BBC licence fee

Saddleworth2 said:
where is this left wing bias that they speak of? The only bias I see is them being the present Governments propaganda unit through Kuensberg and her chums.
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In addition to bias influencing interpretations of evidence, it might be worth noting in relation to perceptions of the BBC's reportage that bias may also influence interpretations of bias.

In a 1985 study, Vallone, Ross and Lepper found that when two groups of partisans watched a relatively unbiased account of an issue, each construed the segment as biased for the other side.
 
Len Rum said:
That's because all they ( the Tories) care about is their own power and position.
They will trash the monarchy, the constitution, the BBC, whatever it takes.
They are not even patriots as they like to claim. Their power and privilege comes before that.
They are in truth right wing anarchists.
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Sovereign individuals?
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
I've got an Economics degree
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Just as an aside, I like Ha Joon Chang's advice about your degree subject.

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Prestwich_Blue said:
Then there's the News side, which interprets 'balance' as two extremes and seems to prefer people shouting over each other rather than engaging in intelligent debate.
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Prestwich_Blue said:
Then I was listening one afternoon and they were discussing some aspect of government economic policy. I've got an Economics degree & it's a subject I'm still interested in so I listened and they had two people discussing whatever it was. One was Yanis Varoufakis, the left-wing economist and former Greek Finance Minister and the other was from the Cato Institute, which is a Koch funded body. For those who don't know, the Koch brothers are very wealthy US ultra-conservatives who fund many like-minded think-tanks and other organisations. Both had an immutable ideological vew on the subject, on the extreme edge of the spectrum of debate. I'm always happy to listen to opposing views, as there can rarely be one single view on a subject, but this was two diametrically opposed extremes where there was no common ground or meeting in the middle.

I learned nothing from the debate other than the fact that these were the two most extreme positions. I complained that this wasn't "balance" but, as usual, the complaint fell on deaf BBC ears. So 5 Live got turned off and I don't miss it.
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Islam also tends to get treated in this kind of way. This is from John Holroyd's excellent book Judging Religion: A Dialogue for Our Time.

'A lack of knowledge about religious organisations, structures and influence means that journalists all too often fail to identify the right representatives so as to shine light on an issue, beyond highlighting controversy....We might... consider the interviewing of Anjem Choudhary by Channel 4 News and on BBC2's evening news programme Newsnight about the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Choudhary is a sufficiently unrepresentative Muslim voice in the UK that there is good reason to ask why he was given the oxygen of publicity in relation to an audience that is not necessarily aware of how unrepresentative he is.'
 
Gabriel said:
All parties in power see the BBC as overly critical. It was fascinating hearing Piers Morgan review the papers this morning on Sophie Raworth’s show. Irrespective of what you think of Morgan, or his views, he was critical in a way that no BBC employee could ever be. You could sense everyone in the room gasping and holding their breath.
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But no previous party in power has been as threatening towards it as this one.
You are setting up a false equivalence argument to justify the extreme actions of this government.
 
Nadine Dorries, who is presiding over the abolition of the license fee, is as thick as mince, isn't she?


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Dumbing down panto. LOL.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
That's a slight exaggeration but the principle is 100% correct. I stopped listening to 5 Live a about 18 months ago ago as I was already growing weary of their constant obsession with Brexit, then Covid. Valid news items certainly but not the 24 hours a day they seemed to devote to them.

Then I was listening one afternoon and they were discussing some aspect of government economic policy. I've got an Economics degree & it's a subject I'm still interested in so I listened and they had two people discussing whatever it was. One was Yanis Varoufakis, the left-wing economist and former Greek Finance Minister and the other was from the Cato Institute, which is a Koch funded body. For those who don't know, the Koch brothers are very wealthy US ultra-conservatives who fund many like-minded think-tanks and other organisations. Both had an immutable ideological vew on the subject, on the extreme edge of the spectrum of debate. I'm always happy to listen to opposing views, as there can rarely be one single view on a subject, but this was two diametrically opposed extremes where there was no common ground or meeting in the middle.

I learned nothing from the debate other than the fact that these were the two most extreme positions. I complained that this wasn't "balance" but, as usual, the complaint fell on deaf BBC ears. So 5 Live got turned off and I don't miss it.
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James O'Brien always said he knew he had to leave the BBC when presenting Newsnight during the Brexit debate all the leavers were saying we just go onto WTO trading standards - he had Pascal Lamy former HEAD of the WTO explaining why that would be a disaster - he had to interview with a straight face Andrea Leadsom who was there to tell Lamy he didn't know what he was about !! Lamy also made a fool of IDS too on the same subject.

 
Len Rum said:
But no previous party in power has been as threatening towards it as this one.
You are setting up a false equivalence argument to justify the extreme actions of this government.
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I’m doing no such thing. I’m not justifying anything it’s doing; I think the licence fee should be kept, increased even.

However, we have a situation in the UK now where all sides of the political debate cry ‘unfair’ when their leaders get what they interpret as hard questions/imbalanced treatment. That has led to a situation where we have a prime minister who was empty chaired and avoided any rigorous scrutiny, and broadcasters feel compelled to give politicians an easy ride. We are all responsible for that and should want all our masters’ feet held to the fire.
 
Citizen of Legoland said:
Are they still funding nonces or is this retrospective offence you have?
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I don't know but i know they were, and there's plenty of nonces on their list of shame. I don't watch live BBC anyway in my house and i declared to them I don't watch BBC live broadcasts, so I'm exempt from paying towards the British Broadcast Corruption fund.
 
Gabriel said:
She arguably did the same with Oliver Dowden. He played the straight bat to everything but she kept bowling the same delivery. She appears timid and looks like someone trying not to offend so as to be given the position full time.

It’s a bit of an indictment of the state of political interviewing in the UK that neither Morgan nor Neil are employable by the BBC. I’m perfectly capable of dividing their personal politics from their interviewing technique, yet both would be capable of giving Davey, Johnson, Starmer, Sturgeon et al.a tougher ride than Marr or Raworth. When the electorate allow their politicians to evade a proper grilling (and that includes shunning Radio 4), they end up with a culture of insipid and repetitive questioning, and that’s unhealthy for the country’s democracy.
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Andrew Neil's reputation is a bit of a myth, without the teams of researchers he is a tame puppy in comparison. One of the reasons he struggled at GB news.

There are plenty of adversarial interviewers at the BBC on less prominent shows, Sackur on Hardtalk is just one example.

Trouble is the ministers won't turn up to the interview if you regularly use that style of questioning on prominent slots.
 
Fode N The Hole said:
Andrew Neil's reputation is a bit of a myth, without the teams of researchers he is a tame puppy in comparison. One of the reasons he struggled at GB news.

There are plenty of adversarial interviewers at the BBC on less prominent shows, Sackur on Hardtalk is just one example.

Trouble is the ministers won't turn up to the interview if you regularly use that style of questioning on prominent slots.
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Never seen GB News so couldn’t comment, but I’ve seen him take enough politicians apart from all parties to judge his astuteness. He’s a careful listener and knows how and when to turn the screw. I agree about Sackur but the problem is we now have a range of benign interviewers because we’ve allowed our politicians to cherrypick where they’ll appear. The media outlets then accept serving up blancmange so as to fill the schedule. Poor fare.
 
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