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Off Topic Politics Thread

Discussion in 'Southampton' started by ChilcoSaint, Feb 23, 2016.

  1. Shandy_top_89

    Shandy_top_89 Well-Known Member

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    In fairness didn't BBC verify actually verify that they had ****ed up <laugh>.

    I mean I laugh, but that is a point in its credit.
     
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  2. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    If the BBC is to remain as it is it needs to present facts that are not based on opinion. Ian's comments above about generational mindsets is utter tosh! He is actually saying that older people's bias is different to younger people's bias in defence of something being unbiased. lol. It doesn't matter what old people or young people think! unbiased means the same thing no matter if old people now view something more modern as being different to their own bias.

    BBC will never become GB News 2. GB News is a discussion channel. BBC is a behemoth that wants to be the pinnacle of all genres and subjects. It should stick to producing good programs and unbiased actual news and not lecturing people or trying to feed narratives into its non news/political programming! I don't particularly care about ethnicities playing wrong characters in dramas but lets not start changing history to be what we want it to be!

    BBCs main problem is that it thinks middle class is where normal is and its whole programming on the main 2 channels is based around affluent people buying houses, needing to be told how to save money (stop buying Omega watches and £100 bottles of Prosecco <--both true stories there) building property portfolios and now falling into the rest of the media trap where we've all got bored of watching normal people do reality TV so lets watch a load of no name Z listers doing reality instead. Popular but its tabloid style crap!

    All the comedy is middle class making fun of anything right wing or working class or poor people etc yet they bang on about punching up!

    And any critique of anyone of any minority is responded to with claims of racism or xenophobia or abelism or etc etc. For example. Nish Kumar is not targeted because of his skin colour or religion (I'm assuming he is muslim) It is because hes not very funny and just sneers at most of the country, thinking he's really clever.

    The BBCs failing is the culture within it where everybody in the building thinks they are THE only moral purveyors of right and wrong with an obligation to educate the masses. If they actually did the latter instead of trying to lecture and preach intending to turn us all into like minded yes nodding clones that would be a bonus...but it isn't. Its a channel that actually sneers at most of the country they they themselves believe should be watching for their own good!

    So I tend to watch the history channels, a bit of science, TNT/SKY for sports and a little bit of GB News these days. in the background while I'm on my laptop. I used to religiously watch BBC and mostly BBC News but way before Brexit I was losing interest in them. recycling the same 5 recorded segments every half hour is piss poor for such a budget. snip them into 5 minutes and do some more of the news they're ignoring. They've got gazillions of journos and correspondents across the world yet they've spent the last 15 years presenting Guido articles as "The BBC has learned!" What do their multitude of correspondents actually do?

    Its a pity because I'm 50 and I remember when the Beeb was actually pretty good. Wide range of all sorts of programming, great comedy but since the internet era they have spent so much on being the world's dominant website, world's moral guide and most of their actual programming has slipped drastically in quality!

    And I'm not just saying "Its a pity" for effect. I genuinely do care. Like a poster above. I have grown up with the BBC and proud of how good it was. The current iteration however is just far too big, far too lecturing and provides very little quality programming. Maybe conceding they can't afford things like Premier League or high profile sport would help in terms of more budget to produce quality stuff but it wouldn;t stop the attitude of "We are the gospel, praise be to the BBC."
     
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    Last edited: Nov 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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  3. Le Tissier's Laces

    Le Tissier's Laces Well-Known Member

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    "The BBCs failing is the culture within it where everybody in the building thinks they are THE only moral purveyors of right and wrong with an obligation to educate the masses."

    Sounds awfully similar to Not606...
     
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  4. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    Not606 is nowhere near as bad as the BBC. lol. I get what you are saying though. The internet is dominated, no matter what people on the left seem to believe, by left wing opinion and voices. I have no idea why they think twitter is a right wing cesspit because its mostly left wingers posting links to bad right wing stuff. lol. Still heavily dominated at least 60:40 left to right. The rest of the internet maybe higher still. Its all pretty representative of each other on the internet but this era is all about saying how bad the other side is a crazy high proportion of internet content, not just social media, is one side calling out the other.......while actually promoting it by doing so!
     
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  5. It'sOnlyAGame

    It'sOnlyAGame Well-Known Member

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    It was the Telegraph that exposed it after a leaked memo. I think in this case they had their arms twisted.



    Charlie Walsham
    The leaked BBC memo is no surprise
    • 8 November 2025, 1:16pm
    • As a BBC news journalist who has been driven to distraction by the corporation’s repeated displays of apparent bias, I didn’t think I was capable of being shocked anymore. It turns out I was wrong. Reading The Telegraph’s revelations about serious editorial lapses within BBC News was utterly sobering.
    As I digested the information contained within a leaked internal memo, a range of now familiar emotions washed over me – dismay, disappointment, anger, sadness – but also a sense of vindication, albeit rather hollow. What originally prompted me to start writing articles in this publication back in 2021, criticising the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic, was deep frustration that my concerns over impartiality were either ignored or derided when I raised them in-house. The leaked memo, written by former journalist Michael Prescott, proves my experience was merely the tip of an enormous iceberg.

    Until as recently as June, Prescott was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Although he was operating at a much higher seniority level than I ever have, there are parallels between his experience and mine. Like me, he had seen repeated examples of apparent bias in the BBC’s coverage of a range of contentious issues. Like me, he had raised his unease in-house. And like me, he found his concerns downplayed or dismissed. His despair at being rebuffed led him to write to the BBC board last month. His memo, which was soon circulating in government departments, was passed on to the Telegraph by a source who thought licence fee payers had the right to know its contents. Too right they do.
    The full dossier is well worth reading, demonstrating skewed coverage of the US election, racial diversity, biological sex and gender, and the Israel-Hamas war. The detailed evidence is utterly damning not simply because it enumerates grave instances of editorial bias, but because it shines a light on the cavalier arrogance and detachment from reality of those at the top of the BBC.
    From my perspective, Prescott’s experience proves what I had come to conclude some time ago: the BBC’s editorial leaders are either ideologically captured or morally craven. They have either drunk the progressive Kool-Aid in such quantities that their concept of impartiality has become treacherously distorted, or they know full well that they are churning out slanted coverage, but they are too cowardly to stand up to the DEI hires, woke warriors, and sectarian antisemites on the staff.
    A fish rots from the head and, right now, the BBC stinks like a decaying trout on a blazing hot beach. The salaries of Director-General Tim Davie and his key lieutenants – Deborah Turness, Jonathan Munro and Richard Burgess – add up to a cool £1.5 million a year. You may view such generous remuneration as reasonable for those who hold significant responsibilities. But how can anyone possibly justify paying this when they appear to have failed, time and again, to ensure the BBC fulfils its basic mission statement to achieve ‘due impartiality in all its output’?
    Perhaps we should take as mitigation the remorse they have shown since the Telegraph published the dossier, the public apologies they have issued for breaching the trust of the nearly 24 million households who still pay the licence fee, and the joint pledge they made to work tirelessly to fix the BBC’s editorial compass. Only joking. Of course, none of those things have happened. As The Telegraph’s Gordon Rayner stated on X, the BBC’s top tier ‘clearly believe that if they just ignore The Telegraph’s revelations, the whole thing will go away’.
    The official radio silence from management has been maintained at Broadcasting House too. Managers love nothing more than a self-congratulatory all-staff email. But when a presenter turns out to be a sex pest or a *****phile, a Gaza documentary is presented by a Hamas-adjacent youngster, or antisemitic death chants are broadcast during a music festival, the enthusiasm for a candid electronic missive is somewhat diminished. Still, one usually arrives in my inbox from on-high eventually. It appears, however, that in the case of the Prescott memo, the BBC has no defence to mount, no context to provide, so its leaders have decided to stay shtum and hope the scandal blows over or is buried by other news.
    You might think frontline BBC journalists would down tools in protest and demand senior heads roll. Regrettably, what the dossier also clearly illustrates is that too many BBC hacks are complicit in the corporation’s decline. With increasing diversity in the workplace a key function of BBC recruitment, the new generation of BBC journalists are as woke as a joke. Refusing to leave their politics at the revolving doors of Broadcasting House, they instead filter every event they report through the prism of their progressive prejudices: Israel is a genocidal rogue state; trans women are women; JK Rowling is a dastardly ‘TERF’; Trump is an evil dictator; diversity is strength, etc.
    Rather than contrition, BBC bosses continue to give a two-fingered salute to anyone who craves a return to measured, sensible, balanced, rational reporting by the national broadcaster.[Are we saying here they are doing nothing about the allegations of bias? Just want to clarify given the following line shows some action albeit I appreciate the point being made that it’s not the action you want to see] On the same day the Telegraph published the full damning dossier, the BBC reported it had upheld 20 impartiality complaints against News Channel presenter Martine Croxall. Her crime? Correcting a script live on air that had absurdly referred to ‘pregnant people’. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit decided Croxall’s facial expression when she added the word ‘women’ gave the ‘strong impression of expressing a personal view’ on a controversial matter.
    So, there you have it. It seems fine to peddle Hamas propaganda, platform anti-Semites, doctor footage of the US president, leverage racial grievance for clicks, promote damaging trans ideology to kids – but acknowledging biological realities that have existed since the dawn of humankind? That’s bang out of order.
    Unless the government steps in and forces the BBC’s top tier to quit and ride off into the sunset on their Brompton bikes, the corporation is finished. Its reputation is already shot, trust has been on the slide for years, and all the signs are it’s only going to get worse. No one should be forced to pay for a product that is being mis-sold. Perhaps licence fee payers should take out a class action for compensation. I’d sign up.
    Written by
    Charlie Walsham
    Charlie Walsham is the pseudonym of a BBC News employee who has worked at the Corporation for several years.
     
    #58505
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  6. Shandy_top_89

    Shandy_top_89 Well-Known Member

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    Again it is even more of a farce because any right minded person already knows Trump is bang to rights over 06/01/21 as it is, they really didn't need to splice any misleading nonsense together.

    Probably a sign of the general declining editorial quality of the BBC since the Conservative Party dispatched its cronies who have a well worn track record of enshittifying anything they touch into leadership positions, it feels less bias and more incompetence to me , in the pursuit of making a more juicy bit of tv and juicy tv should not be the primary concern of BBC News.

    Be an interesting one for the government to handle with Trump this, maintaining the relationship between the UK and US thus far has been genuinely surprising, but if Trump manages to sue the BBC for $1bn as he threatens then the UK government is duty bound to UK citizens to block payment imo. Although I don't even know how this kind of thing would work in reality anyway. Who would arbitrate that kind of legal action?
     
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    Last edited: Nov 10, 2025 at 3:55 PM
  7. StJabbo1

    StJabbo1 Well-Known Member

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    I don't know if Trump could stand the dissection his part in the lead up to the insurrection in open court and of course an examination of the events on the 6th.

    CNN points out there were no complaints at the time of broadcast and that the Telegraph has been a long time critic of the Beeb.
    "A lawyer for Trump asserted Monday that the BBC defamed the president “by intentionally and deceitfully editing its documentary in order to try and interfere in the Presidential Election.”
    The letter, obtained by CNN, charges the broadcaster with defamation and claims that Trump has suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” despite no one seeming to call out the error at the time of the broadcast."
    "Last week, The Telegraph, a longtime source of anti-BBC commentary, wrote about an “internal report” revealing the bad edit, and the story has since snowballed."
    Trump is all wind and piss he can sue and be damned.
     
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  8. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    Lol. BBC Bias somehow now blamed on the Tories. laughable! They have been on the slide for a long long time well before the Tories got back in!

    I still pay my licence. I used to watch virtually only BBC and to an extent most of the things I watch now were made by the BBC but shown on other channels :D but somehow shoehorning the blame onto the Tories is hilarious! This is 100% an inner belief that has grown and grown.

    Ask Trump about legal action! His lawyer just issued the BBC with an "apologise by Friday or we go to court for $1bn" letter, which the chairman of the BBC has confirmed receiving!

    And Panorama is not BBC News! It is BBC1s prime time current affairs offering!
     
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  9. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    Do you think Trump or his team actually saw that episode of Panorama prior to the last couple of weeks? And do you not suspect the Telegraph did not complain, if they watched it, because they assumed that was what he actually said and the BBC were reporting what happened?
     
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  10. Shandy_top_89

    Shandy_top_89 Well-Known Member

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    I mean the leadership of the BBC has been a corral of Conservative Party members and donors for years, I don't know how it can be a stretch to connect the two? and open to peoples views on what BBC News was like before 2010, but it certainly didn't appear to be as controversial back then from what I can recall. I think overall it has remained mainly in the middle with the odd failure, but they have certainly presided over a decline in quality (which is par for the course with anything they touched over their 14 years really).

    It is still notable that everyone on the right claims BBC News has a left bias and everyone on the left claims BBC News has a right bias. I think most of their problems are individual pockets in the organization editorializing as quality control degrades, rather than the News organization as a whole leaning one way or another.

    I say this as someone who vividly remembers 'Superman' Sunak, the Newsnight graphic of Corbyn in front of the Kremlin and Laura Kuennsberg getting caught out emailing interview questions to Boris Johnson.

    Re Trump, I expect we will see an apology from the BBC for that, as they should because they cant just cut footage together like Sun-esque hacks. But in the (reasonable) audit of BBC News that will follow, we still do need to be alert to prevent Yank tentacles from getting in to it.
     
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    Last edited: Nov 10, 2025 at 5:47 PM
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  11. StJabbo1

    StJabbo1 Well-Known Member

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    Yes the legal eagles would have been poised to swoop. The Telegraph would have been sceptical of any Panorama program but missed it until the internal memo was leaked.
     
    #58511
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  12. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    That just goes to show how badly these "Tory stooges" at the top have been at their jobs when the actual coporation has gone very very "liberal" in the modern use of that term!

    BBC News was pretty decent pre 2010 I'm not sure when it all started going wrong but its not BBC News so much we are talking about here. It is the BBC as a whole! BBC News is just one side of things. ITs very hard for me to remember just when it all went downhill. I think it was BBC News24 back then? I remember turning it on one day to see smoke pouring out of the first tower of WTC! It was still OK then. I was watching it all the time at that point.

    People on the left and right claiming it is biased does not mean it is not biased. lol. Equally biased away from certain people's single issues? BBC is undoubtedly centrist to left wing biased. It is not impartial at all. It presents their accepted viewpoint as being what unbiased means and then tells the world that they are the unbiased ones.

    They just did Martine Croxall for an expression when Emily Maitlis spent years scowling, tutting, sighing non stop through any interaction with anyone who wasn't "on message." But of course she was pretty much typical of what the BBC think impartial and unbiased is...which is a privileged view of centrism to left wing as being the righteous path and taking on allcomers that do not align!

    I agree on the "individual pockets" bit. However I think those "individual pockets" might have a lot of indirect peer pressure power that forces others to stay in line or be out of the club.

    They've turned into the politicians they say they are scrutinising! They lie to achieve their messaging.

    How many times have they pulled up the Labour politicians who have over and over again repeated the lie "we have halved the number of hotels since we came to power?" 213 when they came in. 210 now. It was while the Tories were still in it halved! How many times have you seen anyone at the BBC correct this? None because they don't want it not to be true because they don't want to stir that subject up. They are only interested in "scrutinising" when it suits their own narrative" Like said above it is what they don't report on and what they choose not to correct or scrutinise that shows their bias!

    And a lot of those that have jumped in recent times was because they thought they were not being allowed to be biased enough!

    Like with the comments about Labour "being held to higher standards than others" which is untrue, people are now saying the BBC being held to higher standards than others" it isn't true. In both cases they are actually being held to the standards they set for themselves by talking themselves up as being on a higher moral ground than others but in the BBC case.........if GB news had been found to do this OFCOM would be shutting them down tomorrow while the BBC does it? No comment from OFCOM and BBC internally marks its own homework.
     
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  13. It'sOnlyAGame

    It'sOnlyAGame Well-Known Member

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  14. It'sOnlyAGame

    It'sOnlyAGame Well-Known Member

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  15. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    That is a cracker. lol
     
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  16. Ian Thumwood

    Ian Thumwood Well-Known Member

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    It is worrying that Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for a sum that would probably wipe it out. This is really concerning as it is effectively interferring with the media of another country. I am really angry about this.
     
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  17. Ian Thumwood

    Ian Thumwood Well-Known Member

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    I love Matt. Really amusing.
     
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  18. ImpSaint

    ImpSaint Well-Known Member

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    He just wants them to sincerely apologise. Its a power game!
     
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  19. Libby

    Libby Derby County, we're coming for you

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    Beeb using Kelvin Mackenzie to talk about journalistic standards ffs <doh>
     
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  20. The Ides of March

    The Ides of March Well-Known Member

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    Why should the BBC apologise to Trump when he has never apologised for any of his misdeeds?
     
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