Setting the record straight
The BBC Editor’s blog is flagging up a Radio 4 Feedback piece on its blogs that helps clarify their status. It’s only five minutes long, but the key segment has this from presenter Louise Adamson:
Some would say the whole point of a blog is that it should be controversial, outspoken, off the cuff and frequently partisan. So how does that fit with the principles of BBC journalism?
“Badly” is the correct answer, as is daily apparent, but she has the features editor of the BBC’s news website Giles Wilson on instead:
It is quite a challenge so the thing we explain to our bloggers, and thankfully they’ve all got it, is that they shouldn’t misunderstand the apparent informal atmosphere of a blog to let their commitment to impartiality drop. They’ve got to be conversational but they’ve still got to speak in a BBC voice and follow the BBC guidelines on impartiality. Later on he remarks: We don’t think of blog content as being any different to any other news content.
I hope that clears things up.
Well no er, it doesn’t er, clear it up.
If as er, I do sometimes, er, have economic sources er, or political sources er, close to er, a certain adress, which perhaps happens to er, have a number 10 in the name of er, the street, I think it is er, entirely impartial of er, me, er, not to er, mention it.
Surely this guy is taking the p1ss? Impartial is hardly the word Id use to describe ANY of the reporters and their associated blogs that are covering the US Election.
Mailman
Guidelines are a bit like a NuLabour fifty year target, they are meaningless words plastic enough to moulded to fit any excuses needed,words to fill the void, typical socialist smoke blowing!
What does the BBC and NuLabour have in common, apart from many friends and family and political allies of course, the motto of ‘bullshit baffles brains’!
I haven’t been moved to read one of their ‘impartial blogs’ for ages, but from memory, even with their enthusiastic approach to ‘moderating’, the comments were probably ten to one critical of the beeboid pro labour propaganda
Has it been copied to Justin Webb ?
Absolutely clear:
“We don’t think of blog content as being any different to any other news content”
And indeed it isn’t. The blogs manage to be every bit as politically biased to the left-of-centre position as the BBC’s mainstream news reporting. The blogging reporters do indeed still speak with a “BBC voice”.
The problem is, to those who are left-of-centre, the bias in the reporting is usually genuinely invisible. Everybody has a tendency to see their own default settings as normal. Half the reason the BBC will not address the bias issue is that too many of them literally don’t see the bias. They don’t see it because humans are not objective unless they’re specifically trained to be.
Which isn’t a defence of what they do in their blogs, it’s an argument for saying “Can we have our money back please!” and forcing them to sink or swim in the marketplace of biased news organisations, rather than allowing them to continue lying to themselves and to us that they have different standards.
One other thing we have to realise: these people live and work in bubble. I showed this site to a good friend who works at the BBC, and she was ashen-faced and shocked. She couldn’t comprehend that such a site could exist. And why would she? She’s young, urban, left-leaning, and surrounded all day, every day, by people with identical identities. So naturally, when she sees something that doesn’t fit in the bubble that now constitutes her life, she thinks we are biased, that we deviate from the norm.
It’s for that reason that I think the rules for bloggers are irrelevant, as are any efforts to reform the unreformable: we now live in such politically heated times that genuine impartiality is impossible – the Licence Fee has to go. The impossibility of enforcing the BBC’s side of the bargain should free us of our legal obligation to meet ours.
I was a bit shocked when I came across Biased BBC myself first.
But now it’s a regular part of my life.
Nick Reynolds (BBC) | Homepage | 28.10.08 – 11:46 am | #
Welcome back to the dark side, after what I believe has been a while.
I for one really appreciated the factual, well-linked post you made on another thread about The Trust, which really added to the debate.
Keep ’em up!
What planet does this Giles Wilson inhabit? Has he even SEEN the Webb effort?
This Martian (Wilson), obviously just landed, writes about the webloggers being required to communicate.
That’s rich, considering that the Webb attempt at communicating is typically at the level of grunting and pointing. Pointing to “this”, “this” and “this” is about all it boils down to. Sometimes, we get just the bare, inarticulate grunt, without even the desultory pointing.
It’s a grim joke.