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Re BBC nature documentaries

That's interesting what you have to say about international vs domestic documentaries. Could you give an example of either group?

I mean, I appreciate the BBC documentaries that I've seen for their high production quality and photography, innovative CGI and all, and I think they inspired and pushed the limits and budgets for TV documentaries worldwide. But personally, I prefer old-school quiet and scientific documentaries having extended interviews with leading scientist of a field and generally are about a scientific discourse rather than CGI-heavy interpretations of historic, cosmic, or paleo events; you know the kind where dinosaurs look up to an approaching meteorite in sorrow, or idk Alexander the Great is portrayed as a vulgar commander yelling at his men, with lots of made-up ethno kitsch and sensationalist commentary. But perhaps these latter ones are exactly the kind you're not so appreciative of.

Those old-school documentaries do not seem to be made much any more. I also prefer them but they are rare to find nowadays. Instead I go looking for lectures on the topic on Youtube instead. Or search for podcasts.

The production cost ratio is probably 1-100 or 1-1000, at least, between the old school, interview-an-expert type, and the dramatized CGI-heavy ones, so it is strange that so much money is put into production of documentaries with so little factual content value.

"I prefer old-school quiet and scientific documentaries"

I do as well. The BBC actually produces a lot of these types of documentaries but they are probably not sold to broadcasters outside of the UK. I presume it's because they lack the big-budget, glossy look that is attractive to bigger audiences (and to international broadcasters). Or sometimes documentaries are trimmed or edited for international audiences. (I don't know if this is the BBC editing the programme or the broadcaster who bought the programme.)

A lot of the "old-school quiet" documentaries can be found on BBC4 - a specialised channel that shows programmes on specialised or niche topics.

ethno kitsch .... mmmm, tasty

Unfortunately BBC news really isn't that good any more. It's been on a long slow decline since about 2005 or so, and now the majority of their news programming (with a few small but notable exceptions) are primarily cheering on the Tory government + ministers of the day.

It sometimes seems like each side of the UK political spectrum is convinced that the BBC is irrevocably biased in favour of their opponents. The Tory right want to hamstring the BBC ("Bunch of Bloody Communists" used to be the witty cry) and jump on it at any opportunity.

That used to be more of a thing, but the recent governments have politicised the control of the BBC in a way that was not nearly as overt in the past.

I agree with this sentiment considerably. The BBC seems to get equal bashing from both sides of the political spectrum. I think therefore it's likely it's doing quite well in terms of impartiality.

It's partial to the status quo.

I'm a huge fan of the BBC but I couldn't help notice that during the last Scottish Independence Referendum there was definitely a bias - which I did conclude was simply a bias towards the current state of things.

For a laugh and good demonstration of this point, check out the replies Laura Kuennsberg gets to any vaguely controversial tweet.

Usually a solid amount accusing her of towing the party line, being friends with Boris, Tory mouthpiece etc then another bunch accusing her of being an example of how the BBC is full of leftie communists who want to reverse brexit. Both equally vitriolic.

The way she draws the hate from both sides is impressive.

It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased when the government occassionally likes to show it has power over the organisation by sabre-rattling over continuing to allow the TV license fee. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/09/boris-johns...

Honestly I think it has a general pro-government-of-the-day-bias - as you say, 'used to be the witty cry', indeed! Under New Labour it was still broadly speaking pro-government (generally, it's never totally uncritical, just tending towards friendliness relative to the opposition of the day), it was just a different government with different values.

But people don't notice when something stops being biased against them if they've already stopped paying attention to it because they were previously put off by their perception of its bias, so many of these older perceptions of its bias still exist. This creates the illusion that there's bias both ways, based on people's claims, and that it therefore must be 'balanced'.

I agree with your general thesis. However, this line got me thinking:

>It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased

Thought example. If there was a truly objective, unbiased source of information about political and physical reality, wouldn't it be far too valuable to put in charge of a news desk. They should be running the government in place of the parliament and politicians!

Of course, if you find the idea somehow troubling, this is to demonstrate that unbiasedness is actually more difficult concept than is sometimes given credit for.

Ah, but that wouldn't be enough in a democracy because people might choose to vote against it given the right conditions. Your best bet in that case might be to communicate it to the voters in some sort of news programme - taking us back to square one!

But in all seriousness I do accept that unbiased outlets basically don't really exist and it is an impossibly high bar. The reason I talk about this in the way that I do is not as some kind of campaign against the BBC: on the contrary, I think public service broadcasting is in general a good thing and frequently produces higher quality content than the vast majority of privately owned outlets, at least in the UK, despite its biases.

It's just that to me, everything has a bias, and it's important to understand what any particular outlet's biases are before you start accepting information from it. I'd say this is the one redeeming feature of our print media, despite how much crap they often produce, they are at least usually very open about their biases.

You can get a lot of good information out of the BBC news and politics programmes, but I'd say you do have to use a fairly critical lens to get the most out of it.

"Truly objective, unbiased source"

It's not possible to be an unbiased news reporter. The only thing we can wish for is reporting that wears its bias on its sleeve.

What is this "unbiased" reporting anyway? It can only mean that I happen to share the bias.

Any reporter who thinks their work is unbiased is a reporter who is unaware of their bias; which is much more dangerous than a reporter who is biased, and doesn't care who knows it.

I did agree with this sentiment for a long time but I have seen a shift towards failing to challenge conservative policies. I'm also quite critical of the number of Conservative members that have been made controller. There is a bit too much of revolving door between tory communications and BBC at the minute.

I take this "both sides" argument as a sign that actually it's just bad - platforming the most extreme people from both sides in order to get the best fight, as if this was Jerry Springer without the chair throwing, rather than a sincere attempt to get at the truth of the matter.

Edit: it's definitely going to get worse. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-richard-s...

There is no way that anyone with that level of donation to any political party can ever pretend that they or their organisation is "impartial". Being a Brexiteer just makes it even more ludicrous and guarantees that all the ongoing problems and losses of Brexit will be hidden by the state broadcaster.

> (the bCC) are primarily cheering on the Tory government + ministers of the day.

I was about to say the opposite:

https://order-order.com/2021/01/08/bbc-uses-old-picture-to-h...

Their programmes quite often suffer from both-sidesism. They'll have a senior scientist on debating a conspiracy-theory-believing anti-vaxxer, as if they're both on the same level.

While that's galling to see, it's targeted to convince the anti-vaxxer, or really the person who's on the fence. If they just dismiss the ideas, the anti-vaxxer says, "Oh look, the mainstream media covering up the truth again. Must be paid off by ${EVIL_BILLIONAIRE}." If he's given a chance, debates, and loses, that's a much better impression.

What's with this tendency to stick a binary label on every controversial issue? There are peer-reviewed valid concerns about these vaccines. Are the authors lumped into the anti-vaxxers category?

Regularly watching BBC World I've yet to see the both-sideism you describe. As if on the same level? Well in relation to another bete noir, you'll likely get to see an interview with Greta T. (zero academic qualifications) while waiting interminably to hear any (usually edited) counter-position from (for instance, there are many others) Richard Lindzen (with around 200 peer-reviewed papers in atmospheric climatology, MIT emeritus professor) or Judith Curry (https://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html).

That's arguably not "both-sides-ism" so much as "straw-man-ism" if one side does not get the best representation.

That said, it depends on the demographic you want to represent.

BBC News has always been the de facto propaganda arm of the British government. It may only be apparent to you now, but their reporting has always been overly biased. Examples are any reporting on the Troubles (especially British crimes there), the Iraq war (especially the lead up and the Camp Stephen killings), and anything about Brexit.

Slightly odd then that one of the names for the BBC used by Brexit supporters was the "Brussels Broadcasting Company" because they thought it was far too pro-EU.

As I'm sure you're aware, the British government was pro-EU during the Brexit campaign.

Apparently there is a subscription service called BritBox - created by BBC and ITV, but it's only available in Australia, USA and Canada.

https://www.britbox.com/

I expect that will be slowly expanded; the BBC's new Director-General wants to increase commercial revenue (and immediately before being appointed as DG he was the CEO of BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary).

The new chairman has apparently donated to the Tory party.

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-...

The DG was also a former deputy chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party.

https://inews.co.uk/news/tim-davie-new-bbc-director-general-...

Should making a donation, campaigning for a candidate, or exercising other forms of political speech disqualify one from working as a civil servant?

No, but it just raises valid questions regarding motivations. Civil servants are supposed to not be biased toward a particular political party. In practice, that may well not be the case, but questioning his appointment is fair enough. The Tory party has for many years attacked the BBC, using those attacks as a political tool. So people draw conclusions from the appointment of a prominent Tory donor to the post of DG.

BBC also sat on their 10 million hour archive of media while the internet, social networks, Wikipedia and blogs went ahead commenting, sharing, indexing, discussing and remixing other sources of content. They cared so much for their copyrights that their media became unconnected and unused.

The BBC and developed the web based on-demand video platform that inspired Netflix back in 2005 and operates the world's most visited news website. They did this despite having fixed funding, charter obligations not to advertise around their content and royalty obligations to producers.

While locking out most of that content for people outside the UK..

> My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible.

There's the Britbox streaming service, but I have no idea whether it is international. Otherwise, there's limited amounts of BBC content on Netflix. But again, that may just be the UK version.

It's not international, and is jealously geo-blocked. As a Brit expat, I wish it was available. They are effectively refusing my custom, presumably because they can make more money from international licensing deals for terrestrial stations and higher-reach streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

I'm a Brit expat who is very fond of his VPN service and wishes he could give the BBC the money instead of them...

Can you use a VPN, and your parents or friends postcode in iPlayer?

They lock content away from UK users too, it's mostly made by third party, paid by UK public, and so it's locked from international use so those companies can sell rights abroad, and locked from UK users so they can buy the content again (despite paying for it already).