BBC WTF

[ArabellaScott]

The fact the BBC have not reported on the Commons debate, or generally on Cass bar a couple of very weak, short pieces is absolutely outrageous.

The silence is stretching.

They have two members of staff whose sole remit is to report 'LGBT' issues. Where are they? This seems absolutely deliberate omission.

Scarlet Blake.
WPATH.
Cass.

We used to get propaganda, now we get silence.

What do we do, here?

BBC complaints seem to go nowhere, and the hoops to get to an Ipsos report seem virtually impossible.

How do we hold our public broadcaster to account?

https://twitter.com/whtwldbabsdo/status/1780323215618814416

Thanks for this.

I can only imagine how stressful this is for you.

I remember your posts 💐💐
I'm glad to hear that she is hopefully on her way to understanding herself better 🤞🤞 It's such a cruel situation where parents are framed as the enemy for trying to save their children from harm.

The recent HOC debate about the Cass report had some MPs saying that an investigation needs to occur on how this was allowed to happen, with mention of the stifling of voices sounding the alarm, and the power of trans lobby.

Certain MPs were looking for people to be held accountable, and the BBC have definitely had a part to play in supporting this medical scandal, by their lack of reporting

So surely contacting someone in the government and pointing out the bias of the BBC and the need for them to be held accountable...

I don't know much about the government - whether it is the contacting of MPs from the debate or contacting some of the lord's/ladies..The government needs to step in.

The concerned MPs might be totally unaware about how awful the BBC coverage has been.

If anyone more politically savvy could come up with a plan then I'm sure many of us here would implement it. x

Cass Report was on the BBC before it dawned that it was the revealing of an enormous medical scandal, not just a strategy report, I think. Now sections are being stunned into silence..

I've just had a second listen of the Media Show with Hannah Barnes.

Two more observations:

1. Hannah Barnes explicitly says that the BBC has not been impartial
2. Rebecca Coombes mentions the "silence" of the scientists more than once. She also emphasises how unusual it is for scientific consensus to happen in this way.

(And a small correction: HB didn't say "no" after the pregnant pause. However, I stand by my description of the sentiment that this paraphrased word articulates about the "culture wars" at this point in the conversation. Jake Kanter's comments also added to the same sentiment. The net effect is that an evidence-based, scientific approach to healthcare is being sacrificed because of the loud and/or influencial trans activist voices)

Dropping in a link to this thread. If anyone from Hugh Pym's team is reading this thread (I really hope you are), please replace all of the words relating to the awful scandal that was reported today by your team with the current medical experimentation on children and have a think whether you want to be calling it out right now or waiting until the impacted generation is in their 40s and 50s. I've added a helpful comment for you with some things we already know about the life-limiting aspects of "Gender Affiriming Care" e.g. cancer risk (not contested), risk due to infections from surgery (suppressed but known and acknowledged by gender clinics), risk of heart failure due to testosterone use (known and not contested, due to knowledge about anabolic steroids).

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5057880-how-long-will-it-take-before-we-see-this-type-of-reporting-in-relation-to-puberty-blockers?reply=134649429

Hugh, Hugh, Mr Pym, are you there?! I'm shouting as loud as I can.

Give me a sign if you can hear me but you're not allowed to speak about actual news because you're drowning in toxicity.

Look what the BBC was saying on 26th February in relation to the tragic death of this body builder:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2802881.stm

"The temptation to take anabolic steroids should be offset by the risk of an early grave"

The news team forgot to link that article in unfortunately, when they told the story again this week, but his poor parents did say this in the latest article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-68821985.amp

His parents said the chemicals had negatively affected his mental health.

As you're more science-y than me, I'm sure you already know that synthetic testosterone (as given to teenage girls who identify as trans) is anabolic steroids.

At this juncture I'd like to pass on my thanks to my journalism evening class teacher (6 week course) and am now interested in that career change. Would you like me on your team? I've got lots to learn about copy writing but I'm not that bad. I've even had stuff published that I've written in my current field of work. What I can bring to you is a passion for calling out this MASSIVE MEDICAL SCANDAL before more children and young people need to be harmed and the ACTUAL ANGLE OF THE STORY.

Tim, stop being nice and wake the fuck up. Oops, sorry. Too toxic again? Hopefully you can balance me out with another emotional story about another teenage transwoman who wants faster access to cross-sex hormones?

You know, I opened BBC site yesterday and saw 'Children were used as guinea pigs' as the headline, and thought - at last. They are reporting on transing children.

It was, of course, the infected blood scandal - another awful and important story, to be sure.

But it's quite galling that they are apparently so enmeshed in the current scandal they are unable to actually report it.

snap!

I'm convinced they are using this scandal which is old news as a distraction from the current scandal.

Except in Australia - only coverage for many days was buried deep on the ABC (national broadcaster). I only found it by searching for Cass Review on the website)…

I have a working theory that Tim Davie is now beginning to see the true picture. I hope I'm right.

On Friday I was feeling incredibly frustrated, hence the deliberately provocative post above. Despite all that has been discussed in the public discourse (and then parliament) about this medical scandal, it was presumably still filtering through to him as noise in a toxic, two-sided culture war. I'm not saying he's blameless (that's for a Public Inquiry to determine) but I'm imagining the impact of all the BBC activists, the werewolves, and Be Kinders giving him briefings. It's been shared on MN before and it's worth dropping it here now: Malcolm Clark has done lots of investigation in to the roles the Nathan Wren (IIRC, Malcolm sees him as a Be Kind person, not an nefarious activist) and Phil Harold (see screenshot).

As has been shared by posters on MN, at the weekend, the BBC More or Less team (which is a tiny podcast from what I can tell), put out a 12-minute broadcast and accompanying tweet thread about the mis/disinformation surrounding the Cass Report. I've said it on another thread but worth putting here too: Hannah Barnes talked about the Newsnight work she did existing in isolation - no supporting online content etc. The More or Less tweet thread is hugely popular, with something like 2k likes now. That must be unusual for such a niche team.
Hopefully we're seeing a shift from the seemingly interminable stream of distressed trans-identified teenagers wanting medical intervention and pulling on our heart strings (so that we the public feel that we want it for them too) towards coverage about the scandal itself🤞

I'm not offering excuses for Tim Davie but I think the phrase "useful idiot" (or Tim Nice but Dim as some have said in this context 😬😁) has a lot of layers to it. I've shared my own experience of peaking/learning on several MN threads and that it took me a very long time to join the dots between my daughter's exposure to this issue, JKR's tweets about the word "women" and the dangers of autogynophilia. I had a vested interest in this to support my daughter and it still took ages. As I've shared on MN previously, my best friend (who unbeknownst to me had silently peaked in 2014ish but never had occasion to share it) had to take things carefully with me as she knew she was often on the edge of me seeing her as bigoted.

A while ago now, I asked someone who I know (who has occasional IRL contact with Tim Davie) what he was like as a person. The answer was "A nice bloke. Comes from an arty background." Obviously that could mean anything but, in the light of the new coverage that is starting to come out of the BBC, I'm wondering if he's receiving the information more effectively than he did before. I do hope so. Whether he is complicit in any way is for an Inquiry to decide but right now, I'm far more interested in what the BBC can do to make a difference here.

I've very behind @ArabellaScott and still catching up with the thread, but just to say that I thought that now would be a good time for the ridiculous unfairness, partiality and circularity of the BBC complaints system to be brought to attention of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, chaired by Caroline Dinenage (Con, Gosport).

These are the details I have gleaned in order for individuals to make a request for this to be a topic for the Committee's consideration.

Chair: Dame Caroline Dinenage MP

Specific committee email address: [email protected]

The Committee Operations Manager is Andy Boyd who can answer queries via the above email address. Correspondence to Caroline Dinenage should be sent to the same email address and not to her constituency office.

There are different types of inquiries and non-inquiry work packages available to the Committee.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/culture-media-and-sport-committee

@BonfireLady been having a nose around TwiX (study avoidance) and see that he has no presence there. No account and very few mentions. I think this somehow insulates him from the discussions being had about this issue and provides yet another veil between him and public opinion?

Ah, procrastination. I know it well 😁

Yes, he said in his conversation in parliament (the one where he said it was important to be "nice") that he didn't have Twitter/X. I'm not sure if having it would make any difference or not. I have regularly looped Deborah Turness, Head of News, in to X comments after I saw other people doing this too but it's not clear that doing this helps in any way.
Hopefully there will be lots of different ways that the information can make it's way to him. @AutumnCrow's suggestion sounds like a good one to help highlight how it's all getting stuck in the complaints system, for example.

A few interesting links to add to this thread:

Here's the tweet from Journalism SEEN with all of them in:
https://twitter.com/JournalismSEEN/status/1787414281320882581?t=pXUolL73W5WXQtemcvZyVA&s=19

Trying to raise stories in the newsrooms (not BBC specific):
https://seeninjournalism.substack.com/p/the-hurdles-we-face?r=3lemhw&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

On the BBC complaints system:
https://seeninjournalism.substack.com/p/the-lowdown-on-a-bbc-climbdown?r=3lemhw&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

On being an undercover whistleblower at the BBC:
<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/2024.05.05-072211/www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-bbc-staff-trying-to-get-me-fired/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.ph/2024.05.05-072211/www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-bbc-staff-trying-to-get-me-fired/

Hopefully we will continue to see more BBC stories coming out which flag the harmful impact of gender identity belief but, without a doubt, the BBC still has a very long way to go. They also have a huge back catalogue of programmes to address, particularly those aimed at children.

E.g.
https://twitter.com/berk_hamstead/status/1773094127640412386?t=bADmy8jBFbdScRfp_iHTBw&s=19

A future Public Inquiry will hopefully include the BBC but in the meantime, they may want to start their own internally and consider taking action on a) more content that is still available b) editorial guidelines (news and programming) and c) supporting staff who want to break the story.

To finish on a plus note - I can't remember if I added it up above - this is a great piece, starting at the beginning of the show:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y28p

Trying the Spectator link again (not the archived version) as the one above didn't work:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-bbc-staff-trying-to-get-me-fired/

Thanks, Bonfire. That all looks very interesting.

Commenting to easily re-access this excellent post. Thanks @BonfireLady

That link on the BBC complaints 'system' shows it up for the joke it is. I didn't read the 29 page (!) complaint, but good for SEEN for pursuing it.

Rather than starting a new thread for this, it feels like this one is the right place for a fantastic article (it's actually the wording of his speech at Genspect) from Graham Linehan.

I'm not sure if we're allowed to put Substack links in here so I'll go for two posts, with the link in the second one.

If you Google his name and "BBC captured" it should come up.

From the article:

I would suggest at the very least, The Director General of the BBC should be summoned before the Parliamentary Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport, and made to answer for the channel’s behaviour over the last decade

I fully agree.

Link to substack below. I think these links are allowed but can't quite remember.

grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/how-the-bbc-was-captured

Did the BBC (and Guardian) ever report on the LGBA cricket fiasco?

Brilliant article - thank you @BonfireLady

A Google search suggests not.

I was reading on another page in the GL substack (15th October update) that the timing of the crickets release was just as Jamie Reed was about to speak about the risks to children of "gender affirming care".

In a previous update (7th October), it talks about Jamie Reed's spouse now choosing to detransition, after 15 years.

This really is the kind of event and backstory that the BBC should be deeming newsworthy and knitting together:

Six young females, all with trans or non-binary identities, attacked an LGB conference in protest about the lack of access to "gender affirming care" where the next speaker is a lesbian woman who wants to speak about the harm that such care brings, coming from a place of both professional and personal experience.

The optics on attacking an LGB conference look terrible. It just screams homophobia.

Sadly though, it's just crickets from the BBC (metaphorically) instead.

Edited to correct typo