Tim Davie resigns as BBC director general after accusations of serious bias | Hacker News Reader

Tim Davie resigns as BBC director general after accusations of serious bias

theguardian.com

8 pointsndsipa_pomu31 comments

Also, live coverage by the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cd9kqz1yyxkt

Forcing the head of your news organization to resign every time a politician criticizes your reporting, doesn't seem like a great way to build trust in the media.

That's not what happened here. The BBC edited footage to make it appear that Trump said something he didn't in the leadup to the Jan-6 riots.

My personal biases are pretty strongly in favour of the BBC, but what they did here was really bad. It's appropriate that heads roll. I wish more orgs would have the same level of accountability.

The problem here, like the gaza documentaries, is it's produced by outside companies, and the BBC -- like most companies -- sucks at governing outsourced providers.

We all have our echo chambers, as they say.

The right way to build trust in the media is for the media to actually be trustworthy.

The accusations against the BBC in this case are extremely weak, though. The main thing is the somewhat misleading edit of Trump’s speech in one documentary (which was such a big deal that no-one noticed till a year later), and then some general grumbling about too many positive portrayals of trans people. This latter complaint would be bizarre if it was made with reference to any other group of people. (Imagine if the BBC were accused of showing too many positive portrayals of Irish people and was then required to broadcast programs where people who hate the Irish were also given space to air their views.) Finally there are some complaints about coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is of course impossible for any news organization to cover without enraging someone or other.

This paints a pretty awful picture of the BBC in other areas: https://archive.is/mBcPq

So does this:

https://cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-double-stan...

It’s quite a fun game to match every accusation of BBC bias with its exact opposite. That’s not to say that BBC reporting is perfect and that no individual criticisms are valid. But the BBC simply could not report on Israel/Palestine at all without being accused of bias in all directions. Show me the media organization whose reporting on this issue is agreed to be unbiased by all relevant parties.

(Also little ironic to link to a Telegraph article, of all things, while complaining about media bias. On anyone’s analysis, the Telegraph is a vastly more partisan media organization than the BBC.)

If you read the article they are listing things that the BBC itself concluded and cites specific examples. Ignore who wrote the article or even the article itself and just look at what BBC itself found. Also note it's about BBC Arabic in comparison to regular BBC.

I’m sure the BBC gets lots of stuff wrong in its news coverage, just like any other news organization you could name. But if we’re talking about systemic bias in reporting on the Israel/Palestine conflict, it’s worth noting that “both sides” (much as I hate this expression) frequently claim that the BBC is biased against them. The whole issue is so contentious that it’s highly unlikely that any major news organization will escape criticisms of bias. Again, I wonder if you can name a different major news organization that regularly reports on Israel/Palestine and that nobody considers to have any bias in its reporting.

I agree with you that they all have bias. However, as the article points out... this is an egregious bias by it's own sister publication. So, it is unique in that it all falls under the same roof and it's being called out by itself.

That’s unique in a good way, no? Would it be better if the BBC were incapable of self critique?

I’ll give them +10 points for hiring somebody to measure their own accuracy, and −100 points for ignoring their reports and broadcasting deliberate lies anyway.

Who are you comparing the BBC to? I can’t think of a news service of comparable scope that clearly has a better track record when it comes to accuracy. The edit of Trump’s speech in that one documentary was indeed misleading, but it’s being blown out of all proportion here.

Meanwhile, the President who is a stickler for news accuracy and wants to sue the BBC for a billion dollars is busy broadcasting libelous nonsense to his Twitter followers on a daily basis (e.g. the absurd claim that Barack Obama has been receiving millions in Obamacare “royalties”).

The hypocrisy would be astounding if we weren’t already so used to it.

Excusing the BBC for lying just because other people are lying too doesn’t really work.

I'm not excusing the BBC for broadcasting a documentary with a misleading edit of Trump's speech. They've rightly admitted their error in that respect.

This is a politically motivated attack on the BBC by people who, as referenced above, don't care a jot for accuracy in news reporting. By combing through the BBC's enormous output they have, unsurprisingly enough, managed to find one or two legitimate grievances.

> just like any other news organization you could name

Excuse.

> Show me the media organization whose reporting on this issue is agreed to be unbiased by all relevant parties.

Excuse.

> it’s being blown out of all proportion

Excuse.

> the President […] is busy broadcasting libelous nonsense to his Twitter followers

Excuse.

> managed to find one or two legitimate grievances.

Wow, ok. Maybe you didn’t actually read the report?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...

The BBC has been pushing specific viewpoints for years, and burying any story or article that might contradict it or offer a competing viewpoint. A quote:

    As virtually all shows had lost their own reporters, programme editors had to make requests to News if they wanted a correspondent to cover a story. I was told that time and time again the LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans-debate.
    
    The allegation made to me was stark: that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off-air. Individual programmes had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight.
    
    What I was told chimed with what I saw for myself on BBC Online - that stories raising difficult questions about the ‘trans agenda’ were ignored even if they had been widely taken up and discussed across other media outlets.
    
    There was also a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity.

You see? The BBC isn’t trustworthy. It’s literally not worth trusting anything they say. The Trump thing is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the big obvious lie that everyone can see because it’s so easy to find the truth.

If the people who have resigned could point to even one action that they’ve taken to fix the BBC’s culture of unethical behavior then they would not have had to resign.

I addressed the other claims in the report in my original comment. Anyone who writes a report complaining about a ‘trans agenda’ clearly has more of an axe to grind than anyone at the BBC. Your last comment is bordering on a rant (e.g. the far out claim that “it’s literally not worth trusting anything that [the BBC] says”), so I will leave it here.

I think you’re ignoring the problem. Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the matter, the BBC’s strategy of supporting one viewpoint and burying another is unethical. If you want people to trust the media then the media must report the facts even when the individuals within the media dislike them. If they don’t do that they they’re not trustworthy.

The BBC doesn’t have a “strategy” of doing that, but any news service will have a detectable lean towards some viewpoints and away from others. When it comes to Israel/Palestine or trans rights, there is little general agreement as to what the facts are, so you cannot please everyone with some simplistic notion of “purely factual” reporting.

In fact the BBC, following the general transphobic climate in the UK, has given a lot of airtime to people trying to create a moral panic around trans people. They’re using virtually identical tactics to those used to stir up panic about gays in the 80s. This won’t look good with hindsight any more than the 80s and 90s “debate” about homosexuality does now. (Will the Telegraph demand that the BBC give airtime to homophobes in the interests of fairness and balance? No, they have quietly forgotten about that issue, and moved on to the next vulnerable minority group.)

In short, you’re holding the BBC to a standard that you don’t apply to any comparable broadcaster.

Don’t worry, all the mainstream media will be right wing soon enough, so trust in the media will at least hit ~45%.

He is resigning due to BBC Panorama, one of their biggest news shows(if not the biggest) doctoring footage of Trump making it appear he was instigating the occupation on the 6th of January.

This is indefensible and has nothing to do with right or left wing. It is about TRUTH

> making it appear he was instigating the occupation

> The inciters gave their fiery provocations, then Trump told his recruits, "We're going to the Capitol, and I'll be right there with you."

I don't know anything about what footage was or wasn't edited, but if you think he didn't instigate, we're not going to agree on much about that day. I didn't just read this right now. I searched for it because I remember seeing him say it.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/letter-testimony-jan-6th-hearings...

You still believe that lie? The riot had already started before he gave his speech. How then could the speech have instigated the riot? The people who were rioting never even heard it. In fact, most of the people there planned in advance to be there. How could Trump incite them when they had been planning to do that for months?

And you also “misquoted” Trump, because what he actually said was “… and we’re going to go down to the capital and cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women…”. The “…and I’ll be right there with you…” was from a completely different part of the two hour speech.

Also, the article you quote repeats quite a few other lies from the testimony at the hearings, such as the tall tale of Trump grabbing the wheel of the car and assaulting a secret service agent. The commission never actually interviewed the driver of that car until after the 2020 election, months after the testimony in question. Why? Because he refutes the entire story. It never happened. Cassidy Hutchinson wasn’t even in the car at the time and her testimony was at best hearsay, if it wasn’t simply a lie.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/trumps-secret-se...

> The riot had already started before he gave his speech

Sort of. It started before the speech finished, but about 50 minutes after it started. Here's the relevant timeline from the Wikipedia article.

>At noon, Trump began an over one-hour speech at the Ellipse, encouraging protesters to march to the U.S. Capitol. At 12:49 p.m., Capitol Police responded to reports of an explosive device, later identified as a pipe bomb. At 12:53 p.m., eighteen minutes before Trump's speech ended, rioters overran police on the west perimeter of restricted Capitol grounds.

In particular, Panorama showed Proud Boys marching after Trump’s speech, when they’d actually left before.

The founder of NewsMax says that lawsuit is going nowhere.

But this does get the latest Epstein fallout off the front page. Epstein is a worse story for Trump than Jan 6.

Thanks for proving my point.

Doctoring footage is indefensible no matter who the footage was of. See also Crowngate.

So is a news organization firing people in response to mob rule. 2 months ago? Sure, 2 months from now after an investigation? Fine. Admittedly doing it to get people to calm down? Not ok.

They would not have had to resign if they could point to any attempt that they had made to fix the many problems detailed in the report.

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