She told a conference in Washington that she personally he ruled that Nigel Farage be given equal ranking in the 2024 General Election campaign, when the formula previously used by editorial advisers didn't give him that by their calculations.
She mused "Do I think that the BBC Newsrooms would, in percentage terms, vote the same way as the nation right now in the UK in terms of Reform UK ? Do I think that the newsrooms are in lockstep with that sudden social change ? No, I don't. What that means is that you've got to work even harder to maintain that impartiality".
On the Panorama Trump edit that cost her job ? “It wasn’t up to our editorial standards, but I don’t accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias,”
Wow, Deborah Turness. Just, wow. You headed up BBC News for 4 years but you believe that maintaining impartiality in the Corporation’s newsrooms is made harder if the journalists working there vote differently from the latest opinion polls. Leave aside that this comment is one hundred percent a ‘reckon’, i.e. informed by precisely no data on BBC journalists’ political predilections, just what you think. I can see why Tim Davie liked you; he thinks the same: all BBC journalists (and even the lowliest techie or office assistant) working for News, are forbidden to say anything publicly on any matter of controversy, lest the BBC’s enemies get a sniff of a newswriter’s personal opinion. Because if you have a political opinion in your head, you must therefore be biased.
ReplyDeleteNigel Farage will be thrilled to get this confirmation that, as he’s long claimed, Auntie is biased against him, writing fake news. A former CEO of BBC News, no less, thinks it’s difficult to write a fair news story while you’ve got an opinion infecting some of your neurons; it will exert an irresistible magnetic pull on your impartiality and result in a biased news story. Doesn’t matter if you stick to the known facts, or the news wires, or what your own organisation’s reporter is saying (dammit, they’re all journalists too, therefore infected by IBS: Inevitable Bias Syndrome), if you’re writing a story on Reform UK and you don’t much care for their politics, that’s going to make it ‘harder’ for you to write the news fairly. Shall we all just give up now? Oh wait, you already have. Is this the sort of thing that occupied your headspace when you were in post? Instead of making sure programmes knew the identity of their child presenters?