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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie

Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased.

These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and they have been instead been given some generic independent sounding job title.

I'm not joking! BBC Radio 4 famously recently did a "Brexit anniversary programme". Three people in the studio, the presenter and two guests. The two guests were .... Theresa Villiers and Daniel Hannan, two hardcore Brexteers who, of course, spent the entire interview session fighting completely unchallenged over who could give the most sycophantic sunlit-uplands view of Brexit.

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The BBC certainly has a lot of problems with regard to actual independence, but I would like to *ahem* provide some balance by pointing to the satirical popular news quiz "Have I Got News For You" which spent the early part of the Blair years having to beep out certain references to Peter Mandelson — the Dominic Cummings of his era — that only ended with (from memory):

???: "Peter Mandelson is a hom… owner"

Regular guest: "Why can't gay people own homes?"

Host: "Well, new Director General, let's see if that goes out."

At the time, and I'm pleasantly amazed how fast this has changed, being gay and in charge was still mildly scandalous in the eyes of tabloids, and that was about the same time the age of consent was equalised.

However such (entirely valid) reasons for respecting privacy should be for all, but as far as I remember Mandelson was the only person who got to keep that particular secret.

Conversely, right after the referendum someone said the BBC should play "God Save The Queen" at the end of the day's programming in concordance with the departure from the EU, and Newsnight responded with this, which is still up on their official channel: https://youtu.be/WwsQ_5Wm4oo

That last example would mean more if The Sex Pistols hadn't long ago been thoroughly absorbed into and reapprpriated by the establishment.

Imagine if they'd shared a contemporary work calling the monarchy a fascist regime.

As it stands it was just a cute joke, and in a way only served to reinforce the soft power of parliament by entering into a playful discourse with it.

Like how Status Quo made some rehashed pro-war "In the army now" army recruitment video ...

I'd like to see them try rehashing In the Navy by the Village People into pro war propaganda.

The BBC don't seem to care about being impartial when it comes to the royalty. They publish loads of articles about the upcoming coronation and I have yet to see any republican points of view.

They don't care about impartiality in anything, really. Certainly not since Greg Dyke left. The management has increasingly been stuffed with people who are openly Tory.

The recent attack on Gary Lineker for not being "impartial" (not being sufficiently uncritical of Government policy) was particularly galling.

There's no such thing as impartiality. Everything has an editorial line which colours what opinions are allowed.

There's degrees of bias though. The BBC has a charter that is supposed to prioritise impartiality, and yet they show strong bias in many topics.

That's the point I'm making. It's like having their charter saying that pi is 3: reality is no less malleable.

Well, pi is approximately 3 to a certain degree of precision. To make a bad analogy, the BBC is currently saying that pi is 4 and increasing.

> Blair years having to beep out certain references to Peter Mandelson — the Dominic Cummings of his era

I thought Alastair Campbell was Blair's Cummings ?

Campbell is IMO the more appropriate comparison too - Mandelson was an elected MP and later a Lord during Blair/Brown years, he wasn't a SPAD for hire like Cummings or Campbell. That said, the three of them worked very closely together - Blair, Mandelson and Campbell.

I'm thinking mainly of the perception of each was that they were a dislikable Machiavellian power behind the throne: https://youtu.be/IWKBe7L50VA

Cambell was Blair's Tucker.

I'm sorry, but we'd be a hell of a lot worse off without the BBC.

For all its flaws, it does a huge amount of good. All reporting will inevitably hold a bias simply because selection of story for time scheduled news will _always_ involve excluding other news items.

The amount of criticism the BBC recieves is significant, and it's gone up a lot more recently.

I think it's a reflection of the incumbent gov more than the state of the organisation. There are strong forces working against the BBCs more egalitarian aims.

No one has a problem with the BBC existing. Just that it is de facto a state funded and government affiliated news agency.

One of the funnier stories supporting this is that MI5 had to ask the BBC to stop sending everyone for vetting because it was unnecessary!

> when MI5 suggested scaling back the number of jobs subject to vetting, the BBC argued against such a move.

Something the BBC lied about repeatedly and only admitted years after other news agencies broke the story.

Now it's run by the guy who was the PMs boss and who organised a loan for the last PM. And people claims it's totally independent? These sound like stories about RT.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-43754737

> Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased.

I'm curious, around when do you think that changed? And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?

> I'm curious, around when do you think that changed?

The smell of change appeared more clearly in the run-up to Brexit. Certainly post-Brexit I would say it is very much evident.

> And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?

To be clear (as per my Radio 4 example cited above), it is not necessarily a case of "reported on / did not report on", it is frequently more a case of bias / lack of impartiality, again as nicely exemplified by my "two hardcore Brexiteers fight over Brexit" example[1].

However, I could also give you many examples of "reported on/did not report on". Perhaps one of the most well known is Lady Mone of House of Lords fame. She is/was subject to various investigations regarding supply of PPE during CoVID.

For a long time, Lady Mone's investigations were widely reported in all mainstream media (tabloids, broadsheets, other mainstream TV/Radio news ... you name the place, it was reported there).

But the BBC ? Nope. No mention on TV/Radio news, and for a long time a search for "Mone" on the BBC News website yielded exactly zero results.

Even today although you can now find a small number of mentions on the BBC website, you'll have to go looking on other mainstream sources for the actual detail.[2]

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/23289638.bbc-slated-insult... [2] https://www.thenational.scot/news/20107509.bbc-refuses-say-h...

EDIT TO ADD (because I can't reply to the @Veen directly)

> Leftists think it's an establishment mouthpiece run by the Tories.

Well....

I see how they could feel that way when the recently appointed BBC Chairman is a chap who appears to have more than a few ties to Boris Johnson[3].

[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/digital-cultu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry

Regardless of the fine detail about who knew what at what time, history has vindicated people who were skeptical about the claims being made to provoke the invasion of Iraq, and it was not right of the Blair government to attempt to suppress them.

(Mind you, the BBC has never been really able to report on the security state; see the Troubles, or the Zircon Affair)

Not the person you asked but I'd say there was a noticeable shift during the stewardship of Laura Kuenssberg as political editor, beginning in 2015.

i worked for the BBC for several years back in the 80s, in computer services radio (basically designing and writing applications to support radio broadcasts) and it really has always been a crowd of right-wing arse lickers. the "talent" may appear to be slightly left-of-centre, but the management certainly is not.

It's worth pointing out that right-wingers say precisely the opposite and can produce plenty of evidence showing the BBC's left-wing bias.

I think it would be more apt to call it plenty of "evidence"...

No doubt you've dispassionately gone out of your way to assesss that evidence and after detailed examination decided it's invalid. Which would be a perfectl reasonable step to make - if that's what you did. Did you?

Yes, but it's an argument that just goes round and round forever. Conservatives think the BBC is run by a left-wing cabal. Leftists think it's an establishment mouthpiece run by the Tories. We've been having exactly the same argument since the 1960s.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/digital-cultu...

The chair is a Tory. We can then quibble over "run by", but you can't ignore the significant connections at high level.

The Chair, DG, and other higher-ups will almost always have either Labour or Tory connections, because those are the two main political parties. You'd be hard pushed to find a suitable candidate that wasn't connected at a high level. I suppose the tell is whether people who are up in arms about Tory Richard Sharp were similarly upset when Labour-supporting Michael Lyons or Gavyn Davies were chairman, or when Labour-supporting Mark Thompson, etc were DG.

The problem is often reality having a left wing bias.

That's a lazy, trite, and untrue cliché.

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