This Must Be Just the Beginning

Slowly, but surely, accountability is catching up to the BBC. The forced resignations of two senior managers are a start, but only just. Not much short of wholesale demolition is going to break the broadcaster’s institutional bias. Not to mention its blatant peddling of fake news.

Fake news, such as this:

Britain’s public broadcaster has been criticised for editing a speech Mr Trump delivered on January 6, 2021, before protesters attacked the US Capitol in Washington.

Critics said the way the speech was edited for a BBC documentary was misleading and cut out a section where Mr Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Doctoring quotes is a favourite fake news activity for the legacy media, when it comes to President Donald Trump. No, he didn’t call neo-Nazis ‘very fine people’. No, he didn’t tell people to inject bleach. And so it goes.

Those were all textbook Fake News: false connection, “when headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content”; misleading content, “misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual”; false context, “when genuine content is shared with false contextual information”; and manipulated content, “when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive”.

Even as a couple of big heads are given the option of rolling, in an effort to contain the fallout, the BBC is still trying to bullshit its way through.

In a letter to staff, [BBC said director-general Tim Davie] said quitting after five years was “entirely my decision”.

“Overall, the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility,” Mr Davie said.

[Head of news Deborah Turness said…] “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”

Really, what about all this, then?

Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK published parts of a dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines […]

As well as the Trump edit, the dossier criticised the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israeli bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.

Then there was its Gaza ‘documentary’ which starred, although the BBC tried to obscure the fact, the son of a senior Hamas leader.

As for the proximate cause of the resignations – the fake news Panorama broadcast – the dossier is clear that it’s not a case of ‘whoopsie, mistakes were made’, but that the broadcast “completely misled” viewers. Senior managers knew it, but refused to come clean for months. The bias went all the way to the top: BBC chair Samir Shah knew of the fake news for six months, but did nothing about it.

UK politicians have called for a widespread clean-out of the BBC, claiming institutional bias and deep rooted cultural issues at the corporation […]

Michael Prescott, a former BBC standards adviser had written the 8000-word letter to the BBC board members because of his despair at the corporation’s inaction about one-sided reporting of Gaza, examples of anti-Semitism, censorship of the trans debate and the poor splicing of the heavily edited speech by Donald Trump.

Mr Prescott revealed that the BBC has had to correct two stories a week from its BBC Arabic service since the October 7 Hamas atrocities […]

More than 12 months ago, 200 TV and film industry insiders wrote to the BBC claiming “systemic problems of anti-Semitism and bias” at the corporation and warning of worries “they might have a serious, institutional racism problem”.

The exposure of the BBC’s deep and institutional bias must also raise questions about local legacy media outlets who use the BBC as one of their primary “news” sources. Who has any real confidence that New Zealand legacy media publications don’t share the BBC’s biases, making them blind to its blatantly fake news?

After all, these are the finger-wagging elites who browbeat us about ‘misinformation’, even when they can’t spot even the most blatant satire. Isn’t that right, Helen?