Thursday 21 November 2019

The people who hold the BBC to account have a chat


Richard Sambrook, Director of the Centre of Journalism at Cardiff University, was, as regular readers will know, previously Head of Newsgathering for the BBC. 

He now heads a media department which, as regular readers will also know, both the BBC and Ofcom rely on to analyse the BBC's output for things like bias, and which produces reports that often seem to perform somersaults and loop-the-loops in the face of reality. 

Well, here's the great man engaging in a Twitter chat today with Samira Ahmed's predecessor as host of the BBC's 'hold-us-to-account' Newswatch, Raymond Snoddy:

Dick SambrookThe fake factcheck, dodgy video edits, false opposition websites - The Tories are taking deceiving the public and active disinformation to new lows in this campaign. At some stage they will pay a price. 
Ray Snotty: Sooner rather than later I hope. 
Dick Sambrook: Its [sic] the most cynical campaign I've seen - and we've weeks to go! 
Ray Snotty: The only thing journalists can do is to continue to call out the lies - but as with Trump this natural optimist is pessimistic that the public is listening. 
Dick Sambrook: Agree Ray. The question for those fuelling the collapse of trust and mushrooming of cynicism is - after the entire house has burned to the ground, what do you do the next day? 
Ray Snotty: That's deep the only "solution" is to continue to engage however long it takes. BBC chairman slightly started at VoL&V [the pro-BBC Voice of the Listener and Viewer] yesterday that normal "friends of the BBC" are concerned at where the current line is drawn. Enemies from the centre for first time.

The people traditionally presented by the BBC are those worthy of holding them to account aren't exactly reassuring me here about their own impartiality. 

4 comments:

  1. Just scanning though his tweets of the last week or so, you can see his politics... pro Pelosi. pro New European, pro BBC, anti Boris, anti Tories,

    Do they know how revealing their tweets and re-tweets are with regards understanding their political preferences?

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  2. So it's OK for the Labour Party to have its own factcheck website but not the "Tories". It's OK for the BBC, which many people have attested is completely dominated by Labour and Lib Dem supporters, to have its own bogus fact check service. It's OK for McDonnell and Corbyn to consort with terrorists, praise them and their fighters, laugh about political assassination and generally support this country's enemies. It's OK for Jo Swinson to pretend that she once campaigned for a simple in-out referendum. It's OK for Labour to lie time and time again that the Conservatives intend to sell off the NHS.

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  3. For those who think privatisation will sort out BBC bias, let's not forget that the situation in the US is in many ways worse. This might, in part, reflect the fact that there aren't really national newspapers in the USA as in the UK, so the TV media is truly dominant.

    In the USA, the media - with the sole exception of Fox News - seems to have completely sold their soul to the Democrats. Fox have fun with the way, on the instructions of the Democrats, they will suddenly, overnight, change the way they report something. This happened earlier this week when, with reference to the Impeachment hearings, the US media suddenly stopped using "quid pro quo" (repeated ad nauseam) and switched to "bribery" (repeated ad nauseam). This was because Democrat focus group research had found quid pro quo to be ineffective and that bribery had more punch.

    We're quite close to that over here. But not quite.

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  4. “Fact Check” is an ambush word
    cos FactCheck = Fact *spinning*
    whether it’s Channel4 FactCheck or BBC RealityCheck or even FullFact
    “Trust the messenger” is a fallacy
    You really do have to check the evidence in the message

    … AND Half the time the message is hidden
    ====

    The event appeared to start with a provocative tweet 4 hours earlier from Cathy Newman implying that Hugo Dixon is an INDEPENDENT fact checker
    FFS he founded the People’s Vote

    Is there any wonder Boris and Brexiteers refuse to appear on C4 ?

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