@Shedbuilder
Greyhound Girl, you asked:
Why are they all being passed and unleashed on the BBC unsuspecting public?
when I mentioned my friend's (Professor working in the school of Journalism and Media) concerns about the impartiality and accuracy of her students. Things changed when students started paying fees and became customers. Many of them feel they've paid for a qualification and if you fail them (or even if you don't give them the grade they're expecting) they make life very difficult for their tutors. Tears, threats, legal action against her and the university — it's all in a day's work now. As a result there are plenty of young, entitled graduates trading on their diversity, who have the qualification but are rubbish journalists.
My guess is that there are a lot of young people who adopt a Q or non-binary label as a way of telling employers with diversity remits that they're not just straight white people.
Having done a media degree at a university which had a good reputation for the department i can tell you that rot was there before then.
It was full of very over privileged people who had mummy or daddy already working in the industry. I was a northerner so immediately I was out of place. And I felt I was regarded as 'rough' and 'poor' despite coming from a very middle class family and a very well regarded comprehensive. I had a bloody good upbringing in comparison to many. My experience at university with these people really put me off wanting to work in the industry. It was alienating.
These kids were clueless about the real world. I found it very hard to make friends on my course as my face didn't fit. They didn't get the changes about tech that were coming in or the impact it would have. By contrast I was well ahead in seeing where things would head because I was already engaging with it when they weren't. They didn't have the vision nor the experience to see that broadband would change everything. We had lectures asking us about this and the majority were really dismissive of the internet.
Strangely there is an interview from I think its 1999 with David Bowie about the internet and what he said then was considered almost farfetchef but he identified issues and concerns about freedom of expression and what he said had stood up remarkably well. I remember it well because I was hugely into Bowie at the time and it chimed with what I'd studied and what I was seeing happening.
Fees first came in, after me. I think it was about 1999 - but people were definitely seeing and discussing the effect technology would have on fact v opinion and a lack of gatekeeping / gatekeepers with dubious agendas.
It was the internet not fee paying that made the difference. Suddenly people who had previously never had the power could suddenly decide on the world they wanted to live in, and could use technology to decide what others should think / feel by influencing without fact checking and having quality control applied to what was shared with the public as a whole.
We had a particularly good lecturer who made the point in the mid 90s about the power of the censor and who gatekeeps content and how we might be tempted as we were young and leftie we might like to ban the daily mail but it was crucial we didn't for freedom of speech!
It was a lecture which I still remember very clearly and was very much ingrained in my brain. It was a module that the BBC used to send its staff on as an independent training course - I remember being told proudly numerous times about this by the university.
Sadly the lecturer died a few years after I left. He too, clearly had already seen the problem and I read back his writing now and see how perceptive he was about hibrid warfare and mass disinformation. He too wrote about how technology change in communications historically has led to periods of political instability as these technologies led to mass disinformation and this was exploited by various political groups - until eventually things settled and regulation kicked in. The American and French Revolutions are linked to communication technology change. He knew that a new wave of change had already started by the mid 90s.
He taught about political propaganda and used examples from the 1996 election campaigns and we discussed what PR and spin were - techniques to santise or hide the truth. So you also had this as well as the technology.
Media studies was also starting to be dismissed as being 'a mickey mouse subject' that shouldn't be taught as it wasn't important at the exact same time, when actually we should have gone the other way and taught more about the importance of critical thinking and checking sources and agendas not less.
What my leacture was teaching was observational. He literally pointed it out to us and used examples.
We now have a generation thats grown up since then and have never known anything different - spin, public relations and disinformation are everywhere. Critical thought is regarded as something for 'dinosaurs'.
What frustrates me massively was the fact that many from my course went on to work for the BBC and he was literally training many people for the BBC. So people who would now be in senior positions as they are in their 40s, 50s and maybe 60s. Yet this hasn't protected the institution nor has it led to a culture of stressing the importance of this.
Its taken Tim Davie, government pressure and public pressure to give the BBC a massive kick up the arse. You can blame it on the young trendies coming in BUT senior management at the institution hadnt managed to instill proper training about freedom of speech and impartiality to those younger members of staff. Clearly it wasn't valued and felt important enough by the sizeable number of people at the BBC I know were trained on this very subject and many must still be working at the BBC.
Why did I remember it and think it the very fabric and fundamental underpinning of the principles of journalism but others didn't? It was a tradition and skill and knowledge that hasn't been passed down at the same time Stonewall was brought in to train people to all think the same and not ask critical questions.
You have to look at senior, older management over the past twenty years on this. You cannot just blame young people with their 'silly youthful and naive ideas'.
I can't help but wonder maybe if my lecturer hadn't died in the early 2000s would the same still be happening? It was his specialist area and after he died, I wonder if the training died with him. That in itself scares me.
Its something I care about deeply for obvious reasons as a result. There very much is a 'why the hell and how the hell' has this happened question for me.
It does strike me that being cool and trendy was put before integrity and quality for a long long time.
There was a failure from the top down that can not be blamed on junior staff members coming into the BBC in the last few years.