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The BBC


Dougie Do'ins
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Now my wife is leaving me for someone she met at a running club my aim in life is to get with a 30 year old scorcher who is on the BBC gravy train. 

 

My mate is already married to one such quality female and says that another upside is they have access to a kind of Iplayer on steroids that has everything (or as near to it as possible) the bbc has made which is unavailable to the regular plebs.

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1 hour ago, Skidfingers McGonical said:

I’ve mentioned it. 

 

And you’re right. 

Fair enough. 

 

And the assumption that because a person doesnt like some or even over half the content it’s shite.  I wouldn’t pay a penny to watch Mrs Browns Boys but don’t begrudge them making it for the millions that do.  My favourite programme of the year was about 2 Middle aged men fishing and falling over. The Mrs Browns Boy brigade would probably hate it. 

 

Fleabag, This Country and The Detectorists all brilliant but pretty niche. 

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1 hour ago, Geoff Woade said:

Now my wife is leaving me for someone she met at a running club my aim in life is to get with a 30 year old scorcher who is on the BBC gravy train. 

 

My mate is already married to one such quality female and says that another upside is they have access to a kind of Iplayer on steroids that has everything (or as near to it as possible) the bbc has made which is unavailable to the regular plebs.

Selfish cunts.

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11 hours ago, Geoff Woade said:

Now my wife is leaving me for someone she met at a running club my aim in life is to get with a 30 year old scorcher who is on the BBC gravy train. 

 

My mate is already married to one such quality female and says that another upside is they have access to a kind of Iplayer on steroids that has everything (or as near to it as possible) the bbc has made which is unavailable to the regular plebs.

The Marathon Man.

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The BBC are doing a survey on people views about how they should charge the over 75s once the current free subsidy ends in 2020. I've only ever seen this advertised late at night when most people will be in bed. As always, they're using the old cuts to services and programmes.

 

 Anyway, here's a link to the survey.

 

https://www.bbc.com/yoursay

 

Be interested to see what people think of the survey in general. The structure and the wording of the questions.

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1 hour ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

The BBC are doing a survey on people views about how they should charge the over 75s once the current free subsidy ends in 2020. I've only ever seen this advertised late at night when most people will be in bed. As always, they're using the old cuts to services and programmes.

 

 Anyway, here's a link to the survey.

 

https://www.bbc.com/yoursay

 

Be interested to see what people think of the survey in general. The structure and the wording of the questions.

I was intrigued about your comment. I thought you might have been picking up on some kind of bias but was your point that the structure and wording of the questions was unnecessarily complicated? I know its late an' all but I had to read the questions a few times to work out what was being asked.

 

Anyway, I got to the bottom where I'm being asked for my comments on concessionary fees and was about to suggest means testing the licence fee for the whole population but then why should the BBC licence fee be any different from any other TV subscription or the cost of anything for that matter? Oh, I wasn't planning on going down this route at 01.41

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Saw the first question and it made me laugh. Very obviously worded to make it sound that if 75 year olds continue to get free licences then programme budgets will be slashed. I can do that in a paragraph for them; cut out all that celebrity led shite and anti benefit claimant stuff and even don't pay the greedy cunts at the premier league for their highlights and you'll make space to create actual programmes that can be fronted by a presenter in the field who isn't a so called celebrity. Of course the easiest way for the bbc to operate is to just host adverts.

I can easily do without any television or bbc radio myself.

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Good article by Owen Jones regarding the Beeb and Mr Shredded Wheat head

 

If the BBC is politically neutral, how does it explain Andrew Neil ?

 

He symbolises the rightwing domination of our media. Yet a politics presenter as aligned to the left would not be tolerated

 

Imagine this. The BBC appoints a prominent radical leftist, a lifelong Bennite, the chairman of the publisher of a prominent leftwing publication no less, as its flagship political presenter and interviewer. This person has made speeches in homage of Karl Marx calling for the establishment of full-blooded socialism in Britain, including a massive increase in public ownership, hiking taxes on the rich to fund a huge public investment programme, and reversing anti-union laws. They appear on our “impartial” Auntie Beeb wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of a hardline leftist thinktank. Their BBC editor is a former Labour staffer who moves to become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief. They use their Twitter feed – where they have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to a platform handed to them by the BBC – to promote radical leftist causes.

 

This would never happen. It is unthinkable, in fact. If the BBC establishment somehow entered this parallel universe, the British press would be on the brink of insurrection. And yet, the strange case of Andrew Neil, the ultra-Thatcherite former Sunday Times editor who is the BBC’s flagship political presenter, is an instructive example about how our media works.

Neil is a formidable political interviewer in many ways: forensic, unrelenting, quick-witted, sardonic. But consider the background of this former Conservative party researcher. When Jeremy Corbyn had the audacity to meet with leftwing Jewish group Jewdas, Neil smeared them as “nutters”; last year, he made a speech denouncing antisemitism on the left. To be clear, leftwing antisemitism exists and must be vanquished. But Neil has no moral authority on this issue. As editor of the Sunday Times in 1992, he hired Britain’s foremost Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist David Irving, to work on the Goebbels diaries. To hire a sympathiser of Hitler and denier of the worst atrocity in history to do respectable work for a national newspaper – to offer a reputational lifeline to a man who should have been treated as a pariah – was a disgrace for which he has never apologised. As the Wiener Library, the oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, said at the time: “David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.”

Not long after becoming a high-profile BBC presenter, Neil made a speech in homage to rightwing radical Friedrich Hayek, in which he called for a “radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy” as well as a flat tax “and the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale not yet contemplated”. During last year’s general election, he presented the Daily Politics wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of the hardcore neoliberal Adam Smith Institute. His editor was Robbie Gibb, a former adviser to Michael Portillo – another longstanding colleague of Neil on This Week. Last year Gibb became Theresa May’s head of communications.

Neil’s Twitter account – which has hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to his BBC gig – is routinely used to promote rightwing causes. He uses this platform to denounce the scientific consensus on climate change, reviling what he calls “the climate mafia” and claiming that deviation from the consensus meant “the witch-finders want to burn you”. It is not the first time he has deviated from scientific consensus. When he was Sunday Times editor, his newspaper ran a series of articles arguing that HIV did not cause Aids. It was a theme picked up by the Spectator 15 years later. Let’s be clear: this contemptible myth risked people’s lives. His Twitter feed, too, reveals a relentless sympathy for Brexit and denunciation of its critics. A valid political perspective, but not coming from the BBC’s main politics presenter on the biggest issue facing Britain. Again unsurprising, given that he once called “for a reorientation of British foreign policy away from Europe towards Asia and Latin America”and “unilateral free trade, regardless of the policy in Brussels”.

His firebrand rightwing politics aside, Neil skins politicians alive across the political spectrum, comes the inevitable retort. There is no question that Neil is exceptionally bright and well-read with an acute eye for detail: it is a grave error to turn up unprepared with him in the chair, as I discovered in one of my earliest TV appearances. And yes, he did recently take down a Tory minister for the absurd smears against Corbyn over a crank ex-Czechoslovak spy: that he was applauded for doing his job here shows how low the left’s expectations are. But as a general rule, while Neil will fillet politicians on both left and right on the basis of competence, he reserves his ideological assaults for the left, ridiculing Corbyn over Russia – which one would expect on US TV networks, where impartiality rules do not apply.

Last month, when Green MP Caroline Lucas tabled an Urgent Question on bullying and harassment in Parliament, Neil excoriated her for not talking about rape in Telford instead. When Lucas responded that the Telford case was “absolutely appalling” and that she backed an urgent public inquiry into the matter, but that didn’t mean MPs shouldn’t get their own House in order, Neil denounced her for making a comparison between “what some middle class women had suffered” and the Telford scandal – one he alone had made. The consequence was an online pile-on. Imagine if a prominent leftwing BBC journalist existed and launched such a baseless out-of-nowhere attack on a rightwing politician?

Why does this all matter? Critiquing any prominent journalist normally results in a defensive backlash: it is regarded as the ultimate sin within media ranks. But the issue here is about a system. The media are one of the most essential pillars of any democracy, and must be critiqued as such. The usual BBC defence is that the corporation is attacked from both sides, and therefore must be neutral. This is a logical fallacy. For one, it does not take into account which side is more assertive or dominant. Our press overwhelmingly supports the Tories and is intolerant of even mild deviations from rightwing orthodoxy. The BBC itself is dominated by social and economic liberalism, which is why it provokes ire from left and right: but that isn’t neutrality, either. Its daily news priorities are set and framed by the front pages of Conservative-supporting newspapers.

Neil himself would be the most intimidating and effective rightwing polemicist in Britain if he was freed from the BBC. But the fact that somebody as stridently leftwing as he is rightwing would never be appointed to such a position is indicative of how our media operate. Many on the left fear that any critique of Auntie will play into the hands of a right wing that would privatise and gut the BBC if it could. This deference means that BBC political output remains framed by rightwing assumptions. The Media Reform Coalition has suggested a series of proposals, such as freeing the BBC from all government interference and a BBC board elected by licence-payers and BBC staff. At the very least, as the case of Neil underlines, the left – which, after all, represents millions of Britons – must stop accepting its continued media marginalisation as just one of those things. It isn’t – and it must change.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/bbc-andrew-neil-media-politics?CMP=share_btn_tw

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1 hour ago, Stickman said:

Good article by Owen Jones regarding the Beeb and Mr Shredded Wheat head

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/bbc-andrew-neil-media-politics?CMP=share_btn_tw

 

Hayek is a rightwing radical? I'd say Austria has historically placed the bar slightly higher when it comes to rightwing radicals it produced.

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16 hours ago, Champ said:

I was intrigued about your comment. I thought you might have been picking up on some kind of bias but was your point that the structure and wording of the questions was unnecessarily complicated? I know its late an' all but I had to read the questions a few times to work out what was being asked.

 

Anyway, I got to the bottom where I'm being asked for my comments on concessionary fees and was about to suggest means testing the licence fee for the whole population but then why should the BBC licence fee be any different from any other TV subscription or the cost of anything for that matter? Oh, I wasn't planning on going down this route at 01.41

Exactly that Cath. As you said, it came across as unnecessarily or dare I say it, deliberately complicated. I had to go over the questions several times to make sure I was understanding them correctly and that I was happy with my answers. 

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Three mornings out of four this week, around about 7.50 am, Chris Evans has taken  to spinning positive messages about Theresa May. Unprompted and not related to anything else, out they have come. No doubt, he is under orders to ensure the significant listenership subliminally back the tories, I am certainly not buying into the 'hasnt she coped well with a really bad week' crock of bullshit. Monday, Tuesday and todays shows all had Evans going on about her. I had a day off yesterday so I have no idea whether it came up or not.

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On ‎11‎/‎18‎/‎2018 at 9:37 PM, Jairzinho said:

 

It's Liberal. So if you're to the right of that, especially if you have right wing social views, then you could believe the BBC has a left wing bias.

 

The BBC is firmly pro establishment. If the current status quo was slightly to the left, they'd probably be the same. But we have a political system/situation at the moment where a far right Tory party is seen as centre right, and a party putting forward Social Democracy is seen as far left. 

 

The BBC is basically the same as The Guardian. Right wing economics (bar a few token exceptions), centre left (ish) social views. Recycle your quinoa packaging, but support an economic system that leads to nurses having to go to food banks and disabled people killing themselves.

 

But yeah, decent wildlife documentaries.

 

A million times this, of the folk I know working there they basically all fall into that camp (this includes some in the news room at broadcasting house). I often get sent via whatsapp and email, memo's that they send around to their staff which show criticism of the corporation from the left and right, where all the responses underneath are along the lines of 'typical, getting bashed from both sides'. Invariably the critiques from the left will pertain to some economic misreporting or perceived bias around the way policy decisions are reported, while the moaning from the right will almost always be about a cultural issue 'too many gays/blacks on x,y,z show', however this division is virtually never realised.

 

I find it notable that the vast chunk of the bods I know working there are also from middleclass or even wealthier backgrounds, this would chime with what Section was saying. It was particularly notable when they had more of a presence at White City, as you'd walk through the estate towards the tube and virtually everyone there was BAME and hard-up and you'd go past their building and virtually all of them were white, well dressed in their 20's* and healthy looking.

 

I too agree on the prevailing government ideology effecting them, but with our press being pretty right wing I think that exacerbates things as the editorial line of the organisation for the day will often be derived from 'what the papers say' and is usually set out by the Today Programme which the conservative Sarah Sands edits.

 

I also note that as an organisation their investigative reporting now almost entirely seems to sit in radio with the online and TV offerings just being churnalism of a sort, in particular the website front page is embarrassingly close to a yahoo home page on occasion. The quality of programming on the TV channels has also notably dipped, I used to consume a fair amount of BBC 4 but there are a lot of re-runs and repeats on it now.

 

*A lot of this I think is what I call -Jemima Jobs-, shite like; 'A research assistant in central London for 23k per annum', 'online content coder based near oxford circus for £21,500 PA, 'exciting opportunity for young reporter scheme 19k WC1'. There's basically no way you can do those sorts of wages with the required academic backgrounds and intern experience unless you have a couple of parents who are willing to provide for you near the centre of town.

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