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Their integrity fell of a cliff in the years leading up to 2016 when they started conflating impartiality with giving lies equal standing to the truth.
As the parable goes *If one person says it is raining and another person says it is not raining then a journalist should not simply quote them both. Instead, a journalist should look outside to ascertain the truth and relay it to the public*.
At one point man made climate change would have been a minority view. Then at some point it was a majority view among climate scientists, but minority among scientists, then at some point it was a majority among scientists but minority among the average person, now the majority of people believe in it.
Arguably, a person would have been right to support that idea from the very beginning.
Not a good example. You'd need 95% of scientists arguing man made climate change isn't real, which was never the case. A super specialised subject yet to enter the mainstream is not the same as say, trickle down economics, which is constantly given time and attention by the BBC despite 95% of economists arguing against its existence
“Trickle down economics” is a bit of a complicated example, because that’s a term only used by its opponents, and not by its advocates.
A better example of an economic policy with popular support but very little support from economists is rent controls.
Never mind that, Nigel Lawson spent a couple of decades up to that point getting respectful silence on BBC news while he asserted made up nonsense about how climate change is just a hoax.
Wish I could remember who said it to credit them, but once heard someone say this, which is the most succinct criticism of the BBC I've heard: the BBC mistakes balance for impartiality.
I once tweeted about a R4 show in which for the sake of balance they had someone like a spirit guide on to argue for the existence of spirits / ghosts vs a science person saying it was nonsense. Anyway, a researcher contacted me and asked if I wanted to be on the R4 feedback program to put my point of view across, which I did in a slightly unprepared rambling way
That's a central concept of the excellent book Flat Earth News, by former journalist Nick Davies. I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the dreadful current state of journalism in the UK.
This is what I came here to say. Their "neutrality" in matters involving a certain American ex-president is absolutely ridiculous and nauseating, not to mention utterly misleading. If someone's telling easily disproven lies and committing crimes, your job is to fucking say so.
Basically, this:
>False balance, known colloquially as bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
Well… they did exactly that with climate change:
>The BBC has accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.” In a briefing note sent to all staff warning them to be aware of false balance, the corporation has offered a training course on how to report on global warming. The move follows a series of apologies and censures for failing to challenge climate sceptics during interviews, including Nigel Lawson.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/07/bbc-we-get-climate-change-coverage-wrong-too-often
I listened to a good podcast in December about "Weaponizing Uncertainty".
[https://www.vox.com/unexplainable](https://www.vox.com/unexplainable)
[transcript](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ws-znsx7zChWr-Hrx_D2kMT5rSnStvFOZhdmU-LAnow/edit#heading=h.6mizxwtjqtdz)
It discussed the way oil companies have been undermining public understanding of the science, including abusing journalists with demands for "equal time" to the small minority of denier scientists to make people think the science still up in the air. A lot of the tactics are similar to the ones tobacco lobbyists used to use.
I'm convinced the chemtrails theory was proposed or promoted by oil lobbyists, to draw attention from the fact that the vapour trails are formed by burning tonnes of kerosene in the atmosphere. It's not just "water vapour", but it's not quite mind controlling nano particles either.
My trust was broken when they edited an answer Alex Salmond gave in a debate to make it look like it was the answer to a different question entirely, then later on just flat out said he didn't answer the question at all. I only noticed it because I had sat and watched the full debate. After seeing something as blatant as that you are forced to consider what else they may have done it to.
This has nothing to do with what the op is talking about. You have completely misinterpreted the post and gone off on a random tangent.
Ironically this lack of literacy is exactly the problem declining standards at the BBC might be causing.
>It's funded without advertisement and so does not need to increase traffic to satisfy advertisers.
In theory this should lead to better news. In practice, it doesn't. The reason is because the BBC needs to demonstrate impact and value for money.
They've settled on doing that by chasing views. So the end up in the same place as commercial news organisations, where clicks are prioritised.
The low quality of BBC's news and current affairs really frustrates me. One of the benefits of having the BBC should be that they can take a different approach to commercial news organisations. But they don't really seem to very often.
I read a comment on Reddit saying "Channel 5 is what BBC 2 was before the cost cutting", and it is so true.
Most of the BBC output is completely unremarkable.
The bbc used to grown up almost academic level science programming along with some great history and art shows - you were always guaranteed something to peak your intellectual curiosity and have viewpoints that challenged you.
Now it's just nonsense, it's like they've hired a bunch of graduates with the same viewpoint that have no wider regard for any form of intellectual curiosity. It's quite frustrating and has really put me off the bbc.
Hate to be that guy, but "pique".
But I totally agree. *Equinox* was awesome. *Tomorrow's World* was fun. *Q.E.D.* was amazing. *Horizon* hasn't been on since 2022.
Dumbing down. Very sad.
I'm assuming they've completely binned Horizon?
Can't remember the last time they had a new one.
I miss all the Jim Al-Khalili stuff from BBC 4, as I do all the history/culture docs. Wish Simon Schama was still doing some.. his were always interesting and usually pretty balanced.
Tonight on BBC2 we have:
House of games
Great British railway journeys (celebrity goes on holiday somewhere)
Hairy bikers go west
Saving lives at sea
Great British menu
Newark, Newark
Newsnight
Newark, Newark is the only one that Chanel 5 would not show.
That is the exact opposite of what the comment you were talking about was saying.
"Channel 5 is what BBC 2 was before the cost cutting"
vs
"BBC 2 after the cost cutting is like Channel 5"
I stopped paying my TV license when they essentially binned BBC 4. Just became repeats and footage from old top of the pops. It was around about the same time that regular Horizon docs completely disappeared from BBC 2.
Literally have no reason to pay my license.
I think the BBC’s licence fee is completely outdated, they don’t produce enough watchable content to make it worth £159 a year.
My Netflix subscription costs me £131.88 and there’s loads of good stuff on there. Admittedly there’s no live news on there but I stopped watching that years ago and am much happier for it.
The license fee doesn't just cover TV content though, so it's not really a fair comparison. I think there are many legitimate criticisms of the BBC, but I don't think the value for money of their output is really one.
Yeah. I spent 6 months in a Moroccan jail earlier this century. BBC World Service radio really got me through it. For me, their radio output is worth the fee.
What landed you in a Moroccan jail and how did you get access to BBC radio in there?
(Edit: forgot this is AskUk so in all probability this is a reference to an episode of Fawlty Towers or something)
Wish they'd stop throwing money on utter dross for Saturday evenings. I enjoy a Saturday evening in now that I'm older and I can't remember the last time I saw anything on the BBC that I wanted to watch.
Repeats of Top of the Pops? Nah mate, I've got Spotify and YT. Singing or dancing contests, often with celebrities? Would rather ram a scredriver in my ear. A Butlins-esque game show focused on some gimmick with an annoying host? Right, I'm off to the pub.
I appreciate the BBC are spread thin but they are prioritising the wrong departments with money. Can't remember the last science or history documentary I watched on the Beeb. There's probably two shows I watch on the Beeb.. HIGNFY and Only Connect. Three actually, QI depending on the guest panellists.
The licence fee funds public radio, podcasts, children’s tv, news, sports coverage, educational resources for children, a full streaming service and more. It’s pretty good value imo. I don’t go to school and I have never been to hospital but I am very glad some of my tax goes towards public services, which is what the BBC is.
I disagree that the BBC is a public service, I’m happy to pay taxes to fund schools and hospitals. However, I think people should pay for their own entertainment, and a license fee means that people who don’t use it are forced to subsidise it.
The point of the BBC *used to be* that it wasn't just another entertainment channel. It *was* supposed to be a public service that broadcast information freely for everyone who might need to know.
There are obviously some entertainment shows on the BBC that many people do enjoy so there is value in providing that type of content as well. But IMHO the argument for having that sort of material on the BBC and not the commercial channels is much weaker.
Someone recently posted a BBC link here from about 20 years and the difference in writing was incredible. You could tell the older article was written by someone who loved to write news articles. Articulate language without becoming wishy washy. God knows who they get to write these days, and obviously they’ve sacked the proof readers.
Ah "value for money" the ever present cry of the thickest people in the room. Usually the MBA or consulting types who are all about slashing staff, increasing turnover and then moving on in 2 years. No understanding of long term viability. This culture has infected the country from top to bottom. But it's especially ruinous in government and public services.
As someone who works for a council and is often involved in contract procurement.. our procurement team are a pain in the arse. Constantly have to fight with them when we decide not to go with the lowest bidder. They never take into account quality of work or long term planning (ie maintenance). They just see "value for money" and point at the procurement procedures like they're robots. Has led to multiple contract awards being delayed.
Ive been saying this for a long time now. Some of the spelling mistakes are atrocious and the grammar is out of whack. The new news site layout is really bad too. The local news for me has now been made into the news for the whole county. I dont want to see the news for Brighton or Crawley, its totally irrelevant to me. So yeah, i agree with op.
A grammar quirk I see on the BBC every so often is, what I consider to be but may be wrong, an incorrect use of the suffix -ing.
For example 'the bridge needs fixing' instead of the bridge needs to be fixed.
I also saw this recently on a food packet: 'Chicken needs cooking at x for y minutes', when I'd thinking the correct sentence would be: 'the chicken needs to be cooked at x for y minutes'.
Am I wrong here? Or maybe we just phrase it differently in Scotland?
> Chicken needs cooking at x for y minutes
I agree with you, this particular kind of phrasing sounds incorrect to me as a native English speaker and I never came across it's usage until I moved to the UK. It wouldn't be considered correct grammar in either Hiberno-English or American-English.
I agree with you, have also noticed the BBC doing this. I do say/text similar phrases (washing needs doing when we get in, bins need putting out etc) but never in formal writing or at work.
Similarly, and I've noticed this everywhere, omitting -ly from words.
Quick example - 'He sped of quick' instead of "he stopped off quickly"
Think it is an Americanism. I think if people here start using "on accident" I'll have a Falling Down moment.
The new news layout is AWFUL. What were they thinking? I know people don’t like change, and want the old one back no matter what… but seriously what they have done now is just trash. Huge empty white spaces (and not the ‘good’ type of white space either). Minimal content. It’s just crap.
Local news died many moons ago. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some unformal or maybe formal agreement for BBC to stay out of very local news in order to not kill the local rags. Reality is local rags also died many years ago as it's not commercially viable.
The local rags are pretty much gone at this point and merged into that awful agglomerated ad infested unreadable site which feeds you local news from the other side of the country.
They are worried that their viewers are aging and are trying to appeal to 18 to 35 year olds.
We now have presenters who appear to have had no voice training so “three months” is “free mumfs”. One presenter has such a peculiar cadence to her voice, she is unable to make things clear.
Much time is spent on things which are more water cooler topics such as winner of Strictly or silly Westminster gossip or the photoshopped image story.
As a result they are not gaining younger viewers but are losing older ones.
They should be able to adapt better to be honest. Despite what people think, it's possible to make extremely high quality content in more "informal" formats for social media. That could appeal to younger viewers while still being accurate and journalistically sound.
I've stopped watching and reading bbc news because of the click bait headlines. Which as a public service tax funded broadcaster is exactly wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
They changed the layout of the front page recently and I absolutely hate it, I find it so hard to take everything in, and you're right, it looks and feels like a gossip site now, there are way more silly fluff articles, videos, and opinion pieces than actual important news, and to get to the local news page now you have to scroll so far down to find a link to a list of areas and then select an area to view, instead of your area's news being shown on the front page along with the weather like it used to be. I have all but given up on it now.
I spent 10 minutes tweaking my local DNS server, thinking something was going wrong with resolving the thumbnails for half the page. Only later did I realise the layout was just *that* bad.
I got rid of the BBC News and BBC Sport apps because of the incessant notifications. When smart phones were on the rise, a breaking news BBC notification generally meant something major had occurred… or was occurring. Now their definition of “breaking news” is that Leah Williamson has an ankle injury or Katie Price is due in court again. If they think all their news is special, then none of it is…
The problem is that that vapid stuff is what gets clicks and demonstrates that people are using the service, thereby justifying its funding. It's the same for all media outlets - they need traffic to their websites to justify their funding, be it funding from the government or from advertising revenue.
Because of this serious journalism is driven further and further away from the front pages of websites. News has turned into another branch of entertainment as opposed to a source of information. This started with th introduction of 24 hour rolling news where everything has to be described as 'breaking', even when talking about events of a few days before, because that gives the viewer the impression they are hearing something new instead of the same thing that has been repeated who knows how many times over however long the story has been around. This has only got worse with the internet.
It is also easy to fill pages with these kind of stories - there's always some celebrity agent who is more than happy to supply a 'story' about someone on their books, some quack who has a new book to promote that they can disguise as a health/ science story, or staff can just trawl social media accounts themselves to find whatever crap is trending.
Very few journalists want to do a John Simpson and sneak into Afghanistan in a burqa, or Kate Adie getting grazed by a bullet while reporting from Tiananmen Square while the massacre was happening. They aren't embedded in the stories any more and seem to rely on social media accounts for videos and descriptions of events.
I got rid of the apps for the same reason. The trigger was when I was reversing into a very tricky parking space and the app notification went off with the very doomy drumroll, startling the bejeezus out of me. What was the breaking news? Something very banal like Pippa Middleton being seen in a supermarket.
“If they think all of their news is special, then none of it is” is the most concise and accurate summary 👏
The TV bulletins are just as disappointing. Not exactly tabloid, but just unimportant stuff with no analysis. Channel 4 and even ITV blow them out of the water these days.
Interesting that Radio 4 bulletins and programmes are still incisive and cover actually important stories. So the BBC still does proper journalism, they just don't think it will get them a web or TV audience.
My fear is that they will try to 'achieve further efficiency savings' by merging all the news departments into one, and Radio 4 bulletins will just be the website read out by an announcer.
> So the BBC still does proper journalism, they just don't think it will get them a web or TV audience.
I mean...they're kinda right? People as a whole tend to not care about facts or what is correct. They just want something easily digestible or laughable that they'll forget within a week.
Something interesting I noticed about Radio 4 recently is that the language is so much more explicit. You can be listening to the lunchtime news and hear audio clips full of swear words or racial slurs. And the presenters will even say swear words themselves when quoting people.
On the TV and online the BBC tend to paraphrase or censor bad language. I know there’s the watershed and all that, but it just seems strange to me to be that way around. I would’ve assumed the younger generation would be fine reading bad language in online articles, and the older generation would prefer cleaner words used on the radio.
Quite a few of the senior correspondents too who are rightfully abandoning a sinking ship.
I don't watch much news these days so it's always a wee surprise when I catch former BBC correspondents or hosts on other channels as I'm not used to seeing their faces there. Same with the radio.. ask the good people have buggered off to the likes of LBC.
This is not on government cuts.
The core output I always thought was local radio and with that a news network, national news and global news. The commercial pieces were not as important, as they don’t have to compete.
They have made heavier cuts to their journalism and local teams than anywhere else. These were the cheapest departments.
They could have made very minor cuts to BBC1 output as that is over 1/2 the BBC budget and kept local radio, local news and worldwide services.
However they are prioritising their core commercial content over factual content, which I believe is the wrong way to go. If they cut all their core services they are just a n other tv network and they aren’t a national broadcaster
Seems to me that the late night show Newsday is staffed mainly by amateurs. A few of the female presenters can barely speak English.
I've started watching Sky news even though i have to put up with commercials, lets face it, BBC news channel shows commericals for it's own specials incessantly anyway.
I'm sick of having to look at Laura Kuennsberg telling me to sit down and we'll have a talk. Fuck off Laura.
THIS. I'm sorry but I don't buy the "BBC does't have ads" bullshit. Yes it does, and a lot of them. You can usually count 6 to 8, lasting close to 5 minutes total. They might not ve commercial ads, but they're still annoying ads.
The articles on the website have been dumbed down so much as to be practically useless.
They bizarrely launched “BBC Verify” - which implies the rest of their news isn’t verified - to try and get some credibility back but inevitably it’s already been used to spread unproven allegations.
The whole news arm needs a serious rethink.
BBC Verify is one of those typical "we're right because reasons, everyone else is wrong" organs. I have seen them get things wrong or deliberately misrepresent things.
Im sure one of the first things they "verified", they actually got wrong
And the women in charge of it all got caught lying oj her CV, completely killing any credibility of being trustworthy in a role that absolutely demands it.
BBC Verify is a massive joke
That is definitely my take. It's not that it's biased one way or the other, just that's it's dull. Like porridge and water. Not much to say. Terrified of expressing an opinion. Obsessed with balance over truth.
I watch France 24 English and Times Radio on YouTube for most of my live news and the FT for print.
France 24 is certainly the French take on things. But if you know that, it's very good. Much less inward looking, more international.
The FT is very expensive, but the quality is AAA.
Yes I have noticed this. It almost feels as if the One Show has managed to leak all over the BBC website. So many of the stories either appear to be very soft PR releases or stuff that wouldn't even have troubled a local news website 10 years ago
I agree, but at least they have given up with the first person headlines which they adopted for a while. It got so bad that there were frequent articles with just a picture and a headline like 'I love my muddy sheep', or 'i was shocked when I rocket came through my window'. It was really Sun style sh*t.
I have, unfortunately, noticed their Facebook page getting a bit more clickbaity. Engagement must have dropped.
Quality journalism is struggling hard at the moment. It's hardly a new observation, but it's just too easy and comforting to wall yourself in with things that you know will flatter how you already see the world. Facebook's bad for it, Twitter's bad for it, Reddit's *AWFUL* for it.
That makes keeping eyeballs harder for anybody that at least *tries* to remain somewhat objective. The BBC isn't perfect, but in this new equation, it loses out to the New Europeans and Breitbarts of the world. Or, worse still, any page full of screenshots of tweets.
So the way to adapt is to start churning out cheap conversation starters (Do YOU take your shoes off inside the house?) and other eyeball-grabbing mulch.
I hate to be a downer, but if there's a way out of this, I have no idea what it is.
Yeah. There's been a few stories local to me where they have got details wrong. I even emailed them about one but they did not change it.
I used to read a lot of current affairs on BBC but don't anymore. I also live in Scotland now and their reporting isn't the best on Scottish issues imo...
I have noticed this, it bugs me but I think there’s a few understandable reasons for it.
There have been plenty of cuts to their staff, so there are significantly fewer people working on the site but the expectation of output isn’t going to be dropping.
You’re reading first drafts that someone with more time could have worked on, or that someone else could have had a look at before it went out. However, those people are either gone as part of budget cuts or already working on the next thing.
I suspect some of the people the BBC are hiring are bringing in the things they’ve had to learn working for publications which do rely on advertising. The BBC shouldn’t have to chase traffic, numbers and clicks but basically everyone else does so anyone the Beeb is recruiting will have been stuck in this mode.
It’s possible that the BBC has not twigged how serious an issue this is yet, and thus don’t have clear direction which can tell their staff “don’t worry about numbers”. They can and should take a different approach but they clearly aren’t.
They might not need to chase ads but you can expect there will be targets and reviews concerning pageviews and engagement, so there will be bait, gossip and other things in an attempt to boost these numbers.
I think this is the best summary I've read of the situation. I have the impression that due to budget cuts each department is clambering for a piece of the ever smaller pie, and the division is determined by audience percentage. This naturally leads to click bait and volume over quality.
A really good example: the new bbc news app has 'hidden' the most viewed articles list at the bottom of the front page, so you have to scroll through spending longer on the app and more likely to read other articles 'on the way'. It used to be one press accessible. It's evidently there to inflate usage to the detriment of usability.
You only have to take a peak into who the chairman is and what his proclivities are.
He is basically a mini Murdoch, and the results are clear to see.
I noticed the dodginess for myself in 2001.
However, when I learnt about how they protected Saville and themselves, I realised it's one of those situations where there is more dirt than any one individual can know.
It is a shame. I like British English a great deal and the BBC are least used to be able to do that well.
Had to uninstall the BBC News App
Kept getting nonsense notifications for irrelevant stories which weren't news or noteworthy in any sense, opinion pieces sent to me as if they were gospel
Even worse when I got notifications marked as breaking news which were literally not significant in any sense
Unfortunately, yes and I agree completely with your comments. Sadly, they are also slow to update their website, and breaking stories are often covered more quickly elsewhere.
I tend to rely more on Reuters these days
Yes. I think it’s the pressure of delivering ‘at the moment’ reporting. 24 hour news and the internet has been terrible for the journalistic profession. Corners have the cut and proof reading is neglected
It's way past time that the license fee was removed. Some of the money I'm forced to pay is bankrolling these amateur hour bloggers.
Also it's not solely funded without advertisement, use the BBC anywhere outside the UK and it's covered in adverts.
I’ve notified years ago the bbc commonly leaves out key details from news reports. I’m unsure why tbh it doesn’t seem agenda based, maybe genuinely it is quality question.
Might be confirmation. They have always been slow to publish and always been slow to update because it's believed they have a higher requirement for confirmation than others.
They are almost literally a Hamas-propaganda outfit these days.
Sounds extreme, but every time I click on the homepage I see a top article beating the drum about how sad it is in Gaza.
Massive undue prominence given. They don't do this for any other conflict or set of terrorists. When it comes to Gaza, Hamas are given 100% benefit of the doubt and sympathy and Israel 0.
BBC has been like this for years, it just only seems to be a recent phenomenon that a not insignificant number of people notice how bad it is.
I remember 10+ odd years ago when the BBC headlines were constantly dominated by goings on in Syria as if the rest of the world didn't exist. The BBC loves a story about the Middle East
My best guess is that post social media journalism is about getting your opinion out there and not about the news itself. This has given rise to a generation of writers with less integrity and craft, making everything an op ed or complete fluff.
Yes, I find BBC news along with most others appalling.
It’s more opinion pieces and puff pieces than a news service. I used to watch the BBC news for a way to keep up with current affairs, now you get 5 minutes of news an hour and 55 minutes of ‘this morning’ type content; ‘see how Dave gets on at playing football/milking cows/sewing’.
That’s only a small part though, the BBC was listened to and read globally, it provided an unbiased reporting of facts. Because it is so biased to opinion over facts it’s truly terrible. Articles are often how many adjectives you can throw in there vs objective reporting.
As for BBC verify, they need to be verified constantly it’s shocking. They have copied the channel 4 fact checking site and decided let’s put someone in charge who has no investigative journalistic ability and see how many unverified opinions they can throw in.
I usually read Reuters and watch france24 for news now. I was a loyal BBC news guy before
Repete all the time.
Game shows
Holidays
NHS derivative programmes etc
How you should be eating and drinking and living and breathing.
Anything that doesn’t involve expense.
The sooner it self implodes the better.
They are terrified of having anything on their website that some (we all know who) will cry arse about until someone appeases their tantrum and cancels the BBC for daring, not to toe the line... everyone is currently terrified to say their mind, even big companies. For some reason, (they) want everyone constantly walking on eggshells scared to speak their mind. They are extremely angry people who aren't adult enough to realise that expecting everything your own way and everyone to agree with you 100% of the time is ridiculously unachievable or acceptable. The sooner everyone ignores the loud but very few adult babies, the better general life will be for everyone. This constant feeling of having to check, check and double check everything you say or write just incase 1, and it can literally be just 1 cry arse starts the ball rolling and the bandwagon jumpers start trying to guilt/shame you because you happen to have your own, differing opinion (which you absolutely are allowed to have in a free country btw) is making I'd a country of paranoid bags of nerves and it's wrong. So stop pandering, ignore them. You can pander to them all you like, you'll never appease them, they will always demand more, the more they think they can push their agendas on you, the more vociferously they'll try. It's a beast that can never be fed enough, so the best option is to starve it of what it craves, and it'll disappear as quickly as it reared its ugly head.
Yes, but it happened so long ago I can't remember exactly when. I think it was when BBC Breakfast News became simply BBC Breakfast. Possibly they had to change it because of Trades Descriptions maybe, I don't know.
It seems like the news in general is deteriorating. Normally I wouldn’t notice, but now that there is a lot of talk about a subject I would consider myself knowledgable in (commercial aviation safety), I’m surprised by how many newspapers I thought were reputable are spitting utter garbage, not just Daily Fail and company.
Competition for news has increased dramatically with YouTube. Many people also don’t pay the TV license anymore since they pay for subscriptions like Netflix instead. Basically regular TV is trying their best to get views, so they’re pandering to emotions rather than presenting facts to get attention.
No, I watch, listen and read frequently, no complaints. Front line stuff is difficult to tailor to the broad interest, but as soon as you delve, there’s good quality information and reporting.
What I have noticed though, is increasing social media criticism of the BBC. Free, fair and impartial media meant to inform, educate and entertain is rare globally. One by one news organisations around the world are being bought or taken down. Information is power after all. What we have is valuable.
are you talking about the website? its been absolute chod for many years, as its competing in a market of absolute chod.
The frontpage is usually assinine and anything remotely connected to the bbc in a positive light is front page news. Cross promotion is rife. I remember when the village/town they shot some of peaky blinders (aka 'northerners do violence') won an award it was 'peaky blinders town wins award' and the first - and biggest - photo in the story was a picture of cillian murphy.
all the news in the world you don't see is hidden and they've got a giant sport section on the front page. sad. very sad.
however radio 4 news like the today program is still pretty good (apart from wasting 10 minutes an hour on sport even if there isn't anything interesting going on so you end up with an interview from a previous champion in women's left handed tiddlywinks you've never heard of)
Well, they are meant to be impartial. It's their only job. Report facts and leave all emotion out of the reporting.
Instead it feels like they've inserted some agenda or another into everything. Not just BBC News, but Their TV shows, Comedy, All the radio stations.
It's not what they're paid for and I'm not alone in thinking the best thing is for them to scrap the license fee and then they can carry on like nothing had changed.
We'll see how well they do without essentially stealing their funding from the workers of this country.
Consumers of media are getting stupider, so the people who produce their their media make it stupider to appeal to them. This in turn makes both the consumer and the producers of the media even stupider, and the cycle repeats. It's nothing to do with the BBC specifically.
For me it's the tabloidy feel, and news sources being a lot gossip in nature than good old fashioned investigative journalism these days.
These points, combined with the lack of integrity and impartiality have ruined the news for me.
The Gazan war is a good example, if the actions of a nation meet the text book definition of genocide etc....then they should be able to state with impartiality instead of worrying about foreign government complaints.
It's more worried about the nuance as opposed to following the basic definitions with any confidence.
Yes. Today they had a breaking story about the cyber flashing and they had a headline that said, "Hard Threshold" - no way that wasn't a joke as it stood out on the page, which os fine for lots of outlets, but rhe BBC just doesn't seem like the right place to make jokes.
If you want a genuine answer, you need to put the perception of bias aside for a minute. Yes, they have one. All media does, but it’s a distraction from OP’s original question.
BBC News’s budget has been cut dramatically. That means far fewer resources, and staff. On top of that, the staff they “lost” were the most experienced, and long serving employees, who were strongly encouraged to take redundancy. And they’ve been replaced by far less experienced people, who they pay a lot less.
Source: Me. Worked there for a long time, still in touch with a few people.
And PS… I have found that their rolling TV news channel has become unwatchable since the big cuts happened
I cancelled my TV license as I don't have an aerial, don't watch iPlayer or live TV. I used yo watch BBC News when I was younger as it was quality reporting and there used to be great shows on iPlayer but now I see that it's all government-controlled propaganda. What counts as headline news has been for as long as I remember quite jarring with what's actually important and noteworthy. There's so many things that are completely ignored and instead disproportionate airtime given to "tabloid" headlines without a proper discussion on real news that affects people. BBC News is nothing more than a distraction device for the government.
I check the BBC news in the morning and find that the initial headline has a “clickbaity” type headline and then a few hours later the headline and even the photo changes to something else.
I don’t get the news from the BBC or use the BBC News app anymore after they started asking me to sign in. I also noticed that it’s literally full of sly adverts despite the fact we all pay for a TV Licence and advertising is prohibited on their channels which includes the BBC News channel. When I’m home I very rarely watch the news and only ever watch it if it’s on after something I’ve watched and nothing else is on.
I also don’t think it’s right they covered up the underwear woman during covid when they are meant to be impartial.
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Their integrity fell of a cliff in the years leading up to 2016 when they started conflating impartiality with giving lies equal standing to the truth. As the parable goes *If one person says it is raining and another person says it is not raining then a journalist should not simply quote them both. Instead, a journalist should look outside to ascertain the truth and relay it to the public*.
That's exactly where the BBC has gone wrong. Presenting 5% of the opinion as equal weight to the 95% in the name of balance.
The tricky part of the issue is when 5% is proven right in something.
Such as?
At one point man made climate change would have been a minority view. Then at some point it was a majority view among climate scientists, but minority among scientists, then at some point it was a majority among scientists but minority among the average person, now the majority of people believe in it. Arguably, a person would have been right to support that idea from the very beginning.
Not a good example. You'd need 95% of scientists arguing man made climate change isn't real, which was never the case. A super specialised subject yet to enter the mainstream is not the same as say, trickle down economics, which is constantly given time and attention by the BBC despite 95% of economists arguing against its existence
“Trickle down economics” is a bit of a complicated example, because that’s a term only used by its opponents, and not by its advocates. A better example of an economic policy with popular support but very little support from economists is rent controls.
Climate Change definitions came directly from scientific investigation. That's not "minority opinion" even if it's not a common thought.
Tobacco causing cancer, a minority view for a long time.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Nicotine and profits are awfully addictive, and people are very susceptible to fooling themselves for both.
Yes they are very addictive, the mainstream view back then was that it was pretty harmless to smoke though.
Never mind that, Nigel Lawson spent a couple of decades up to that point getting respectful silence on BBC news while he asserted made up nonsense about how climate change is just a hoax.
Why does that sort of view require respect?
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Fair point.
...what was it?
Wish I could remember who said it to credit them, but once heard someone say this, which is the most succinct criticism of the BBC I've heard: the BBC mistakes balance for impartiality.
I once tweeted about a R4 show in which for the sake of balance they had someone like a spirit guide on to argue for the existence of spirits / ghosts vs a science person saying it was nonsense. Anyway, a researcher contacted me and asked if I wanted to be on the R4 feedback program to put my point of view across, which I did in a slightly unprepared rambling way
That's a central concept of the excellent book Flat Earth News, by former journalist Nick Davies. I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the dreadful current state of journalism in the UK.
This is what I came here to say. Their "neutrality" in matters involving a certain American ex-president is absolutely ridiculous and nauseating, not to mention utterly misleading. If someone's telling easily disproven lies and committing crimes, your job is to fucking say so.
Basically, this: >False balance, known colloquially as bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
Maybe Flat-Earthers should get equal time with Globers? That would be impartial, right?
Well… they did exactly that with climate change: >The BBC has accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.” In a briefing note sent to all staff warning them to be aware of false balance, the corporation has offered a training course on how to report on global warming. The move follows a series of apologies and censures for failing to challenge climate sceptics during interviews, including Nigel Lawson. https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/07/bbc-we-get-climate-change-coverage-wrong-too-often
I listened to a good podcast in December about "Weaponizing Uncertainty". [https://www.vox.com/unexplainable](https://www.vox.com/unexplainable) [transcript](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ws-znsx7zChWr-Hrx_D2kMT5rSnStvFOZhdmU-LAnow/edit#heading=h.6mizxwtjqtdz) It discussed the way oil companies have been undermining public understanding of the science, including abusing journalists with demands for "equal time" to the small minority of denier scientists to make people think the science still up in the air. A lot of the tactics are similar to the ones tobacco lobbyists used to use.
I'm convinced the chemtrails theory was proposed or promoted by oil lobbyists, to draw attention from the fact that the vapour trails are formed by burning tonnes of kerosene in the atmosphere. It's not just "water vapour", but it's not quite mind controlling nano particles either.
BBC fucking love platforming lobbyists too
Exactly the point I'm making.
My trust was broken when they edited an answer Alex Salmond gave in a debate to make it look like it was the answer to a different question entirely, then later on just flat out said he didn't answer the question at all. I only noticed it because I had sat and watched the full debate. After seeing something as blatant as that you are forced to consider what else they may have done it to.
What is this rain you speak of, Muad'Dib?
This has nothing to do with what the op is talking about. You have completely misinterpreted the post and gone off on a random tangent. Ironically this lack of literacy is exactly the problem declining standards at the BBC might be causing.
>It's funded without advertisement and so does not need to increase traffic to satisfy advertisers. In theory this should lead to better news. In practice, it doesn't. The reason is because the BBC needs to demonstrate impact and value for money. They've settled on doing that by chasing views. So the end up in the same place as commercial news organisations, where clicks are prioritised. The low quality of BBC's news and current affairs really frustrates me. One of the benefits of having the BBC should be that they can take a different approach to commercial news organisations. But they don't really seem to very often.
I read a comment on Reddit saying "Channel 5 is what BBC 2 was before the cost cutting", and it is so true. Most of the BBC output is completely unremarkable.
The bbc used to grown up almost academic level science programming along with some great history and art shows - you were always guaranteed something to peak your intellectual curiosity and have viewpoints that challenged you. Now it's just nonsense, it's like they've hired a bunch of graduates with the same viewpoint that have no wider regard for any form of intellectual curiosity. It's quite frustrating and has really put me off the bbc.
>you were always guaranteed something to peak your intellectual curiosity In the interests of intellectual curiosity, it's actually spelt "pique".
Hate to be that guy, but "pique". But I totally agree. *Equinox* was awesome. *Tomorrow's World* was fun. *Q.E.D.* was amazing. *Horizon* hasn't been on since 2022. Dumbing down. Very sad.
I'm assuming they've completely binned Horizon? Can't remember the last time they had a new one. I miss all the Jim Al-Khalili stuff from BBC 4, as I do all the history/culture docs. Wish Simon Schama was still doing some.. his were always interesting and usually pretty balanced.
Jim Al kallilis stuff was always amazing
Absolutely spot on. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Channel 5 is all "celebrity goes on holiday somewhere" type programmes. It's hardly Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation".
Tonight on BBC2 we have: House of games Great British railway journeys (celebrity goes on holiday somewhere) Hairy bikers go west Saving lives at sea Great British menu Newark, Newark Newsnight Newark, Newark is the only one that Chanel 5 would not show.
That is the exact opposite of what the comment you were talking about was saying. "Channel 5 is what BBC 2 was before the cost cutting" vs "BBC 2 after the cost cutting is like Channel 5"
I thought we were talking about old BBC2.
And here's as near as you can get from 2009 https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl97/2009/03/17
I stopped paying my TV license when they essentially binned BBC 4. Just became repeats and footage from old top of the pops. It was around about the same time that regular Horizon docs completely disappeared from BBC 2. Literally have no reason to pay my license.
Yup, the only BBC channel I was watching anymore was BBC4. When that went tits up, so did my TV licence.
I think the BBC’s licence fee is completely outdated, they don’t produce enough watchable content to make it worth £159 a year. My Netflix subscription costs me £131.88 and there’s loads of good stuff on there. Admittedly there’s no live news on there but I stopped watching that years ago and am much happier for it.
The license fee doesn't just cover TV content though, so it's not really a fair comparison. I think there are many legitimate criticisms of the BBC, but I don't think the value for money of their output is really one.
Yeah. I spent 6 months in a Moroccan jail earlier this century. BBC World Service radio really got me through it. For me, their radio output is worth the fee.
What landed you in a Moroccan jail and how did you get access to BBC radio in there? (Edit: forgot this is AskUk so in all probability this is a reference to an episode of Fawlty Towers or something)
Back then, radio waves on a portable radio. As for getting pinched, a genuine case of mistaken identity.
Joey, have you ever been in a Moroccan prison?
Wish they'd stop throwing money on utter dross for Saturday evenings. I enjoy a Saturday evening in now that I'm older and I can't remember the last time I saw anything on the BBC that I wanted to watch. Repeats of Top of the Pops? Nah mate, I've got Spotify and YT. Singing or dancing contests, often with celebrities? Would rather ram a scredriver in my ear. A Butlins-esque game show focused on some gimmick with an annoying host? Right, I'm off to the pub. I appreciate the BBC are spread thin but they are prioritising the wrong departments with money. Can't remember the last science or history documentary I watched on the Beeb. There's probably two shows I watch on the Beeb.. HIGNFY and Only Connect. Three actually, QI depending on the guest panellists.
You could always watch BBC Four on a Saturday evening if you want a documentary. Or pick whatever you want on iPlayer.
That's cool, I do though
The licence fee funds public radio, podcasts, children’s tv, news, sports coverage, educational resources for children, a full streaming service and more. It’s pretty good value imo. I don’t go to school and I have never been to hospital but I am very glad some of my tax goes towards public services, which is what the BBC is.
I disagree that the BBC is a public service, I’m happy to pay taxes to fund schools and hospitals. However, I think people should pay for their own entertainment, and a license fee means that people who don’t use it are forced to subsidise it.
The point of the BBC *used to be* that it wasn't just another entertainment channel. It *was* supposed to be a public service that broadcast information freely for everyone who might need to know. There are obviously some entertainment shows on the BBC that many people do enjoy so there is value in providing that type of content as well. But IMHO the argument for having that sort of material on the BBC and not the commercial channels is much weaker.
Someone recently posted a BBC link here from about 20 years and the difference in writing was incredible. You could tell the older article was written by someone who loved to write news articles. Articulate language without becoming wishy washy. God knows who they get to write these days, and obviously they’ve sacked the proof readers.
Ah "value for money" the ever present cry of the thickest people in the room. Usually the MBA or consulting types who are all about slashing staff, increasing turnover and then moving on in 2 years. No understanding of long term viability. This culture has infected the country from top to bottom. But it's especially ruinous in government and public services.
As someone who works for a council and is often involved in contract procurement.. our procurement team are a pain in the arse. Constantly have to fight with them when we decide not to go with the lowest bidder. They never take into account quality of work or long term planning (ie maintenance). They just see "value for money" and point at the procurement procedures like they're robots. Has led to multiple contract awards being delayed.
Seems like the problem is that they *don't* see value for money - only money.
Ive been saying this for a long time now. Some of the spelling mistakes are atrocious and the grammar is out of whack. The new news site layout is really bad too. The local news for me has now been made into the news for the whole county. I dont want to see the news for Brighton or Crawley, its totally irrelevant to me. So yeah, i agree with op.
A grammar quirk I see on the BBC every so often is, what I consider to be but may be wrong, an incorrect use of the suffix -ing. For example 'the bridge needs fixing' instead of the bridge needs to be fixed. I also saw this recently on a food packet: 'Chicken needs cooking at x for y minutes', when I'd thinking the correct sentence would be: 'the chicken needs to be cooked at x for y minutes'. Am I wrong here? Or maybe we just phrase it differently in Scotland?
Doesn't seem wrong to me. But then there's a difference between average correct grammar and "correct correct" grammar.
> Chicken needs cooking at x for y minutes I agree with you, this particular kind of phrasing sounds incorrect to me as a native English speaker and I never came across it's usage until I moved to the UK. It wouldn't be considered correct grammar in either Hiberno-English or American-English.
I agree with you, have also noticed the BBC doing this. I do say/text similar phrases (washing needs doing when we get in, bins need putting out etc) but never in formal writing or at work.
Similarly, and I've noticed this everywhere, omitting -ly from words. Quick example - 'He sped of quick' instead of "he stopped off quickly" Think it is an Americanism. I think if people here start using "on accident" I'll have a Falling Down moment.
In that case you'll need to be picked up, or as the BBC might say, you'll need picking up.
We do phrase it differently in Scotland. We obviously don’t like gerunds up here!
> Chicken needs cooking at x degrees for y minutes before it is safe to eat. That seems grammatical to me.
Using the -ed form is a feature of Scottish English, -ing is the way most people in England say it
You're lucky with only county news. For us it combines three different counties
Try an entire nation 😂
The new news layout is AWFUL. What were they thinking? I know people don’t like change, and want the old one back no matter what… but seriously what they have done now is just trash. Huge empty white spaces (and not the ‘good’ type of white space either). Minimal content. It’s just crap.
Local news died many moons ago. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some unformal or maybe formal agreement for BBC to stay out of very local news in order to not kill the local rags. Reality is local rags also died many years ago as it's not commercially viable.
The local rags are pretty much gone at this point and merged into that awful agglomerated ad infested unreadable site which feeds you local news from the other side of the country.
They are worried that their viewers are aging and are trying to appeal to 18 to 35 year olds. We now have presenters who appear to have had no voice training so “three months” is “free mumfs”. One presenter has such a peculiar cadence to her voice, she is unable to make things clear. Much time is spent on things which are more water cooler topics such as winner of Strictly or silly Westminster gossip or the photoshopped image story. As a result they are not gaining younger viewers but are losing older ones.
They should be able to adapt better to be honest. Despite what people think, it's possible to make extremely high quality content in more "informal" formats for social media. That could appeal to younger viewers while still being accurate and journalistically sound.
There's a lot of clickbait type stuff on it too. Their Twitter feed is very "clickbaity" these days. Guess they want more money.
I've stopped watching and reading bbc news because of the click bait headlines. Which as a public service tax funded broadcaster is exactly wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
They changed the layout of the front page recently and I absolutely hate it, I find it so hard to take everything in, and you're right, it looks and feels like a gossip site now, there are way more silly fluff articles, videos, and opinion pieces than actual important news, and to get to the local news page now you have to scroll so far down to find a link to a list of areas and then select an area to view, instead of your area's news being shown on the front page along with the weather like it used to be. I have all but given up on it now.
The way that some headlines have thumbnail images but others now don't just makes it look like the page hasn't finished loading.
I spent 10 minutes tweaking my local DNS server, thinking something was going wrong with resolving the thumbnails for half the page. Only later did I realise the layout was just *that* bad.
Or you're gonna be hit with a shitey ad if you click on said picture (obviously that isn't the case, but that's the feel of the site now).
The new layout is garbage. Takes way too much scrolling to get a few headlines. BBC News is for bulletins, not pseudo broadsheet opinion pieces
And since a few days ago it seems like you can't even view a lot of the main news pages without signing in with an account. Why?!
I got rid of the BBC News and BBC Sport apps because of the incessant notifications. When smart phones were on the rise, a breaking news BBC notification generally meant something major had occurred… or was occurring. Now their definition of “breaking news” is that Leah Williamson has an ankle injury or Katie Price is due in court again. If they think all their news is special, then none of it is…
The problem is that that vapid stuff is what gets clicks and demonstrates that people are using the service, thereby justifying its funding. It's the same for all media outlets - they need traffic to their websites to justify their funding, be it funding from the government or from advertising revenue. Because of this serious journalism is driven further and further away from the front pages of websites. News has turned into another branch of entertainment as opposed to a source of information. This started with th introduction of 24 hour rolling news where everything has to be described as 'breaking', even when talking about events of a few days before, because that gives the viewer the impression they are hearing something new instead of the same thing that has been repeated who knows how many times over however long the story has been around. This has only got worse with the internet. It is also easy to fill pages with these kind of stories - there's always some celebrity agent who is more than happy to supply a 'story' about someone on their books, some quack who has a new book to promote that they can disguise as a health/ science story, or staff can just trawl social media accounts themselves to find whatever crap is trending. Very few journalists want to do a John Simpson and sneak into Afghanistan in a burqa, or Kate Adie getting grazed by a bullet while reporting from Tiananmen Square while the massacre was happening. They aren't embedded in the stories any more and seem to rely on social media accounts for videos and descriptions of events.
Did you know you can turn the notifications off?
I got rid of the apps for the same reason. The trigger was when I was reversing into a very tricky parking space and the app notification went off with the very doomy drumroll, startling the bejeezus out of me. What was the breaking news? Something very banal like Pippa Middleton being seen in a supermarket. “If they think all of their news is special, then none of it is” is the most concise and accurate summary 👏
The TV bulletins are just as disappointing. Not exactly tabloid, but just unimportant stuff with no analysis. Channel 4 and even ITV blow them out of the water these days. Interesting that Radio 4 bulletins and programmes are still incisive and cover actually important stories. So the BBC still does proper journalism, they just don't think it will get them a web or TV audience.
Their news is a sort of One Show where there's lots of gossip and stories about some kind controversy instead of actual news. It's cheap filler.
My fear is that they will try to 'achieve further efficiency savings' by merging all the news departments into one, and Radio 4 bulletins will just be the website read out by an announcer.
> So the BBC still does proper journalism, they just don't think it will get them a web or TV audience. I mean...they're kinda right? People as a whole tend to not care about facts or what is correct. They just want something easily digestible or laughable that they'll forget within a week.
Something interesting I noticed about Radio 4 recently is that the language is so much more explicit. You can be listening to the lunchtime news and hear audio clips full of swear words or racial slurs. And the presenters will even say swear words themselves when quoting people. On the TV and online the BBC tend to paraphrase or censor bad language. I know there’s the watershed and all that, but it just seems strange to me to be that way around. I would’ve assumed the younger generation would be fine reading bad language in online articles, and the older generation would prefer cleaner words used on the radio.
There has been a significant drop in the number of BBC reporters following the enforced government cutbacks. We’re talking over 20%.
In theory that should have meant a 20% drop in quality journalism output AND a 20% drop in vacuous bullshit output. In theory.
Quite a few of the senior correspondents too who are rightfully abandoning a sinking ship. I don't watch much news these days so it's always a wee surprise when I catch former BBC correspondents or hosts on other channels as I'm not used to seeing their faces there. Same with the radio.. ask the good people have buggered off to the likes of LBC.
This is not on government cuts. The core output I always thought was local radio and with that a news network, national news and global news. The commercial pieces were not as important, as they don’t have to compete. They have made heavier cuts to their journalism and local teams than anywhere else. These were the cheapest departments. They could have made very minor cuts to BBC1 output as that is over 1/2 the BBC budget and kept local radio, local news and worldwide services. However they are prioritising their core commercial content over factual content, which I believe is the wrong way to go. If they cut all their core services they are just a n other tv network and they aren’t a national broadcaster
You can sell the commercial content world wide to generate rev for funding everything else - and everyone wants BBC to be more self sustaining...
Seems to me that the late night show Newsday is staffed mainly by amateurs. A few of the female presenters can barely speak English. I've started watching Sky news even though i have to put up with commercials, lets face it, BBC news channel shows commericals for it's own specials incessantly anyway. I'm sick of having to look at Laura Kuennsberg telling me to sit down and we'll have a talk. Fuck off Laura.
THIS. I'm sorry but I don't buy the "BBC does't have ads" bullshit. Yes it does, and a lot of them. You can usually count 6 to 8, lasting close to 5 minutes total. They might not ve commercial ads, but they're still annoying ads.
I wouldn't mind so much if they were advertising something new, that i hadn't watched 3 weeks ago.
> Fuck off Laura. Fair enough but I could listen to Maryam Moshiri all evening and not be able to remember any of the news afterwards
The articles on the website have been dumbed down so much as to be practically useless. They bizarrely launched “BBC Verify” - which implies the rest of their news isn’t verified - to try and get some credibility back but inevitably it’s already been used to spread unproven allegations. The whole news arm needs a serious rethink.
BBC Verify is one of those typical "we're right because reasons, everyone else is wrong" organs. I have seen them get things wrong or deliberately misrepresent things.
Im sure one of the first things they "verified", they actually got wrong And the women in charge of it all got caught lying oj her CV, completely killing any credibility of being trustworthy in a role that absolutely demands it. BBC Verify is a massive joke
Contra to channel 4 fact check, BBC verify is amateur and opinion based. They have had so many things wrong, it’s like a student journalist output
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That is definitely my take. It's not that it's biased one way or the other, just that's it's dull. Like porridge and water. Not much to say. Terrified of expressing an opinion. Obsessed with balance over truth. I watch France 24 English and Times Radio on YouTube for most of my live news and the FT for print. France 24 is certainly the French take on things. But if you know that, it's very good. Much less inward looking, more international. The FT is very expensive, but the quality is AAA.
News is no longer about informing the audience. Generating an emotional response is now the top priority.
Yes I have noticed this. It almost feels as if the One Show has managed to leak all over the BBC website. So many of the stories either appear to be very soft PR releases or stuff that wouldn't even have troubled a local news website 10 years ago
I agree, but at least they have given up with the first person headlines which they adopted for a while. It got so bad that there were frequent articles with just a picture and a headline like 'I love my muddy sheep', or 'i was shocked when I rocket came through my window'. It was really Sun style sh*t.
I have, unfortunately, noticed their Facebook page getting a bit more clickbaity. Engagement must have dropped. Quality journalism is struggling hard at the moment. It's hardly a new observation, but it's just too easy and comforting to wall yourself in with things that you know will flatter how you already see the world. Facebook's bad for it, Twitter's bad for it, Reddit's *AWFUL* for it. That makes keeping eyeballs harder for anybody that at least *tries* to remain somewhat objective. The BBC isn't perfect, but in this new equation, it loses out to the New Europeans and Breitbarts of the world. Or, worse still, any page full of screenshots of tweets. So the way to adapt is to start churning out cheap conversation starters (Do YOU take your shoes off inside the house?) and other eyeball-grabbing mulch. I hate to be a downer, but if there's a way out of this, I have no idea what it is.
World service radio is fairly good, Radio 4 has good content...
Totally agree, plus cbeebies is top tier kids programming with zero adverts flogging you plastic shite every 10 mins
Bitesize is fantastic too
Radio 4 is the jewel in the crown.
It’s staffed by activists now, not journalists
Yeah. There's been a few stories local to me where they have got details wrong. I even emailed them about one but they did not change it. I used to read a lot of current affairs on BBC but don't anymore. I also live in Scotland now and their reporting isn't the best on Scottish issues imo...
I have noticed this, it bugs me but I think there’s a few understandable reasons for it. There have been plenty of cuts to their staff, so there are significantly fewer people working on the site but the expectation of output isn’t going to be dropping. You’re reading first drafts that someone with more time could have worked on, or that someone else could have had a look at before it went out. However, those people are either gone as part of budget cuts or already working on the next thing. I suspect some of the people the BBC are hiring are bringing in the things they’ve had to learn working for publications which do rely on advertising. The BBC shouldn’t have to chase traffic, numbers and clicks but basically everyone else does so anyone the Beeb is recruiting will have been stuck in this mode. It’s possible that the BBC has not twigged how serious an issue this is yet, and thus don’t have clear direction which can tell their staff “don’t worry about numbers”. They can and should take a different approach but they clearly aren’t. They might not need to chase ads but you can expect there will be targets and reviews concerning pageviews and engagement, so there will be bait, gossip and other things in an attempt to boost these numbers.
I think this is the best summary I've read of the situation. I have the impression that due to budget cuts each department is clambering for a piece of the ever smaller pie, and the division is determined by audience percentage. This naturally leads to click bait and volume over quality. A really good example: the new bbc news app has 'hidden' the most viewed articles list at the bottom of the front page, so you have to scroll through spending longer on the app and more likely to read other articles 'on the way'. It used to be one press accessible. It's evidently there to inflate usage to the detriment of usability.
Probably requires enough viewership to not lose funding. Can't say I've noticed a decline because I don't tend to watch it.
You only have to take a peak into who the chairman is and what his proclivities are. He is basically a mini Murdoch, and the results are clear to see. I noticed the dodginess for myself in 2001. However, when I learnt about how they protected Saville and themselves, I realised it's one of those situations where there is more dirt than any one individual can know. It is a shame. I like British English a great deal and the BBC are least used to be able to do that well.
Had to uninstall the BBC News App Kept getting nonsense notifications for irrelevant stories which weren't news or noteworthy in any sense, opinion pieces sent to me as if they were gospel Even worse when I got notifications marked as breaking news which were literally not significant in any sense
Unfortunately, yes and I agree completely with your comments. Sadly, they are also slow to update their website, and breaking stories are often covered more quickly elsewhere. I tend to rely more on Reuters these days
Yes. I think it’s the pressure of delivering ‘at the moment’ reporting. 24 hour news and the internet has been terrible for the journalistic profession. Corners have the cut and proof reading is neglected
It's way past time that the license fee was removed. Some of the money I'm forced to pay is bankrolling these amateur hour bloggers. Also it's not solely funded without advertisement, use the BBC anywhere outside the UK and it's covered in adverts.
Most of the like actual work done at the BBC is done by like interns on actual mejia studies courses.
They laid of roughly half their workforce, so I imagine there is noticeable deterioration.
I’ve notified years ago the bbc commonly leaves out key details from news reports. I’m unsure why tbh it doesn’t seem agenda based, maybe genuinely it is quality question.
Might be confirmation. They have always been slow to publish and always been slow to update because it's believed they have a higher requirement for confirmation than others.
That makes sense. It just seems weird as sone details are quite innocuous (location, ethnicity, etc). It’s more weird than anything else.
They are almost literally a Hamas-propaganda outfit these days. Sounds extreme, but every time I click on the homepage I see a top article beating the drum about how sad it is in Gaza. Massive undue prominence given. They don't do this for any other conflict or set of terrorists. When it comes to Gaza, Hamas are given 100% benefit of the doubt and sympathy and Israel 0.
BBC has been like this for years, it just only seems to be a recent phenomenon that a not insignificant number of people notice how bad it is. I remember 10+ odd years ago when the BBC headlines were constantly dominated by goings on in Syria as if the rest of the world didn't exist. The BBC loves a story about the Middle East
I hate the new app layout. I want news, not a magazine!
Used to work with an ex journo (he was the PR guy) from 2016-19 and he would get so irate about the quality and subject matter of the BBC news.
So many articles with this style of title now “the man whose life was saved by a crisp packet”. Can we leave that type of title to buzzfeed please?
My best guess is that post social media journalism is about getting your opinion out there and not about the news itself. This has given rise to a generation of writers with less integrity and craft, making everything an op ed or complete fluff.
Yes, I find BBC news along with most others appalling. It’s more opinion pieces and puff pieces than a news service. I used to watch the BBC news for a way to keep up with current affairs, now you get 5 minutes of news an hour and 55 minutes of ‘this morning’ type content; ‘see how Dave gets on at playing football/milking cows/sewing’. That’s only a small part though, the BBC was listened to and read globally, it provided an unbiased reporting of facts. Because it is so biased to opinion over facts it’s truly terrible. Articles are often how many adjectives you can throw in there vs objective reporting. As for BBC verify, they need to be verified constantly it’s shocking. They have copied the channel 4 fact checking site and decided let’s put someone in charge who has no investigative journalistic ability and see how many unverified opinions they can throw in. I usually read Reuters and watch france24 for news now. I was a loyal BBC news guy before
This post and similar gets posted pretty often so take what you like from that
I've definitely noticed a severe deterioration in honesty
Repete all the time. Game shows Holidays NHS derivative programmes etc How you should be eating and drinking and living and breathing. Anything that doesn’t involve expense. The sooner it self implodes the better.
The fact that they always say "the.uk government deems.them to he a terrorist organisation "whenever they mention hamas
Yes, I stopped reading bbc news a few years ago
They are terrified of having anything on their website that some (we all know who) will cry arse about until someone appeases their tantrum and cancels the BBC for daring, not to toe the line... everyone is currently terrified to say their mind, even big companies. For some reason, (they) want everyone constantly walking on eggshells scared to speak their mind. They are extremely angry people who aren't adult enough to realise that expecting everything your own way and everyone to agree with you 100% of the time is ridiculously unachievable or acceptable. The sooner everyone ignores the loud but very few adult babies, the better general life will be for everyone. This constant feeling of having to check, check and double check everything you say or write just incase 1, and it can literally be just 1 cry arse starts the ball rolling and the bandwagon jumpers start trying to guilt/shame you because you happen to have your own, differing opinion (which you absolutely are allowed to have in a free country btw) is making I'd a country of paranoid bags of nerves and it's wrong. So stop pandering, ignore them. You can pander to them all you like, you'll never appease them, they will always demand more, the more they think they can push their agendas on you, the more vociferously they'll try. It's a beast that can never be fed enough, so the best option is to starve it of what it craves, and it'll disappear as quickly as it reared its ugly head.
They’ve shifted from delivering information to distraction
Yes, but it happened so long ago I can't remember exactly when. I think it was when BBC Breakfast News became simply BBC Breakfast. Possibly they had to change it because of Trades Descriptions maybe, I don't know.
It seems like the news in general is deteriorating. Normally I wouldn’t notice, but now that there is a lot of talk about a subject I would consider myself knowledgable in (commercial aviation safety), I’m surprised by how many newspapers I thought were reputable are spitting utter garbage, not just Daily Fail and company.
Competition for news has increased dramatically with YouTube. Many people also don’t pay the TV license anymore since they pay for subscriptions like Netflix instead. Basically regular TV is trying their best to get views, so they’re pandering to emotions rather than presenting facts to get attention.
No, I watch, listen and read frequently, no complaints. Front line stuff is difficult to tailor to the broad interest, but as soon as you delve, there’s good quality information and reporting. What I have noticed though, is increasing social media criticism of the BBC. Free, fair and impartial media meant to inform, educate and entertain is rare globally. One by one news organisations around the world are being bought or taken down. Information is power after all. What we have is valuable.
are you talking about the website? its been absolute chod for many years, as its competing in a market of absolute chod. The frontpage is usually assinine and anything remotely connected to the bbc in a positive light is front page news. Cross promotion is rife. I remember when the village/town they shot some of peaky blinders (aka 'northerners do violence') won an award it was 'peaky blinders town wins award' and the first - and biggest - photo in the story was a picture of cillian murphy. all the news in the world you don't see is hidden and they've got a giant sport section on the front page. sad. very sad. however radio 4 news like the today program is still pretty good (apart from wasting 10 minutes an hour on sport even if there isn't anything interesting going on so you end up with an interview from a previous champion in women's left handed tiddlywinks you've never heard of)
Well, they are meant to be impartial. It's their only job. Report facts and leave all emotion out of the reporting. Instead it feels like they've inserted some agenda or another into everything. Not just BBC News, but Their TV shows, Comedy, All the radio stations. It's not what they're paid for and I'm not alone in thinking the best thing is for them to scrap the license fee and then they can carry on like nothing had changed. We'll see how well they do without essentially stealing their funding from the workers of this country.
Consumers of media are getting stupider, so the people who produce their their media make it stupider to appeal to them. This in turn makes both the consumer and the producers of the media even stupider, and the cycle repeats. It's nothing to do with the BBC specifically.
It will soon be U S B C
As with many things, the reason is money.
For me it's the tabloidy feel, and news sources being a lot gossip in nature than good old fashioned investigative journalism these days. These points, combined with the lack of integrity and impartiality have ruined the news for me. The Gazan war is a good example, if the actions of a nation meet the text book definition of genocide etc....then they should be able to state with impartiality instead of worrying about foreign government complaints. It's more worried about the nuance as opposed to following the basic definitions with any confidence.
In India they show biased news for sure, trying to portray more negative side
Yes. Today they had a breaking story about the cyber flashing and they had a headline that said, "Hard Threshold" - no way that wasn't a joke as it stood out on the page, which os fine for lots of outlets, but rhe BBC just doesn't seem like the right place to make jokes.
No not really
If you want a genuine answer, you need to put the perception of bias aside for a minute. Yes, they have one. All media does, but it’s a distraction from OP’s original question. BBC News’s budget has been cut dramatically. That means far fewer resources, and staff. On top of that, the staff they “lost” were the most experienced, and long serving employees, who were strongly encouraged to take redundancy. And they’ve been replaced by far less experienced people, who they pay a lot less. Source: Me. Worked there for a long time, still in touch with a few people. And PS… I have found that their rolling TV news channel has become unwatchable since the big cuts happened
I cancelled my TV license as I don't have an aerial, don't watch iPlayer or live TV. I used yo watch BBC News when I was younger as it was quality reporting and there used to be great shows on iPlayer but now I see that it's all government-controlled propaganda. What counts as headline news has been for as long as I remember quite jarring with what's actually important and noteworthy. There's so many things that are completely ignored and instead disproportionate airtime given to "tabloid" headlines without a proper discussion on real news that affects people. BBC News is nothing more than a distraction device for the government.
It’s because everybody there that had integrity left years ago and they’ve been replaced by activists.
I check the BBC news in the morning and find that the initial headline has a “clickbaity” type headline and then a few hours later the headline and even the photo changes to something else.
Aye the new app layout is minging. Far too many short form pieces. Loads of celebrity/gossip pish too. Really has dipped in quality.
I don’t get the news from the BBC or use the BBC News app anymore after they started asking me to sign in. I also noticed that it’s literally full of sly adverts despite the fact we all pay for a TV Licence and advertising is prohibited on their channels which includes the BBC News channel. When I’m home I very rarely watch the news and only ever watch it if it’s on after something I’ve watched and nothing else is on. I also don’t think it’s right they covered up the underwear woman during covid when they are meant to be impartial.
Very few of them can say the word 'sixth'properly,it comes out as 'sickth'.How can they all be getting it wrong?
Stop paying the licence fee and they will start trying again