Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

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I watched the live BBC coverage of the London 2011 riots. Their live coverage was so completely out of touch and basically wrong it was disillusioning.

Reporters and anchors were completely unwilling to discuss the issue as a whole - each fire was treated individually, the anchor repeating every few minutes "there seems to be a new fire, but, it is not related in any way to the other 200 fires set this evening....." a few minutes pass "we have shocking new information that a fire has started, as of right now, we have no indication that it is related to the rest of the fires"....few minutes later "thugs are starting fires elsewhere, it seems totally unrelated to the other fires"

Completely unwilling to discuss poverty or any of the reasons people riot, instead, treating each incident as individual and not remotely related to the rest. It's like they want to pretend that everything is totally great in the UK like always and any problem you think you see is just temporary and unrelated to any other problem you see.

BBC is allergic to anything that is systematically wrong. No greater vision for what is happening in the world, just demeaning words for the poor and controlling-the-narrative that the UK is awesome and can do nothing wrong, systematically at least.

I wrote this elsewhere but I'll copy it here:

Nothing remotely new since the very birth of the BBC. It's always had an extremely paternalistic streak

>John Reith [the creator of the BBC] and the BBC, with support from the Crown, determined the universal needs of the people of Britain and broadcast content according to these perceived standards. Reith effectively censored anything that he felt would be harmful, directly or indirectly. While recounting his time with the BBC in 1935, Raymond Postgate claims that BBC broadcasters were made to submit a draft of their potential broadcast for approval.

And it's also never been too bothered about telling the truth

>While the BBC tends to characterise its coverage of the [1926] general strike by emphasising the positive impression created by its balanced coverage of the views of government and strikers, Jean Seaton, Professor of Media History and the Official BBC Historian, has characterised the episode as the invention of "modern propaganda in its British form". Reith argued that trust gained by 'authentic impartial news' could then be used. Impartial news was not necessarily an end in itself.

Or of remaining politically neutral

>The resulting coverage of both striker and government viewpoints impressed millions of listeners who were unaware that the PM had broadcast to the nation from Reith's home, using one of Reith's sound bites inserted at the last moment, or that the BBC had banned broadcasts from the Labour Party and delayed a peace appeal by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Supporters of the strike nicknamed the BBC the BFC for British Falsehood Company.

I actually thought the Question Time after the riots was the only time I’d ever seen that programme produce a useful debate.

It’s in the nature of the BBC that you’re not going to get opinionated independent research on issues which are political, they report directly relevant factual information, and then they report when someone else does follow up research, for instance this film produced by BBC Newsnight and the Guardian, based on research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/video/2011/dec/05/reading-the...

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