BBC Whistleblower report mentions censorship of 'trans debate'

[CrackingOn50]

Briefly mentioned in reporting around the Panorama Trump speech 'doctoring'.

Can't find anything else about it yet but it's excellent to see coverage of what we've known for ages.

Could the recent change in BBC reporting style of stories involving TiM be to do with this?

Apologies if there's already a thread but I couldn't find one.

This is so much worse than 'Queengate' (when the BBC edited footage to make it look like the Queen walked off in a huff), it should definitely result in resignations.

I think it's interesting that inaccurate reporting on Trump is what might chasten the BBC rather than their total disinterest in the human rights of 51% of the population...

And in 1984 the BBC reversed the footage so that it appeared that the striking miners attacked the police at Orgreave. It was the other way around.
(Then the police falsified their statements against 50+ men, but that's beside the point of this thread)
if you are naive enough to believe what you see on one news outlet, any single news outlet, you deserve what you get.

Doctoring footage is the problem here, not people being 'naive'.

I understand very well that the BBC omits and slants many reports, I've been through the complaints process several times.

Actively creating fake news like this is something I'd not have imagined they'd do, though. It's far beyond the usual playbook.

Are we to expect 'creative' editing on every news channel? AI deepfakes as standard?

Understandable but still a counsel of despair. What we need & deserve is competent, unbiased journalism & that's what's too often lacking. If all we have a an array of different propagandists who we have to second-guess, we'll wind up as nihilistic as the Russian people - & that nihilism was deliberately inculcated.

Absolutely.

Any media outlet that markets itself on its lack of bias is one that I'll mark down considerably in terms of trustworthiness.

Did I say "markets itself"? Sure, outlets have always skewed towards different market niches but you're missing the fact that journalist is a different job from propagandist. TBF, that's something an awful lot of editors have forgotten too.

When was this time when we had these journalists free of bias?

I am endeavouring to understand what you mean by that.
Would you call Nick Wallis "biased" for refusing to let go of the Post Office/ Fujitsu Horizon scandal for so many years?

I've followed his work for years, applauded what he's done, and given him financial support. He's a campaigning journalist and I do not consider him to be unbiased at all!

The Panorama doctored footage / propaganda is horrendous. They attempted to influence public opinion against a foreign politician. Using UK taxpayer funding. That's very bad. I wonder how Trump will respond. The BBC are meant to be impartial, this is very deliberately far from that and seemingly there is no way to actually raise a complaint too or require accountability - something I know from fruitless efforts to point out factual errors myself (I have now given up as they'll never admit failure or lying).

Alongside safeguarding failures like Savile, and failure to report on reality (male criminals especially sex offenders really need to be be reported as men and not women) it's a reason why I don't pay for my license and never will.

The media in the UK is very biased against Trump with the BBC and Guardian leading the way. I had an inkling this might be true a while ago and started listening to his speeches unedited and fact checking for myself. I found out there's more truth in his various statements about the press lying about him all the time than in a lot of UK media 'reporting' about him. I also found out he's not all bad. And not just because of agreeing that women are actually human too and not just service objects for men (and deserving of our own sports and spaces).

Because I'd watched some of his speeches unedited and done some fact checking, as well as talking to a range of US citizens I know (including working class Americans) myself, I was entirely unsurprised when he was democratically elected in the last US election quite comfortably and had predicted it. So many people around me in the UK suffered from Trump derangement syndrome because they'd swallowed all the lies whole. It was very disturbing honestly. So many were more willing to believe that 77 million US voters were despicably evil humans who deserved the worst of fates and (often) removal of democracy than perhaps consider they'd been fed lies and had got some things wrong as a result. And the BBC has a lot of responsibility for this.

I am surprised people are surprised about this - I think it's really quite common for left of centre news sources to do this with Trump's speeches.

I remember way back when at the beginning of his first presidency, when there was the speech around the removal of statues where people claimed he had said white supremacists were "good people".

A person I know told me this had been the beginning of her disenchantment with the left, because she lived in that town and had been there, and heard the speech. And it was very clear that he did not say that white supremacists were good people. But on every mainstream news channel when she was home that night, the clips had been edited to make it look like that, and all the print media too.

I've seen some other instances too over the years and I suspect if I cared to delve into it, it would be the case large percentages of the time. I don't really have the time or access to do that, but I now take pretty much anything I see in the mainstream press about Trump with a giant grain of salt.

This is how the left does misinformation. It's differernt from the way the right wing does disinformation, and I think easier to cover up.

They used to quote their former editor CP Snow, who famously said "Comment is free, but facts are sacred" -- a central tenet of decent journalism. They also used to have a pioneering women's page that campaigned for women's rights.

I don't know if they have the nerve to quote Snow any more, as I haven't bought the Guardian since they started throwing women under the trans bandwagon. If they still do, it's like Lovelyview's quote above: amazing if they can say it without choking on the hypocrisy.

That is astounding!! We knew they were awful but this is horrendous! Deliberate and harmful lies about a world leader.
Every one of those responsible should resign in disgrace and not be allowed to bounce onto the next highly paid job like the Post Office leaders did.

Right, so your difficulty is with the concept of journalistic bias.

It seems that the BBC has now decided the issue is done and they've decided it's time for it to go away. Let's see if they get away with this.

I'd expect political repercussions from this. It's not an IPSO matter, it's way beyond that.

Didn’t see any on UC

Not a fan of Trump but remember years ago now when Trump was first running. Was listening to late night radio talk while driving. Country was in disbelief Trump was running, the mockery, scorn, disgust at the time was huge throughout the country. This guest (can’t remember who) just said of how everything we get from Tump from our media is coming through a bias. This country has decided against Trump and everything we get is laced with that - that no other Presidential candidate had been treated to this degree of scorn and ridicule- from our media.

he said it so much better in a way that even though i was scathing of Trump myself - i realised he was right

I remember turning on BBC radio in 2020, just before the US election, and this woman was on spouting pure propaganda about Trump. I listened out for the name because she was being so biased.

It was Marianna Spring. She now runs BBC Verify. She significantly lied about her work experience to get the job. Her first podcast at BBC Verify was full of numerous untruths, some of which were completely absurd (she said Tommy Robinson had literally brainwashed 50% of the men of one village).

Every BBC report on trans describes men as women, and BBC Verify has never once said a word about it

In the US there are a number of journalists who've moved into fact checking and it is eye-opening if you look at how they've performed. Largely making sure that one side's "facts" are promoted, and the other side's are discredited. Together with doing the Three Wise Monkeys act when they're too inconvenient.

These fact verification roles often seem to be mainly about making sure that the "correct" set of narratives are presented to the public as valid. They often end up and being corrosive of public trust.

They had to invent a new word for it - they've moved from tackling "disinformation" to "misinformation" to "malinformation".

So from "intentionally false information" to "false information (whether or not intentionally)" to "bad information (whether or not false)".

Somewhat related piece - paywalled though, sorry...

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/data-activism-and-the-death-of-truth

The Trump-adjacent writer Michael Anton has this great concept "the celebration parallax", where the same facts can be true and good, or false and scurrilous, depending on who's pointing out the same facts.

We just had a real-time demonstration of this with the discussion of demographics in advertising, and this weird thing where Black people are 4% of the UK population but appear in 50% of adverts.

There was a report by Channel 4 that backed up what a lot of people instinctively saw, but because it was uber-woke C4 there was no problem.

Then a day or two later Reform MP Sarah Pochin is asked about it on a phone-in, agrees with the caller (yes, her language was a bit clumsy) and suddenly there's a huge media storm about Pochin's alleged racism.

I think this is one of those things that fall into the category of "it's true but you can't say it". Which TBH covers most of the areas where Marianna Spring wants to correct our thinking.

I think this is one of those things that fall into the category of "it's true but you can't say it".

The consequences of having moratoria on what can be spoken about and what can't are what we need to look at next.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism