Do you believe the UK media is politically biased?
I get nearly all my news from the BBC. And the BBC is, officially, legally required to be politically impartial. And yet the new head of the BBC since last year, Tim Davie, is a full-blown Conservative politician who has taken several steps to stop the BBC being so critical of the government:
I'm no fan of sanctimonious wokeness, but I do believe the media has an obligation to challenge the government, which effectively makes it the voice of the opposition. So for as long as we regularly get 15+-year periods of uninterrupted Conservative government, yes, I do want the BBC to criticise the Conservatives, simply because they're the ones in power. If Jeremy Corbyn was Prime Minister, I would expect them to turn on him immediately, but it's hardly the BBC's fault nobody voted for him.
Lately, I've noticed that the BBC tends to get Conservative politicians on to interview them extremely frequently. If you watch the news at precisely 07:30 on a Friday, there's a different blue-ribbon bootlicker every week. And they do the rounds of every news organisation, also having Zoom conversations with ITV News and Sky News, while opposition politicians never get a look in. Is this deliberate? Are Labour MPs just refusing to get up that early, because they are lazy and poor and hungover from smoking crack all night? I know the TV presenters try to take Our Glorious Overlords to task during the weekly brown-nosing, but they never succeed. The Conservatives are just getting free advertising in the end. But for all I know, maybe that's because newsreaders are incompetent rather than some gigantic overarching national conspiracy to fellate God Emperor Boris at every opportunity.
I think we can all accept that tabloid newspapers are openly right-wing, but at the same time, social media is predominantly left-wing, and pretty unabashedly so. Does this cancel out? Is the media all right on the whole? I sometimes watch Russia Today, universally acknowledged as propaganda, just to see what propaganda looks like. They never lie, but every single story is just, "You can't trust the mainstream media, so watch RT instead for your brave daily dose of red pills." The fact that none of the news is actually completely fabricated, not even when it's made by literal foreign agents trying to undermine the fabric of Her Majesty's Great British Society, makes me feel confident that TV news reporting must be pretty tightly regulated. Newspapers, of course, are bollocks and must be ignored.
People who support Boris seem to expect him to come out with shit like this. Maybe some people are surprised by his remarks, but I can't imagine who. Someone can only be shamed into resigning if they have shame to begin with, although this might be a decent opportunity for Gove or Sunak to attempt a coup via VONC.
>>33346 Why would anyone give a fuck about some rumoured hyperbolic statement. I certainly don't.
Rather than making meme videos and screeching that a politician can't say this or that it would be better to highlight the fundamental policy point that Boris is opposed to any further lockdowns.
>>33348 >Why would anyone give a fuck about some rumoured hyperbolic statement
Traditionally when a leader oversees the death of tens of thousands of his citizens, a statement that he knew it was going to happen and still allowed it to happen is considered particularly incriminating.
One of the problems with the BBC's commitment to avoiding bias is that they can't report that one party has done something detestably evil unless the other party does as well. Unless the other party does something of note, the BBC can't report anything substantial.
Whatever function this BBC rule is supposed to serve it's clearly not working as intended.
>>33355 >Nice reference.
I thought >>/pol/93259 made a good reference too, it took me a moment to remember where it was from but I did read it in the Vogon's voice.
>>33356 At the risk of sounding like a whinging Corbynite, I'm not sure this accounts for their coverage of Labour from 2015-19.
Their coverage of the recent inquiry into how the Scottish government fucked up handling complaints against Salmond and their coverage of the ongoing disaster of the present UK government both follow this rule (i.e. advantage a bunch of incompetent crooks because the opposition aren't newsworthy at all), but back when Corbyn was in charge they seemed perfectly happy to cover the ongoing saga that is The Strange Death of Labour England without much balancing with "Nasty party still pretty nasty".
If I was to advance a theory that preserved the BBC's impartiality, I'd say they possibly treat Labour infighting as though it were internal discussion rather than damaging scandal, so "Our leader is a dangerous bastard who hangs out with daft militant wogs and shouldn't be in charge of turning off the lights at the end of the day, let alone the nation says Labour shadow minister for war" can be balanced out with "Conservative tax cut plans are excellent says Conservative minister for sport" rather than being balanced with "Residents upset as Conservative minister is seen shooting dogs from his constituency office window."
(The alternative - as I'd take from the case in Scotland - is that they tend to be aligned with the government. For my own part I'd definitely say they used to be unfair to the SNP until recently, when they started becoming unfair in the SNP's favour)
>>33356 I suspect the political parties know this, or at least the one in power does. I remember when Labour published their election manifesto for the 2019 election, that was obviously going to be the main news story of the day. The Conservatives set up a fake website (I forget what it was called, labourmanifesto.org or something like that, I think) full of fake policies, to deliberately mislead people looking online for the Labour manifesto. This was outrageous, and a total scandal in my opinion. It was Fact Check UK (?? - odd how I've forgotten the details of all these scandals) all over again. They were lying to win votes and anyone who was paying attention could see this. And yet, it didn't get reported on BBC news, because they were reporting on the real manifesto. If they had decided at any point to report on Conservative lies that day instead, the butthurt brigade would complain that the Conservatives control the entire media narrative and Labour aren't getting any coverage of their lovely, reasonable, intelligent and worthwhile plans to hunt down anyone who wears glasses and behead them with a sickle for counterrevolutionary treachery. The BBC couldn't really win in that situation; either ignore Labour's good story or ignore the Boris/Cummings bad story. Either way, the Conservatives win. The BBC got played, almost as badly as they got played when Boris said most of their viewers shouldn't have to pay licence fees any more, or when a former Conservative councillor became their Director-General.
Some American journalist has resigned from the New York Post after feeling bad about writing a false story about Kamala Harris.
Her Twitter statement has been savaged, with most replies saying she shouldn't have written it in the first place if she felt bad about it and also saying that her apology hasn't gone far enough; I think they'd only be happy with a public flogging.
Something similar happened to Lucy Worsley when she apologised for quoting John Wilkes Booth in one of her BBC4 documentaries after people got mad when it was repeated last August upon hearing the word "nigger". The apology, if anything, intensified the attack on her because it was seen as a sign of weakness and apologising never goes far enough for these people.
I can see why the likes of Johnson and Trump don't apologise for their brazen behaviour. There's no fucking point because you'll never win with those people.
That's a very valid observation. The likes of Johnson and Trump are untouchable, simply by virtue of the fact they refuse to show any acknowledgement. They're already baddies and have nothing to lose, much less anything to gain from kowtowing. The lynch mob only holds power over those who genuinely wish to remain on the side of the good; "cancellation" only works against the fundamentally well intentioned.
I think that's part of what I find so perverse and disgusting about it all. It's like how the school bullies would always pick on the already shy, awkward kids because that's where they could inflict the most damage. It's the same sadistic satisfaction, which you can't get from a victim who's capable of taking it standing up. It has to be someone you can hurt.
>>33377 What a ridiculous leap to compare some of the most powerful world leaders to moderately well-known Twitter users. The lies that Johnson and Trump tell are responsible for life and death situations, the entire ideological outlook of the nations they run and how their very powerful nations influence the wider world. In no way is this like some people being annoyed on Twitter. And who are "those people"? People who like Kamala Harris? People who don't like the word "nigger"? Not everyone who is at some point irritated on the internet is the same amorphous "that lot" you seem to assume they are. This is a completely baby-brained analysis on your part, it has absolutely nothing substantial about it; "utterly vapid" doesn't go nearly far enough to expressing how pointless the opinions you offered were, are and always will be. More to the point what does any of that have to do with media bias in the UK? If you want to talk about Americans so badly why don't you fuck off to the colonies and then immediately fall under one of their comically oversized trucks so I definitely don't have to read one of your posts ever again.
He has a point though. Trump and Johnson aren't the way they are out of exhaustion from trying too hard to do good. This woke cancel-culture boogeyman is just an excuse.
For them, anyway. I have no doubt some people actually do feel that way.
I don't think anyone's even implied that they were. The observation made was just that they get away with their behaviour because it's not possible to shame or guilt them in the same way it is with a reporter who uses a no-no word or whatever.
>>33393 >I can see why the likes of Johnson and Trump don't apologise for their brazen behaviour. There's no fucking point because you'll never win with those people.
Not this?
>>33394 This seems to fundamentally be true though. Even if "these people" aren't actually a coherent group (The media? Upset members of the public? Serial Whingers? Actual victims?) the dynamics for a lot of groups are very similar. How often do you see a politician go "Sorry, yeah, I fucked that up a bit" and the media response be "It's alright mate just don't do it again"? It doesn't matter whether it's people who think the Prime Minister shouldn't go around in blackface beating up playschool kids or NIMBYs who're upset about not being consulted over changes to zoning laws that will hopefully put a dent in our awful house price bubble. In all cases their incentive (and the incentive of opportunists like me, who'll grab onto anything if it helps us throw mud at someone we don't like) is to press the issue for all its worth rather than accepting an apology and a lukewarm promise not to do it again.
Considering how common car crash interviews are in politics, should it be any surprise that it operates on car crash rules? (Never ever say the word "sorry", even out of politeness, because it can be taken as an admission of liability at a later date.)
>Trump and Johnson aren't the way they are out of exhaustion from trying too hard to do good.
No, but their personas are clearly a reaction against "political correctness", whatever their supporters take that to mean. They have carefully cultivated a brazen and shameless image that exempts them from many of the normal standards expected of politicians.
"Woke cancel culture" is just a rebranding of what we used to call "political correctness". It's not a new phenomenon and neither is the backlash against it; many of the arguments are word-for-word the same as those we were having in the late 80s and early 90s.
That says, the way I read it at least, exactly what I said in >>33393.
I mean are you under the the impression Bozzer or Trump have ever tried to win votes from woke SJWs or what?
Woke SJWs can cancel and bully people from their own side, but they can't touch actual unapologetic conservative types. They have no power over someone who never pretended to care about political correctness or whatever in the first place.
And political correctness is a backlash against something else. We can pass the buck back endlessly or we can hold the people who are actually doing the thing responsible for it. It's telling that you (rightly) say "whatever their supporters take that to mean". It's a construct of propaganda that leads to people gleefully eating more than four pounds of red meat a month or putting Worcestershire sauce in their bolognese to trigger woke snowflakes.
>>33398 I wrote a big post about this but a .heic file pretending to be a .png just cost me it, so here's the short version with no development:
Boris and Trump weren't primarily a rejection of political correctness, they were a rejection of your typical boring "white man in a suit" politician. Boris's clownishness is the equal and opposite force to Blair's utterly stage managed soundbytes and spin, not to Caroline Lucas's moralizing. Trump was obviously more openly bigoted, but so are US republicans in general - it's just that until Trump they would mask it a little bit, hiding behind euphemisms and dogwhistles to declare vast groups of people to be gangs of subhuman parasites with some plausible deniability. Trump just dropped the pretence and all the other words of more than one syllable.
But it doesn't, it says that's why they never apologise for it. It doesn't make any assertion about the reason for their behaviour in the first place, and neither have I. My observation is about why woke people are so powerless to confront them despite being so diametrically opposed.
You're right, I am very confused, because this entire avenue of conversation has been spun off of a misinterpretation of something that was never said or intended. I'm in no way defending the likes of Johnson or Trump and I'm not debating anything, because whatever you think I'm debating has been entirely imagined and the point I actually made was about something different.
Not apologising for what, you docile cunt. Existing? The thing they are not apologising for is the behaviour, otherwise where does the need for apology come from.
>>33408 >>33409 Watch it with the ableist language or I'll have you lot cancelled.
(Unless it's you, Boris, in which case: get the fuck off /news/ and go back to counting yer corpses.)
Are the BBC proper, proper fucked? There seems to be a backlash brewing over the whole "Martin Bashir and the BBC are directly responsible for Princess Diana's death" narrative that's playing out.
>>33635 I hope not, and indeed it seems unlikely. Look at what The Sun and the Daily Mail have got away with in the past. The BBC apparently contributed to Princess Diana's unhappiness and mistrust of the media. Okay, but they didn't chase her into a French tunnel where her car crashed and she died, did they? That wasn't the BBC.
Of course, tabloid newspapers are probably fully tumescent over this opportunity to say it wasn't just them, and to shift the blame to another media source at last, so they're definitely going to go for the jugular here. But the BBC submitted so completely to the government when they were accused of insufficient deference that surely, surely, the government must now support the BBC again?
