Is That True Or Did You Hear It On The BBC?

One of the things that justifies blogs like this - unless the blog gets deleted - is that it provides a permanent, searchable record for those interested in researching the BBC's claims to nigh-perfect impartiality. 

We hope it helps.

Sue's better than me at standing back and drawing things into an overarching overview, as I tend to just record endless individual instances of bias, but a book-length overview of the past few years of BBC bias has been urgently needed, and David Sedgwick's latest book has filled that gap wonderfully. 

It's called Is That True Or Did You Hear It On The BBC? 

I swallowed it down virtually whole in just over a day, and then re-read it much more slowly. It's clearly laid out, much more forensic than Sir Keir Starmer and ought to be damaging, maybe even devastating, for the BBC. 

Some of the instances examined in its chapters will be familiar to readers of this blog, but David retells them with comprehensive gusto and brings them to a conclusion, often pursuing them further than we did down the rabbit hole of the BBC's complaints system. 

On which theme, the book proves that the bottommost part of this complaints system - which might be called 'Wonderland, namely the supposedly semi-distant ECU - even when it concedes a few things is forever engaged in bottom-covering manoeuvres on behalf of the BBC, of which it is a part. 

There's the 'Christian convert' Liverpool bomber who 'wouldn't hurt a fly'; and the 'Nigel Farage has blood on his hands' 'Brexit-related murder', which was no such thing; and the Oxford Street antisemitic incident with the 'anti-Muslim slurs'; and the assault on the Eric Gill statue outside Broadcasting House 'by QAnon'; and the BBC's skewed slagging-off of Israel over Covid vaccines for Palestinians. 

It's hard to choose a favourite chapter but I'd go for one that we only touched on here - and mainly did so thanks to you, our ITBB family, on the open threads: the BBC's absolutely atrocious misreporting of Brexit-backing 'prominent Conservative supporter' [not] James Dyson. The BBC behaved badly at every stage of the way as far as this story goes. It's fascinating seeing it all laid out and demonstrated. 

And, as a bonus, I'd go for the one where the BBC falsely claimed 'the director of a large NHS trust has contacted the BBC', which is a tour-de-force of what used to be called 'fisking'. All I'll say is that every single word of 'the director of a large NHS trust has contacted the BBC' was false. The man in question wasn't the director of an NHS trust, there was no large NHS trust involved, and he didn't contact the BBC [the BBC contacted him], and the attempted BBC cover-up that followed shows BBC kneejerk defensiveness at its typical worst. 

Other chapters [including that 'NHS trust' piece I've just mentioned] deal with matters we've been reluctant to touch on - namely Covid/lockdown and Russia/Ukraine. I took a different attitude to Covid/lockdown to David [though I've been rethinking that for a while] and take a different attitude to Russia-Ukraine too [though I'm growing less sure about that too], but you don't have to agree on such things to see that his demolition of case after case of BBC misreporting holds water. He proves most of them beyond reasonable doubt, and got me seriously thinking on the rest. 

It may be cherry-picking, but these are huge cherries of no small importance and he's right to pick them, chop them up and lay them out before us. I was taken back, again and again, by the sheer inaccuracy of the BBC's reporting, often clearly ideologically-motivated. Some of the grossest examples, naturally, spring out of the corporation's hostile reporting of Donald Trump, but others clearly go beyond such simple partisanship. The BBC, David argues, pushes a much broader agenda - a globalist agenda. 

One of the recurring figures in the book is the BBC's latest 'flavour of the month', Ros Atkins. David takes quite a few of his much-praised fact checks apart. I must admit to being rather uncomfortable about Ros's 'aggressive impartiality', as the BBC calls it, and took exception to my longest exposure to him when he presented an episode of The Media Show and played the part of the BBC's Little Mr Perfect defender rather too passionately. 

If there's one group of journalists - or as David calls them 'activists' - at the BBC that need closely watching and fact-checking it's the BBC's growing legion of disinformation specialists and reality checkers. The watchers, as ever, need watching - especially when they often appear so one-sided in who they watch. 

Anyhow, please read David's book for yourselves. 

Tricky

Catching up with the past week's typically turbulent BBC-related news [and, as ever, thank to you for keeping us up to date on the open threads]...

That Daily Telegraph story about how the BBC's ultra-worthy 50:50 equality project is going wrong and leading to complaints from within the BBC that the corporation is “disappearing women” by allowing the female side to be filled “by those who self-identify as female” included some fascinating details. 

As the BBC itself might say, I've not been able to independently verify the Jeremy Vine discussion about women’s sports on BBC Radio 2 where the voices on air were four men and three trans people with no women, but I have checked out the edition of Radio 4’s Moral Maze a year ago last June where two men and two trans women discussed women’s sport. 

Which does seem odd.

The Telegraph quotes “a senior BBC insider” saying that the BBC presenter behind the 50:50 equality project, Ros Atkins, “has gone along with” redefining the word 'woman' - “a word which we all understand”, something the BBC has done “without any public debate”.

As for the whole 50:50 equality project, it is interesting how one [male] BBC presenter, such as Ros Atkins, could have such a massive impact - for good or for ill - on the BBC's behaviour. His agenda has pretty much consumed the BBC since 2017.

This is something Radio 4's Media Show, or the BBC News Channel's Outside Source, or the BBC's Analysis Editor might want to tackle...

...if only the man behind the 50:50 equality project wasn't also a main presenter on Radio 4's Media Show, and the main presenter on BBC News Channel's Outside Source, and the BBC's Analysis Editor.

And called Ros Atkins.

Tricky.

Into the Labyrinth again

Just checking through our archive for our use of the word 'labyrinthine' - plus 'labyrinth' - to describe the BBC's tortuous complaints process, I find I've used it in five posts over the years - in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019.

So it's gratifying to find that a former BBC head of news, Roger Mosey, and Ofcom's Kevin Bakhurst, both used exactly the same term to describe the BBC complaints process on this week's The Media Show on BBC Radio 4.

It feels like vindication.

Roger Mosey described the BBC as being “rather bad at accountability”:

Roger Mosey: And now I'm outside the BBC you see that accountability is really important, and it's very crucial for the BBC that it is accountable. I think it's rather bad at accountability really. The complaints process is very complicated. I've only ever...Since I've been outside I've made one complaint in eight and a half years. And I know the system. And you just got stuck in this labyrinth of not being able to work out how it was that you got anyone to acknowledge that there was a genuine issue there. 

And former BBC high-up now their regulator Kevin Bakhurst said that people get lost in the process and don't like the tone of the BBC's responses and “give up the ghost” - and also rather deliciously skewers a BBC 'defence' here:

Ros Atkins, BBC: But help me dig into the detail here. And, Kevin, you're the one making the request. So let me ask you, if I Google now 'BBC Complaints' I'm quite easily gonna end up on a page which says 'What would you like to say to us?', so the problem is presumably not that. The problem for you is what happens after that? 

Kevin Bakhurst: I mean, our research shows audiences can Google it and find their way in really, really easily and quickly, and they approve of that. And, by the way, in general they approve of BBC First as the right way to deal with complaints. However, once they get into that system, they get lost. And, as Roger says, it is really labyrinthine for audiences. That's what our research shows. They are not quite sure where they are in the process, they don't like the tone of language they get in responses from the BBC, many of them...when we were discussing this with the BBC, the BBC said, well, you know, it's a measure of our success that people don't come through to Ofcom that much at the end. Our research shows people don't come through to Ofcom because they've given up the ghost going through the BBC complaints process, and don't really understand where they are or how to advance them.

 As we've long said.

The Media Show

I've belatedly caught up with this week's The Media Show where Ros Atkins talked to Ofcom's Kevin Bakhurst; Owen Meredith of the News Media Association; former BBC head of news Roger Mosey; and Alice Enders of Enders Analysis.

Various thoughts flitted across my mind while listening to it, e.g. I tutted when Ros said:

But on the broader issue of complaints. Here's a statement today from the BBC - and, by the way, we did invite the BBC onto the programme, but they've sent us a statement.

It's always a little daft when the BBC declines to speak to itself.

This led into my next thought, concerning Ros's role in the programme. One admirable quirk of the BBC, especially during John Humphrys or Eddie Mair's interviews with BBC people during times of crisis for the BBC, was that BBC interviewers can go in surprisingly hard on the BBC. One DG, George Entwistle, had to go after a particularly high-temperature John Humphrys roasting. Maybe it was because the BBC weren't there to stick up for themselves that Ros played the part of BBC defender so strongly - i.e. for professional reasons, and reasons of fairness and balance - but he did seem to take certain things personally and put considerable energy - and what sounded like conviction - into sticking up for the BBC.

Anyhow, there were some interesting exchanges during the programme...which will follow in the next few posts...

A hae ma doots

 

(Didn’t know I was Scottish, did you?)  We’ve been pretty quiet on the BBC’s coverage of the War / Special Operation in Ukraine. The BBC is quite confident that it is one of the most - if not THE the most - reliable and unbiased sources of information on this alarming state of affairs.

As Jamie Angus says:

“Are we an arm of the Government? No, we’re nothing of the sort. We are an independent news broadcaster funded by the licence-fee payer. That’s why we’re so trusted and why the BBC Russian news information is so widely trusted…”

Ros Atkins asks:

So no discussion between the BBC and the government as to how the BBC covers this conflict?

Jamie Angus responds:

It’s not the government’s job or position to tell the BBC how to cover the conflict; our editorial independence from the UK government is assured….”

etcetera etcetera.

Anyway, as I’ve said over and over, whenever the press gets hold of a story about which one has empirical knowledge - ‘based on first-hand observation or personal experience’ - one knows only too well the vast potential therein for bungling, garbling the details and omitting crucial facts.

If I were to take the BBC’s reporting on Israel as a model, I would have to doubt that I am getting the whole story from the BBC on almost any issue, let alone this particular one. How can I believe it’s simply a case of Ukraine=good, Russia=bad, much as I’d like to? 

Listening to Jeremy Bowen, Fergal Keane, and Orla Geurin doesn’t fill my heart with joy and I’m not totally convinced that there’s an iota of genuine impartiality between them.

Sadly, the BBC’s record on all sorts of issues raises doubts and sets alarm bells ringing. It hasn’t turned me into an all-out conspiracy theorist yet, though I’m noticing that a few others are there already, or on the cusp. 

I must just be one of nature’s Doubting Thomases. I doubt everything, including myself.

Europe's Disaster Week | BBC Outside Source

Here's a representative tweet of a common reaction hereabouts today:

Brace yourself. This is truly remarkable. The BBC says something negative about the EU.  

I've not seen anything remotely close to this from the BBC before.  

I would also like to be the first to wish Ros Atkins well in his new career.

 And here's what provoked it: 

Well done Ros!

"Whether this happened or not..."

Here's another transcript, just for all of you Katty Kay fans (and I know there are legions of you out there). It comes from the BBC News Channel's Outside Source.

I've highlighted in bold some of the choicer passages. The way Katty and, indeed, Ros drop in those little sops to impartiality whilst being anything but impartial and immediately contradicting themselves is almost...almost...worthy of grudging admiration (especially if you're into Machiavelli).

Ros Atkins: And Katty, even if the Republicans do take Brett Kavanaugh's side of the story, does his demeanour have any bearing on their decision? Because a lot of people have been watching this and thinking, this man's not calm, this man is not reflective as you might expect a judge to be, and he certainly is not nonpartisan. 

Katty Kay: So, in 1991, Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Ford (sic). She gave her testimony and was seen to be very credible. He then came back after her testimony, fighting and very defiantly. He called it a high-tech lynching. He was absolutely furious and angry and he was then confirmed to the Supreme Court. He still sits on the Supreme Court's 27 years later. So it's quite possible...there's a precedent here for a judge to come out and be angry like this, to be emotional like this and still be confirmed to the Supreme Court. We've heard it happen before. The partisan site is interesting because Clarence Thomas did not take on Democrats and the left in the way that Brett Kavanaugh has done during the course of this hearing. I don't think, however, that that will mean that you will have Republicans suddenly saying, oh dear, he's too partisan, we can't vote to confirm him. 

Ros Atkins: Now Katty, on the Outside Source screen I've just put up the picture here from the hearing that the New Yorker tweeted out showing the view that Christine Blasey Ford was facing - a raft of white older men - and you and lots of women around the world watching her testimony commented on how the whole experience was profoundly uncomfortable, regardless of whether you believe her story or Brett Kavanaugh's. 

Katty Kay: Yeah, I think there would have been a lot of women who listened to the account she gave...and you just played it there. That's I think the fifth time I've heard it, and it's hard to listen to, Ros, frankly, every single time. And I think there will have been women who have been the victims of sexual abuse who will have listened to that and felt a certain amount of PTSD. Whether this happened or not, and we may never know what happened or did not happen in that room, whether this happened or not, her account was very compelling, it was very emotional. I had read the testimony beforehand but it was a punch in the gut to hear it. To hear her deliver it was very powerful and it will have had a big impact on women who've been through similar things.