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.
>>32614 >The Conservatives are just getting free advertising in the end.
I would like to stress that I don't think it's always been like this. A couple of years ago, during the epic Brexit banter, seditious lefty media were doing everything in their power to subvert The Will of the People. Obviously in the end, the will triumphed (sounds inspirational; could be a film title, that), but the Corbynista adolescents of Twitter were claiming the media were biased against them even then. They were wrong then; does this mean I'm wrong now? Because I am far too intelligent and correct to be wrong, at least in my own opinion.
I believe it is biased less in the sense that it consciously tries to push a left-right agenda, and more in that the basic dynamics of the way it's set up pull it in a direction that is, in effect, its bias.
Consider for example the BBC's coverage of the day's papers. You'll get your lefty liberal takes from the Guardian and your righty bigot takes from the Daily Mail and everything between and beyond, but you're still letting the papers lead the agenda of "what's news?"
Or consider the role that journalists take in general: They are journalists, they are not economists, or political scientists, or engineers, or anything of the sort. They interview these people, but they're rarely equipped to ask relevant questions. So inevitably complex debates on these issues get biased in particular ways. For example, discussion of budgets tends towards "Do the sums add up" or "What does this mean for your household in terms of taxes?" because people can do basic maths, rather than the more interesting economic questions - the effect on output, demand for workers, the balance of trade, that sort of thing. On military matters there'll be some discussion of whether the army should get more or less money, or if this or that procurement program is good, but rarely is there a wider sort of discussion about the sort of strategic role we should play in the world because that's an incredibly complicated question with a lot of viewpoints, not something that you can really boil down into a 5 minute segment between "MP in Badger Scandal" and "The lighter side: This cat has been flying in the cockpit of Japanese planes for the past 6 months" with a little vox pop at the end about what the public thinks.
Perhaps worst of all in political terms, they aren't historians. Things quickly get forgotten which would be useful to hold over the heads of MPs. Governments are allowed to get away with all sorts of U-turns and hypocrisies or so on because it's no longer a live story and the journalists have already forgotten about it.
So you wind up with a pervasive sort of status quo bias, except where a call for change suddenly follows a big event. You wind up with the wrong questions being asked pretty consistently, and with debates being lead in directions that mostly waste time.
Then there are other factors. A few that come to mind as a result of the fact that you usually need someone to comment.
1. It's quite common that for (say) a discussion on the budget, you'll get in someone from a think tank, or you'll get an economist from a hedge fund or something to drop in. But their contributions are inherently biased. Think tanks have an ideological slant and many of the economists they grab are microeconomists by profession, because the academic macroeconomists who could actually tell you what the budget might do are too busy sitting in their university office putting the details of the budget through their models slowly and properly so as to come to an actual researched conclusion, rather than rushing to get a quick "Yeah actually I think the tax cuts were good" out the door in time for the 6 O'clock news.
2. In the case of the BBC, you can supposedly kill discussion outright by simply having everyone with one viewpoint refuse to appear. No appearance, no balance, no go for a discussion.
3. Whether it's for papers or for interviews, people do have to agree to appear. As a result if you ask too many tough questions you can simply be avoided. Even where the avoidance itself can become the story (as with Johnson and Andrew Neil) the whole thing is still constrained by the limits of the format. If you've only got an hour program, a politician will get away with lying and bluffing simply because the journalist needs to move on to other questions to fit them into the allocated time and is forbidden from really tearing into them. If a reporter loses their temper then that becomes the story. So you have a bias in favour of bluff, and being a well trained bluffer gets rewarded instead of actually knowing your stuff. Give a nuanced position and it can be torn to shreds, give an untenable position and refuse to move from it and the journalist has to fold.
So my summary answer, inelegantly bolted on, is that there are pervasive structural problems equivalent to bias but that tackling them would be very difficult indeed, perhaps impossible within the constraints of some formats.
(With that said I should note that I view our newspapers with nothing but contempt and social media as an essentially malign force designed to make people angry about the wrong things in pursuit of maximum "engagement". Newspapers have little structural excuse to be as bad as they are and social media as structured is nothing but bad. The rest gets some sympathy.)
I find the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum a very interesting sort of thing to look at when it comes to the question of media bias.
45% of the Scottish population voted for independence. In that vote, not a single daily newspaper backed independence. Nowadays, so far as can be told, only one does (though more back the SNP) - and it was started in the heady days after the result where the SNP became the third largest political party in Britain and it was very obvious that there was a market opening. (It isn't very good, but then none of the Scottish papers are very good.)
That sort of universal closing of ranks on a given issue is something I find fascinating. There's a lot you can read into it. Is it the papers acting according to the commercial incentives of their mostly-UK-wide owners, or a reflection of the wider interests of the rich and powerful, or the lingering influence of the days when Labour's political machine dominated Scotland entirely, or is it a lesson in how a large number of voters can break through media bias and still endorse a largely reviled option, or is it just that Independence is crazier than any of the other crazy nonsense that at least one newspaper has backed? Whatever it is, we've been deprived of adequate analysis. Not of the independence question itself, but of that particular media environment. Say what you will about the bias against Corbyn, a few papers still begrudgingly came out and said to vote for Labour.
News media is inescapably biased just due to the kind of institutions they are. Whether it's a profit motive or a desire to keep good relationships with government or industry insiders, journalism can only operate within very strictly defined bounds. There is a spectrum of opinion, but the spectrum dramatically narrows when it attempts to address issues which really affect our existing political and economic structures.
Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky described these institutional pressures well in Manufacturing Consent, providing a lot of quantitative analyses of media coverage as evidence for five main influences on what stories receive the most (or least) attention: ownership, funding (e.g. advertising), sourcing, flak (e.g. media criticism by think tanks), and artificially constructed fears (e.g. anticommunism). They called this the propaganda model.
This 1996 interview between Chomsky and Andrew Marr is pretty illustrative:
Media ownership is a particularly severe problem in the UK, where three companies (News UK, Daily Mail Group, and Reach) dominate 80% - 90% of the market, both in print and online. The Media Reform Coalition just recently came out with a new report on this subject: https://www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership/who-owns-the-uk-media
Writers David Cromwell and David Edwards at a website called MediaLens have been thanklessly plugging away for years, applying the propaganda model as way of analysing news stories as they appear. Their work is at its best when it's criticising media we would call the "left", but actually largely tows the line on matters of importance like the use of military force in foreign policy:
https://www.medialens.org/category/alerts/
To further get the point across that this isn't about "left" or "right" so much as the boundaries of acceptable opinion, even writers for conservative papers have become disillusioned with how limited the scope for British journalism is. Peter Oborne has become increasingly isolated, despite a long and successful career, for daring to point out the co-dependency of journalists and government:
>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.
When people talk about the BBC being biased they conflate the news output with the rest of their broadcasting.
The news output is generally pro-establishment and the bias tends to be what they omit to cover rather than the presentation of what they actually cover. This, in combination with their penchant for giving Are Nige a lot of airtime, means they get accused of being right-wing. The Daily Mail think they're left-wing because they employ Naga Munchetty.
Their actual entertainment output is invariably seen as left-wing. You have the identity politics nonsense that led to Simon Mayo leaving Radio 2. You have the Vicar of Dibley taking the knee. You have the Proms and whatever the outrage was over that. It's almost mandatory for TV shows to feature interracial couples. You get the idea. They do peddle a lot of airy-fairy, do-gooder, bleeding heart, namby-pamby woke nonsense. When someone says the BBC is too left-wing it generally means "there's too many wogs on my screen."
I enjoy that the right see the MSM as very left, while the left see the MSM as very right. It's disingenuous, and does not present topics fairly. It is now a human interest series.
>Tim Davie, is a full-blown Conservative politician who has taken several steps to stop the BBC being so critical of the government
What's wrong with that? His argument is that the comedy is unfairly biased which it is. Comedy hasn't been funny or relevant for a while because everything has been 'orange man bad' and 'brexit voters are dumb'.
>>32647 >The news output is generally pro-establishment and the bias tends to be what they omit to cover rather than the presentation of what they actually cover.
>Their actual entertainment output is invariably seen as left-wing.
This is a valid observation. It's a similar performative leftism to the Guardian, but when it comes to economic or foreign policy the tone changes completely.
It's impossible to not produce politically biased news. The very act of selecting which information you dripfeed people causes you to control what information people have access to and consequently how they perceive the world and therefore how they act upon that information.
The BBC isn't allowed to bias any particular party, but that doesn't mean that they're free of bias. There's a much broader political spectrum than that put forward by the main parties. The BBC doesn't illuminate this at all. It oscillates around what's immediately relevant to the status quo. If you try to look at it objectively, this is much closer to the right then the left. Socially liberal policy isn't really a left wing staple; it's more like optional flavour. Real left wing policy is stuff like land reform, reckoning, abolition of private profit and so on, and that doesn't enter into the imagination of the perspective the BBC pushes. It's not because these are outdated ideas, is that the subject isn't in vogue in the UK. These kind of things are often a part of the political debate in other parts of the world.
The BBC's problem is that when one political party is obviously under performing, it can't criticise without finding something about the other lot to complain about. This basically hands a carte blanche to the shit party to get away with whatever they want, which is exactly what's happening in the UK. It doesn't help that journalism is expensive, so news outlets just uncritically regurgitate whatever the government wants to say, which is cheap, either.
Everyone hates the BBC so they must be doing something right is the common retort. Interestingly despite Sky News being labelled as a Murdoch operation they almost exclusively have Labour MPs engaging with it on twitter. There might be something to be said on audience dynamics being more of a game given how many left-wing lovies seem to keep up with the Daily Mail and every 'comment is free' article gets interest from angry pensioners.
I will however echo what otherlad said in that the BBC and related mass media operations are all quite lowbrow and, back when I owned a television, it would piss me off watching it. There's also undeniably an element of social control involved as well but most offensively is that it's just shit.
These days I mostly read financial news sites as they have the right level of responsiveness-accuracy for me owing to the pressures they have from the audience. I have specific interest sites that publish in slower form for more detail/argument. If I'm in front of a telly then I'll watch NHK World both because I'm a fucking weeb and because at least it's explicit in its mission to chill you out with what is effectively the programming you would watch on a hotel tv channel.
>If you watch the news at precisely 07:30 on a Friday, there's a different blue-ribbon bootlicker every week
Might have something to do with them being in government innit.
>>32647 >It's almost mandatory for TV shows to feature interracial couples
I feel like that's more in the advertising space rather than the BBC. Auntie might have interracial sex on Eastenders but from the last time I watched it they tended to keep families in the same-race owing to how people move in and out of the square.
>>32651 If people don't like a tv show then it should be cancelled or reformatted. I'm not sure what you're whinging about unless you actually want to hear Nish Kumar blub about Brexit again but even then the BBC has a serious problem in that nobody wants to pay a licence fee for content that doesn't serve them.
>>32690 I know you're mostly getting at comedy/entertainment but I've never quite liked the argument that the licence fee should be for producing content that people want. It feels like a method for generating programming that the private sector is more than capable of doing by itself.
Obviously I'm not saying everything should be abstract artistic statements about the very nature of television, but you'd except that the BBC would be the network that would throw a good chunk of money into dull documentaries about pointillism or the evolution of music theory or the poetry of classical antiquity or something without expecting to have to justify it with proof of "audience engagement". There are programs that the public deserves to have, but probably doesn't actually want when ancient aliens is far more interesting.
I suppose a similar principle applies to comedy/entertainment. If you cut having to justify it with viewer numbers, "engagement", and good reviews you could get in new and exciting comedians without much concern for audience reception, rather than being pushed to the safer strategy of showing "value for the license fee payer" by showing that you got positive Twitter feedback and a good Guardian review by having someone read out the Lib Dem manifesto while replacing the punctuation marks with concatenated swears and types of meat.
>>32697 >you'd except that the BBC would be the network that would throw a good chunk of money into dull documentaries about pointillism or the evolution of music theory or the poetry of classical antiquity or something without expecting to have to justify it with proof of "audience engagement".
You seem to be under the illusion that the BBC commissions and retains programming without hefty quantitative measures. You include public service in that metric to justify the licence fee but I'm sure you can appreciate the hazard in a world where BBC executives have no accountability or oversight on their decision making. It's like the world we're currently living in.
>you could get in new and exciting comedians without much concern for audience reception
On the other hand nobody is going to watch a comedy show where some bloke shoves Tulips up his arse and if people don't watch and support the BBC then it will fall into a death spiral. The BBC can in some ways be more risk tolerant on account of both its scale and talent culture but we're not living in the days where Channel 5 is a novelty nor is the BBC an institution of limitless resources.
This isn't to say that I'm defending the BBC decision making which cancelled the Daily Politics.
I think all journos are cunts and would be amongst the first against the wall come the revolution. TV news is basically prolefeed, although as a whole I do view the BBC more favourably than other arms of the media. But that's just because I only listen to or Wath BBC and Radio Four, thereby only getting the posho high brow stuff.
In a right and proper world people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden et al would be hailed as heroes of the people but we can't even be sure of that, we still have to half suspect they're Russian disinfo plants and we have no way of knowing if that isn't just, in turn, our own regime's counter-propaganda.
>>32690 >Everyone hates the BBC so they must be doing something right is the common retort.
It's a rather poor retort, though. It could just as easily be said that they are hated because they do many things wrong; it's a bit of a meaningless statement without specifics.
Hating an institution also doesn't mean it isn't directed to serve particular interests. How people feel about the BBC is largely irrelevant to its institutional function, where concerns of "left" or "right" bias are quite low on the list of influential factors. Their coverage has tended towards outright servility toward whoever was in power for many years, because media relationships are critical and governments have been putting an ever tighter stranglehold on them. At the risk of posting too much Andrew Marr, this reached maybe its most surreal peak during the invasion of Iraq:
The BBC has been under increasing pressure for many years to behave more like private companies and chase raw numbers in terms of viewers. One of the directors at the BBC, Howard Stringer, openly said that the BBC should learn lessons from Buzzfeed in order to gain more attention.
I imagine similar pressures apply to the BBC for their programming. BBC documentaries, like those from other channels, now feel like trailers for proper documentaries.
>>32617 >Governments are allowed to get away with all sorts of U-turns and hypocrisies or so on because it's no longer a live story and the journalists have already forgotten about it.
This isn't really related to the media, but I genuinely believe all the U-turns are a deliberate tactic by the government. Anyone who doesn't want nurses to get a pay rise has seen the government do everything in its power to accommodate that opinion, and now the government is doing the exact opposite to please the rest of the country. Ditto for every other U-turn. It's like they have their cake for a week, and when the backlash gets too great, they eat their cake too. It's the best of both worlds, and furthermore, it makes the party impossible to oppose. Any Labour policy that's popular just becomes a Conservative policy too, so Labour wind up with absolutely nothing to set them apart, and they're just a pink foam.
>>32644 >systematic bias against Corbyn
Sometimes I wonder if Labour had got rid of Jeremy Corbyn and made John McDonnell leader a month of two before the election, if they might have done better. He has all the same opinions, and he's certainly said things I disagree with, but so much anti-Labour sentiment was really anti-Corbyn sentiment that they could have obliterated that whole angle just by getting someone else with all the same opinions.
>>32688 >It doesn't help that journalism is expensive, so news outlets just uncritically regurgitate whatever the government wants to say
It upsets me how true this is. It's like the voters have spoken, and they don't want the people they voted for to be questioned. Just recite what's written in the press release, and that's news. There are more protests going on in Bristol right now about the police, and the BBC are reporting that "Boris Johnson says he is appalled by the protests." Who gives a shit? Report on the protests, not on what Boris thinks of them! Read the news, not the comments! Shut the fuck up!
>>32690 >If I'm in front of a telly then I'll watch NHK World both because I'm a fucking weeb and because at least it's explicit in its mission to chill you out with what is effectively the programming you would watch on a hotel tv channel.
You should give al-Jazeera a go. I get my news off Freeview telly, so there are a lot of channels I don't see, but al-Jazeera is sick. I love it. The news is more global and not as UK-focused as is relevant to my interests, but they report it so well and they find a lot of really interesting stories that this country's media just doesn't give a shit about.
>>32713 I've heard that the BBC is trying to appeal to da yoof more, with shorter, more digestible news reporting. This sounds like an exceptionally risky gamble, like getting Krept & Konan to present the Antiques Roadshow but otherwise changing nothing. It might appeal to some young people slightly more, but it'll also turn a lot of people off, and it will be worse, and, most importantly, young people weren't watching the Antiques Roadshow anyway.
I prefer France 24 for that. Not only because they have a clear niche in African news but because the myopia in editorial coverage at least doesn't feel quite so on the nose. Also because they really go all out when it comes to doing journalism on the ground and with interviews.
>>32785 >Sometimes I wonder if Labour had got rid of Jeremy Corbyn and made John McDonnell leader a month of two before the election, if they might have done better. He has all the same opinions, and he's certainly said things I disagree with, but so much anti-Labour sentiment was really anti-Corbyn sentiment that they could have obliterated that whole angle just by getting someone else with all the same opinions.
The treatment of McDonnell would have been equally as vicious as Corbyn, precisely for the reason that they share more or less the same views.
>so much anti-Labour sentiment was really anti-Corbyn sentiment
True.
However it's also true that anti-Corbyn sentiment was almost entirely manufactured. We can be fairly confident of that, because nobody outside the niche socialist circles even knew who the fuck Corbyn was before he was leader.
People had their minds made up for them. It wasn't about anything the man himself said or did.
>>32799 It was manufactured by newspapers finding things he'd said in the past, and everyone disagreeing with them. This is why so many politicians are incredibly dull and cringeworthy and refuse to ever give a straight answer to a question: you never know when you might accidentally say, "Hamas are my friends" and consequently lead your party to the worst election result since the one where the Conservatives were completely unopposed. Jeremy Corbyn never expected to become leader, so he spent his whole life asking if Peter Sutcliffe was really that bad, and the press had an absolute open goal. I know John McDonnell got in trouble for his "let's lynch Thatcher" remarks, but there must have been a moment when they could have tagged him in and he'd have lost fewer seats just because people didn't know yet about his history of epic insurrectionist banter.
>>32802 That stupid unelectable lefty cunt, having the same positions as... Nicholas Ridley, Thatcher's Minister of State at the Foreign Office.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/28/falklands.past Well, almost the same - I don't remember Corbyn proposing to arm the Argentinians.
(I actually have no intention of defending Corbyn's position, which I do not sympathise with. I just like to point out that Tories posture on the matter like Thatcher wasn't perfectly happy to sell out the islanders and the royal navy until crisis struck and she could play the hero, the towering figure brave enough to stand up to a decline that she was rapidly accelerating in practice. A few pennies into the navy after the war and everyone will forget you almost cut it to the point that winning the war without calling in the US Navy would be impossible...)
also because I feel that affected affection for the Falklands by mainland Britons is primarily a coping mechanism for losing Hong Kong, the last part of empire worthy of the name, rather than any genuine care for the outer outer hebridies with penguins.
You can get away with a few maverick opinions, but you can't get away with only maverick opinions. Corbyn took an unpopular minority stance on enough topics to make him politically radioactive. Thatcher at least had the political savvy to engage in skulduggery.
At the risk of kickstarting a whole debate about what is and isn't appropriate in public life, whether a certain blogger is an arsehole, or the entire Scottish election, I find this story interesting from a media bias perspective.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19198757.alba-party-urged-cut-ties-wings-scotland-blogger-sturgeon-decapitation-post/?ref=twtrec >ALEX Salmond’s new Alba Party has been urged to cut its ties to a influential blogger after he defended a post about Nicola Sturgeon which advocated “decapitating this witch”.
I mean god, that sounds terrible doesn't it? Alex Salmond's party is associated with a website that advocates physical violence against a politician, and it's implied that a lot of people are very upset about this. Rightly so, right?!
And then for balance they front-load the blogger's defense: That the context was obviously not physical violence, but political decapitation. Unseating the leader of the party. Still, the blogger should've been more careful, picked his terms better, right?
But then you sort of dig into what actually happened and it's actually even more inane:
Somebody commented - not posted - commented on an article, saying that they would vote Labour to decapitate the SNP's leadership because they live in Sturgeon's seat. The blogger himself didn't write it, merely defended it.
So one man didn't like the comment, reported it to the police, and asked Salmond's party to distance themselves from the blog as a whole. (A blog for which one of their MPs has written in the past) Because one man objected to a metaphor in a comment. Ex-post-facto a lot of people will (mostly disingenuously) urge the party to distance itself from the blog, but at the time the story was written it was literally one middle aged man.
Then you get a little back and forth where the paper concedes that everyone talks about decapitation strategies in politics, giving the last word to the man who complained to the police who thinks it's inappropriate in an atmosphere where politicians have been murdered. (Perhaps so, but one suspects the man in question hasn't been reporting every newspaper to make reference to decapitation strategies... For my view, such a complaint would look like whining in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section, let alone the police records.)
But the practical purpose of this article isn't really to be read, because it's nonsense - a man didn't like a comment on a blog that he interpreted in a stupid way so he went to the police, but written in a way that puts the spotlight on a tangentially related political party. Hey I've got a follow up story: I don't like his comments in this article. Stupid. - The practical purpose is that people will share it on Twitter and go "Oh, isn't Alex Salmond's party so bad? He'll stop at nothing in his sexist crusade against his predecessor" "Oh that blogger, always talking about doing violence to people", "Outrageous decline in the standards of public life that people like this get away with it", and so on. People will read only the headline, perhaps as far as the blogger defending it. Very few will go on to skimread the rest, and even fewer will actually stop and think about the events being described.
And don't get me wrong, I don't like the blogger in question - he is a twat, he does drag down the standards of public life - but it's very illustrative. If I took similarly petty issue with something written on LabourList even The Sun wouldn't touch it, but apparently a comment on a stupid blog is "news" in a supposedly respectable newspaper?
I'm not saying there's a conscious attempt to "get" anyone here. I don't think Tom Gordon (who I like) is out to get Alex Salmond or Stuart Campbell (who I do not like), but I do think the practical consequence of writing a non-story in the most inflammatory way possible is a form of "bias" against them. Their (already very damaged, it must be said) reputations are being put down further because a "credible" source is writing a story that puts them in a bad light, despite the actual events underpinning the story being painfully stupid and not really worthy of attention except as an illustration of how a story not worthy of attention becomes social media discourse fodder.
I dunno but I think politicians are the one class of people whom it should be 100% legal to threaten with violence. The world would undoubtedly be a better place for it.
>>32887 I've noticed recently that the news will often phrase things in terms of how a politician reacts to a story, rather than in terms of the story actually happening. There were a couple of "Here's what Robert Jenrick thinks about Sarah Everard" stories, even though who honestly gives a fuck what he thinks? Unless he killed her himself, he's just going to say the exact same shit anyone else would say: it's sad that she died, it would be nice if she hadn't been murdered, raping and murdering people is bad. It's a non-story what he thinks, but they've already reported the real story and they want to report on it again, and this is a way to do that. Inane zoomer hacks are people too, and sometimes they phone it in at work, same as any of us.
>>32888 This sounds like a good idea, but I think you've been trusting Carol Malone and people like that a little too credulously. Leftie libcucks are, on the whole, much less violent in real life than illiterate fascists. I'd love to be able to tell these rats I was going to slit their throats if they keep gaslighting me and claiming they haven't fucked my life up completely, but then all the Daily Express rabble would do that too, and they're the ones who'd get listened to since they're the only side to actually successfully murder an enemy lately. I would happily not save a drowning Conservative, but there's no way in hell I'm getting a train down to London just so I can run about with a knife trying to chase them all down. I wouldn't even run to catch that train; I'm certainly not running once I get there. There are people out there who would, and they don't agree with me politically.
>>32807 You can't compare the two; Hong Kong is full of Cantonese people and we had no business taking it over, even if it is a libertarian thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party today thanks to our influence. The Falklands, meanwhile, had an indigenous population of penguins when Europeans arrived, so it's fair game. Most people living there either identify as or are descended from British migrants, so to hand the place over to the Argies just because it's nearer to them is chocolate teapot nonsense. Their population density is a fraction of ours, if they want an island they can flood the Calchaquies.
I think there's quite a big difference between a historic headline that draws attention to the right-leaning political opportunism of the Mail, and actively feeding their online dominance by linking to whatever nonsense they've published in the here and now.
I think the phrasing of this lower article's heading speaks volumes about the editor's attempt to diminish the allegations against Johnson. Especially paired with the top one.
>>33338 My personal highlight is the introduction.
>Often, huge scandals are described by politicians as "just tittle-tattle". Like this one that Labour did, or this other one that Labour did.
Laura Kuenssberg does go into more detail later on, and I absolutely reject the Corbynite delusion that she is some conniving Tory conspirator hellbent on never ever criticising the Conservative Party under any circumstances, but it sure is a weird way to start an article all about what a crook Boris is.
Agreed, and it takes very little imagination to think how other figures could be attacked far more harshly over such comments. Careers have ended based on less.
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?
