colour, people with regional accents, all of whom were much less represented 30 years ago. I'm sure that these days there are fewer people educated at grammar schools, but then there aren't as many grammar schools as there were in the 60s.[/quote]
There has been quite good research into this. What you need to understand is that the journalism degree is quite a recent thing, and university educated journalists being the norm is quite recent. So it used to be completely normal for journalists to come from quite humble backgrounds, and it was unusual that they had been to university. That's not to say they were ignorant, but they represented quite a different kind of education than what comes out of universities.

Now it's very rare to see journalists without degrees, often though not always in journalism. That means not only do they tend to share more similar backgrounds, universities have also suffered in the last decades in terms of faculty representing a narrower set of views. And if you look at the more prestigious media like the NYT or Guardian or BBC, it's even more extreme, the majority of their writing staff come out of the most prestigious institutions, Oxbridge in the UK or the Ivy League in the US.

It's difficult to convey what a huge change this represents if you don't remember how it used to be. It was quite an interesting phenomena when I was a student, because the journalism school was of course populated by rather privileged youngsters who wanted to write for a living, often with strong activist interests as well. They were quite different than the faculty, who had been working journalists, many started out in other careers, most hadn't been to university and none had journalism degrees because no such thing had existed.

You are mistaking diversity in identity characteristics for diversity of thought and experience. It's changed the face of journalism.

@SantaClawsServiette
I'm pretty sure that at the time you mentioned, 30 years ago, the majority of the BBC's (and ITV's) journalists had been to university but please do point me to the research. I bet many privately educated, many Oxbridge - I'm sure some grammar school and some who went straight from school into training at local newspapers, but those routes barely exist in the same way these days since both grammar schools and local papers are much fewer and further between.

You are mistaking diversity in identity characteristics for diversity of thought and experience.
I think this is a bit odd also - that there is no diversity of thought and experience in being non white or a woman or gay or from the nations / regions. The reason these groups are desirable is because of the diversity of thought and experience they bring.

Well here is one article outlining some of the changes:
workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-costs-of-becoming-a-journalist/

Here is <a class="break-all" href="//another:www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/newspapers" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">another:www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/newspapers

I;m not sure why this is not fairly clear, unless you are very young, but journalism was not a career in the past that required or expected a university education. Journalism degrees are a new thing altogether. Many journalists started out in some other career, or they started out at small local papers and those who were really good worked their way up to the most prestigious publications.

In fact there was something of a tendency for working journalists to look down at formal qualifications.

With the requirement for formal education, it narrows significantly the political views and experiences of the people who are employed. Even more so when you are talking about Oxford and Harvard graduates.

Which is where this false idea about diversity gets in. Because it doesn't matter if you are white or black, straight or gay, if you are from a middle or upper class family with a university education chances are your political views are very similar, and the way you frame questions is very similar. This is something that has been pointed out time and again by more traditional leftists commentators, when you put people into the middle classes, it doesn't much matter what their ethnicity is or their sexual identity, their best interests are now the politics and economics of the middle classes and elites.

Which is why the publications staffed by these journalists also reflect those particular viewpoints.

Oh, fabulous organization. I hear they've released a "spike protein detox guide"...

That seems legit. A bunch of dentists and homeopaths is exactly where I’d be looking for advice if I had multi systemic viral illness.

@DrNo007 what a useless document. Of course 'in most cases Covid can be treated at home using cheap drugs' because in most cases it's a clinically mild though unpleasant illness and you just treat the uncomfortable symptoms as you would with any virus, plus keeping up with fluids and rest.

THAT load of shite that you posted takes care to suggest you take lots of useless and in many cases prescription-only drugs for Covid, as well as God help us, colloidal silver which has no benefit for anything unless you want discoloured grey skin.

Will Drs Kory and Lawrie ever stop wanging on about ivermectin? Nothing suggests it does a thing for Covid. And I actually have been involved with a case of someone who overdosed on multiple 'safe' drugs such as ivermectin and nearly fucking died. It's not ivermectin's fault that they overdosed but peddling this RIDICULOUS shite is wrong and you should be ashamed of yourself.

That's a really hooky article - it manages to omit that about 98% (since vaccination and before omicron) do not require hospital anyway.

Just adding for any lurkers that DrNo007 is now posting a document by an organisation that promoted the view that President Obama was using hypnotism in his speeches, and that also promoted the view that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. It is completely valid to dismiss the output of that particular organisation as the work of cranks.

I'm not a doctor. If you are, Dr No, you should still be ashamed of yourself.