On behalf of Biased BBC, I would like to apologise to Mr Michael Stoute and his family for any distress caused by a comment posted here on 30th May by an anonymous contributor. I wish to point out that the allegations are incorrect and I have removed them from the site.
On a general note, can I please ask you all to think before you post comment that may cause distress to any individual and imperil this site? Thank you for your co-operation.
Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear has mixed feelings about the BBC. He sees Newsnight as his main rival and variously describes the corporation as “stifling”, “crippling” and “a monster”. Equally, though, he speaks with relish about the level of competition it offers him.
“I think it’s an incredibly healthy time for British broadcast journalism to have two strong, daily broadcast journalism programmes.”
He goes on to point out the challenges presented by the BBC. “When it comes to the digital side, we are swamped. I wouldn’t even call it David versus Goliath. We are like an ant versus Goliath when it comes to the BBC. It stifles competition online,” he says, adding that a good online exclusive for Channel 4 News will often get far more traffic on the BBC website when it is followed up.
Channel 4 News has, he says, no more than 50 journalists, eight of whom will be working online “on a good day”. He says that the BBC has thousands of journalists who are able to work online each day (BBC News says it has 8,000 staff including 5,500 journalists).
“We know that we can compete in television news – because it’s all about that hour-long programme, or that three minutes of television. We know our journalists and cameramen are as good as theirs, if not better,” he says.
“But we are swamped by the BBC’s online resources. We constantly think how can we put this out and keep the traction we have, because it’s such a monster. It’s just a massive thing.”
He adds: “Our biggest priority is to extend even further our digital reach. But we are, in terms of television news websites, swamped by their size, their ability to deploy resources.”
Morning all! Monday arrives and so does this! Let’s DETAIL the bias….!
Don’t you think it a little strange that despite its vast resources and all those “world class” journos it employs (at our expense) the BBC might have picked up on the fact that a French-based Muslim extremist has been arrested on suspicion of having slaughtered four Jewish people in Brussels last week? Still, at LEAST it is bringing us the breaking news that climate change is going to be the death of us…..
Nicky Campbell ran a phone in about the state of the economy…notably several callers said that when they raised the question of a pay rise with their bosses the answer was ‘There are plenty of East Europeans who will do it for a lot less’.
Whilst Campbell eventually highlighted such comments this is what the BBC’s economic genius from Wake Up to Money, Adam Parsons, said in response (55 mins):
‘Fascinating that, that disaffection that people sometimes have and their limited horizons…..it’s one of the symptoms of that long period of downturn and the change in the dynamic really of the British economy…we have got people who are prepared to work for lower wages, there’s a lot of them coming in, but I wonder sometimes whether the spectre of that, the memories of all those Polish plumbers who came along, resonates in people’s brains as much as the reality of it.’
Even as he admits there are workers being imported who undercut British wages he denies it saying it is just some sort of residual mythical belief generated by the Daily Mail no doubt.
So not, maybe, he says, the reality….never mind the callers stating quite plainly that it is happening to them here and now.
Of course Parsons does a double act with the venerable Micky Clark who is always more than happy to be unhappy about good news….the other day as the British Chamber of Commerce and the CBI stated that they believed the economy was bouncing back Clark decided (ala Flanders and the OECD) they couldn’t be trusted….saying they had got it wrong so many times before.
On that basis Clark and Parsons should be taken off air.
One of our occasional off thread rambles to provide a short break from the usual.
I see the BBC is employing the services of a firm that employs Lord Hall’s wife to headhunt a new BBC Trust Chairman.
As the BBC previousily spent £350,000 to headhunters to fill two vacancies and then filled them from within its own ranks perhaps the money might be better spent on employing the services of a cleaning company, whether or not it has relations of Lord Hall on its books.
Newsreaders at the BBC’s flagship £1billion headquarters have complained that the revamped building is a ‘toxic waste pit’ which is making them ill.
Staff at the new Broadcasting House in Central London claim there is a ‘trend of filth, human waste products and a badly built building’.
They have called on bosses to intervene ‘as a matter of urgency’ over the ‘unclean and dangerous’ premises they say are so unhygienic that staff regularly become sick.
AA Gill comments on the BBC’s coverage of the Euro elections on Vote 2014.
His conclusion….
Political reporting on television…..moribund, unchanged and unconsidered. Politics on televison is a shabby, undemocratic national disservice.
No kidding.
He goes on to say that BBC 2 has been good, but is now ‘an arty social worker.’
No kidding…and of course that is a description that could sum up pretty much all of the BBC’s output more concerned as it is with social engineering than entertainment and genuinely, truthfully, informative programming.
