Thursday 2 January 2020

Rob's New Year Message


If you missed it, here's the BBC's editor of live political programmes, a certain Rob Burley, issuing a New Year plea on behalf of the BBC:

  1. I’ve been largely off Twitter over Christmas. But I see the BBC’s critics from left and right are still here. It is of course legitimate to criticise and debate the BBC and it’s a fact of life. 
  2. But while impartiality is difficult and we will make mistakes trying, it is a really important and laudable goal. Most media takes a position and looks at issues through that prism. We try and offer something different and valuable: fair coverage without fear or favour. 
  3. Of course critics will say we aren’t impartial, allege that we favour one side or take orders from political masters. The people who work at the BBC know this to be untrue. They don’t deserve the vilification and accusations of bad faith they get. 
  4. So, even if you want to criticise the BBC, please think about the good that our aspiration to impartiality brings. Without it we would end up largely with echo chambers. We’d be worse off. It’s a good thing!
  5. There’s so much to love about the BBC way beyond news and politics. I am proud to work for it and with fantastic colleagues. Whatever Twitter critics say, millions of viewers and citizens love the BBC too. Here’s hoping more of those people @ me in 2020!

2 comments:

  1. Well Rob...

    1. Complaints from both sides...please don't use that as a defence.

    2. Impartiality is not difficult. Occasionally (or rarely now) the BBC by design or accident produces impartial programmes. The Nick Robinson debate with Corbyn and Johnson was one such example recently. It's really not that difficult.

    Impartiality doesn't mean pushing a left of centre position at every opportunity. It means reflecting the full range of democratic opinion in the country and respecting that opinion, not setting it up for attack. You do not offer fair coverage. You have reported on Brexit purely as a Project Fear object. Where are those famous pro-Brexit programmes - a single one, even - that the BBC were supposed to be producing?

    3. You don't favour a "side". You favour a narrow bandwith of politics. That bandwidth is pro-EU, left-liberal, socially radical, pro-tax, pro-public spending and pro-government intervention. It is everything between Ken Clarke at one end and Keith Starmer at the other. It is sympathetic to the Far Left but more for their ultimate aims than their methods and programme.

    4. You are an echo chamber! Essentially a Guardian-Independent-FT echo chamber. You draw nearly all your news staff from that echo chamber, just to make things worse.

    5. Gavin and Stacey was an unrepresentative non-PC retread. The rest of the BBC is dying. You lost sport. Your modern comedy is dire. You appeal only to your left-liberal constituency but you expect the rest of us to stump up for this lopsided fare. You hope your critics are all going to die off but sadly for you, people become older and wiser and younger people gradually come to realise your hypocrisy (flying everywhere while telling everyone else to stop flying, tucking into expenses paid lush meat-based lunches, while telling everyone else to go vegan and alcohol-free) and your mendacity.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I tolerate Rob as he has not blocked me, but frankly simply not engaging is hardly better, if epitomising BBC 'editorial integrity' to a fault... blanking what doesn't suit whilst playing up anything that does as if the blanks do not exist. It is as cowardly as it is dishonest.

    His employers deserve no quarter.

    My watershed was being banned from commenting for two years for pursuing a complaint relentlessly, even to 'Trust' level.

    Unfortunately they could not afford to concede so came up with the next best thing in their heads.

    Sadly they were supported by a bunch of fellow civil servants, which may well have informed my view of those paid by the state with no accountability, in general.

    They all awakened a sleeping person of outrage, and if my efforts to date have been one of a million cuts, fine.

    And my long threatened complaints log blog has not gone away either.

    Maybe this year?

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.