Comment on Cuts the size of BBC Two's budget needed after licence fee squeeze, says insider

• danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sure, here’s a short list of just some of the terrible shit they did over the last few months to bias the public toward the Tories:

  • Laura Kuennsberg (senior political editor) revealed the results of secret postal votes two days before the election.
  • She also falsely accused a member of the public of punching a Tory adviser.
  • One of their reporters said "If Johnson wins the majority that he so deserves” live on air.
  • They edited Remembrance Day epitaph footage and replaced it with 2016 footage.
  • They edited out audience laughter at Boris Johnson during a Question Time special.
  • They ran a special Question Time show for young people and stacked the audience with leavers despite 70% of the under 30’s wanting to remain.
  • They claimed vote Leave was cleared of wrongdoing during the Brexit referendum (they weren’t).
  • An Investigation into Facebook ads found that the Conservatives lie 88% of the time, while Labour didn’t lie at all. The BBC reported that “Ads are ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful’” without citing who was doing the lying.

  This is before we talk about their efforts to paint opposition as communists.

  A lot of this goes back to 2016 when the Conservatives changed the rules around how the BBC’s board was appointed. Basically the BBC hasn’t been “arms-length” for three years and it’s glaringly obvious in their journalism.

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  • HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Quite an old bit of pasta, but lets go through them.

    • The Kuennsberg stuff on social media with her shooting from the hip before establishing the facts was bad and she should have been censured.

    • The "deserved majority" - she was describing the conservatives positioning of their strategy from their point of view. Clearly mispoke.

    • The remembrance stuff was a cockup where at 5am someone grabbed a clip from the CMS that had been used the day before for the preview and was sitting in 'recently use'. You don't include Tim Farron and David Cameron in the clip if you are trying to be sneaky

    • The laughter edit was wrong.

    • The Question Time audience issue consists of someone on Twitter alledging the the audience was deliberately stacked to be pro Brexit. I can't find any other coverage alleging that - can you? and if it was this programme, it wasn't just about Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722313#

    • Question Time and Fiona Bruce claiming Leave was cleared of wrongdoing - Fiona Bruce shouldn't be presenting the programme, in my opinion.

    • The story does actually say who is doing the lying though I agree, having it buried in the second half isn't great. Note the update though, saying that a small proportion of Labour's ads (7%) were untruthful.

    • The Jeremy Corbyn hat thing is just laughable.

    I know you say that you've never looked back, but this pasta basically selects all the cockups that occurred on one side to try and paint a picture of instututional bias in news reporting.

    You look at the political coverage of the Johnson unravelling, Truss or Sunak and the BBC are giving the government a well-deserved pummelling.

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    • danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Here’s a more recent example. The bias at the BBC is palpable. These are not the actions of a public broadcaster. They do however look like what a state broadcaster would say.

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