The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
Seem well founded complaints. So what does out Guardian journalist say in response?
As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.
Oh, right, well there we are then.
This is an attack by a UK statutory body, the UK state, on the US democratic process. What Russia has been accused of. If I was Trump, I’d be calling in the UK ambassador to give him(?) a bollocking.
Anyone else remember the whole ‘Russia Collusion’ hoax pushed by the Beeb and ITN, indeed virtually the whole UK and US media, during the last Trump campaign and Presidency?
Do we have an ambassador since Mandleslime resigned?
Worth severing diplomatic relations over?
BBC Charter 2.1: “Impartiality is fundamental to the BBC’s purpose and is enshrined in the BBC’s Charter. It means not favouring one side over another and reflecting all relevant sides of the debate”.
“28gate”, where they decided that those who didn’t agree with them regarding man made climate change were not ‘relevant’ so could be ignored.
Impartiality? Silly me, I thought it was about lying. Telling porkies. Huge whoppers. Trying to get someone jailed because you don’t agree with them. Like Kier and Lucy. No wonder the Labour mob love the BBC. Let’s see how much they love broadcasters lying about politicians to discredit them. Fox News doing a new sitcom, the Strange Case of the Unexecuted Gay Muslim and the Prime Minister…
October Films, the independent production company that made the Trump Panorama, is said to be working on a film about Nigel Farage.
I wonder if they’ll be doing a doc on the odious pair of Zack Polanski and Mothin Ali?
I won’t hold my breath…
By “doc” I presume you mean hagiography?
I’m sure it would be an utterly impartial overview….
I noticed that sentence too. It’s very odd. It doesn’t fit with anything that comes before or after. It’s just shoehorned in, apropos of nothing. It’s like a sole cow standing in the middle of a paddock.
Has anyone ever seen the sort of disclaimer the ‘Grauniad’ has has to run at the foot of this column before?
“Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage, “
Yes of course, ignore the evidence that the Beeb is bang to rights and oh look over here, a squirrel.
And,
Jane Martinson is professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. She writes in a personal capacity
LOL
Not just any old squirrel; a neoliberal fascist squirrel.
There is no fucking Scott Trust, you lying liars. It’s the Scott Trust Ltd as a quick visit to the Companies House website reveals. Awfully meta, isn’t it – telling lies about defenders of lying liars.
Alleges? The BBC were bang to rights on all counts.
In resigning, Davie spouted bollocks about ‘mistakes’ and ‘errors’. Fuck off, all these actions were taken deliberately.
The mistake was getting caught.
As ever.
Impartiality seems to be a rather relative concept. The Guardian claims to be independent hence impartial. A good friend of mine, who is otherwise very astute, has been suckered into believing that lie, so now reads the Guardian “because it is impartial”. He doesn’t read anything on the other side of the political spectrum, because they aren’t.
Similarly whilst many people backed by plenty of evidence, find the BBC to be left leaning those on the far left believe it is a right wing mouthpiece for the mega rich.
My conclusion is that “impartial” means having the same views as oneself i.e. everyone and everything is impartial in its own frame of reference.
I’m now tempted to work on “The General Theory of Impartiality” which expounds how the further one goes from your frame of impartiality the more that departure from reality gets dilated and extreme
Exactly.
I used to read the Telegraph because I considered it impartial. Now I believe that it is written by the Comintern.
I used to read the Telegraph but stopped because it has become a load of old shite.
It has moved to the left too, of course. Partly in step with the Tories but also because if your staff is made up of middle class London meedja luvvies, your publication will reflect their opinions, prejudices and godawful stupidity.
Having said which, it was the Telegraph that broke this story. As they did MP’s expenses. When they go for it, they’re quite influential.
If you can take down the BBC’s impartiality whilst simultaneously having your potential ownership objected to because of assumed bias, you’re either doing impressively well, are desperate to avoid oblivion, or have flung the mother of all dead cats.
Exactly, and this is why this whole “impartiality” thing is nonsense.
The BBC made some sense back when TV had limited bandwidth. There wasn’t much of it, you couldn’t have a market in it, so you have a lot of government intervention so that everyone gets a bit of something. I’m not sure it was ever really impartial but it isn’t a bad idea when resources are limited.
We now have near unlimited bandwidth. Anyone can and do set up a YouTube channel advocating for hardcore libertarianism, tankies. We can have a marketplace of ideas. We don’t need “impartiality”.
And the competition at both ends is killing the BBC. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon etc at the expensive end. The Crown is like a BBC thing. And YouTube is taking eyeballs at the cheaper end (news interviews, history, cookery shows, science, standup comedy). Paul Whitewick, Triggernometry, Tom Scott, Finlay Christie. People are making things with miniscule crews.
I really don’t care what the BBC does now. I don’t know if the war is over, but we’re past the Kursk/D-Day stage of it. Some old people are watching it. Everyone else is on Facebook/Tiktok and YouTube. I’m not even saying I just want righties. I like the marketplace of ideas.
It wasn’t by accident that Orwell based his ‘Ministry of Truth’ on his time working at the BBC…
But in that case, WB, people might see stuff that the Guardian doesn’t approve of, and that would never do.
And that’s the scrap that we’ve been through. A historical version of this is the Reformation. Along comes the printing press and you get people like Martin Luther and William Tyndale going against the state. All sorts of shit happens for a long time. Eventually, Protestantism wins.
But we’re in the endgame now. The BBC aren’t over, there was still 1000 miles from Kursk to Berlin but the Germans were smashed. The war was on autopilot to defeat. The “mainstream media” is no longer the BBC, ITV, Channel 4. The streaming audience is now bigger.
It’s also why Trump won both times. The old US TV media are not the force they were.
Trump to sue the BBC for $1 billion unless they provide a “full and fair” retraction of the lying Panorama programme by Friday.
This is perfect, because either way they’re smashed. If they retract they admit categorically that they deliberately misrepresented and are therefore not an impartial and trustworthy news organisation. If they don’t they’ll have to pay a massive fine. Where does the money come from? It can’t come from the government because the BBC is an arms-length body, so it’ll have to come from BBC resources, which means massive cuts and job losses.
My violin is so small I can no longer see it.
$1bn wouldn’t happen, but either way, they’d have to pay up quite a lot.
As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.
After the Brexit Referendum that four-eyed slaphead Nick Robinson said that, while the Beeb had a duty to be strictly impartial before the referendum, now that the matter was settled it was free to say whatever it wanted. That was presumably why we were treated to the endless predictions of doom and destruction. Remember the claim that Britain would face an epidemic of syphilis?
I remember friends of mine putting together ‘Brexit Boxes’ containing prescription medicines, toilet paper and other items they were convinced would be unobtainable after Brexit.
Clearly the wrong sort of impartiality…
The fact that the Guardian is pretty much Murphy’s sole source of mainstream news is pretty damning evidence that it is complete bollox
No doubt he sticks to the Graun because he’s too tight to pay the subscriptions to other papers. So he loses the opportunity to challenge what’s written there. Pretty shortsighted for someone who’s trying to make a living commenting on current affairs. One might as well read the Graun & cut out the middleman.
Having no doubt been on the picket lines at Grunwick and never having bought a Murdoch rag on principle, I’d assume he doesn’t subscribe to the filthy right-wing press because he refuses to give money to its fascist neoliberal owners.
And he’s too tight to use Pressreader.
I suggest – only mildly and all that – that the reason he hung on so hard to the Emeritus thing is that it preserves library access and thus an FT subscription….
I get library access and thus various newspaper subscriptions at my local Uni by paying the £12.50 annual membership fee.
Library access is valuable – my wife claims that access to the Cambridge University Library is the most valuable reward from her degree – but only if you read books. There is no visible evidence that Murphy reads books (maybe press releases and summaries of papers, but not books)
I’d love to make use of my ex-staff lifetime university library subscription, but I have to go there to do it. Do you think Spud hangs out in the reading room at Islington poly, like some kind of latter-day Karl Marx? Furtively hiding his FT in back issues of Playboy?
I don’t think they have Playboy in Islington Poly – Now the “University” of North London – any more, BiG. It’s 85% Diversity, much of the pious kind, and the rest is draped in rainbows.
I love the way these people airily use the word “discredited” without any qualification whatsoever as if that’s it then, conclusively done and dusted. And then you research, and find the discreditation was actually no more than someone somewhere going “Reeeee!”
Norman, I would suggest that the BBC have been ‘discredited’. Airing falsehoods or material deliberately aimed to mislead should lead to the loss of the charter surely?
Addolff, I was referring to the way the word was used in PST’s quote:
As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.
A discredited view of impartiality, eh? Oh yeah? How, and by whom?
In that particular world the word “discredited” means : “My mates on BlueSky don’t agree”.
When pressed for the actual articles or publications that would prove the “discreditation” they’re generally miffed you don’t believe them at their word, and fail to supply any reference to any source.
Some “REEeeeEEE!!!”-ing may be involved as part of the inquiry as well.
Shall we just agree to string anyone up who talks about “climate denial”?
I deny that there is a climate. Go on, string me up, then.
BTW, the Earth is flat, too.
Don’t be silly… If the Earth was flat, cats would have knocked everything off the edge by now.
That….. May well be the most poetic and irrefutable argument against the Nutters…
I repeat my proposal: send a share certificate to every licence holder and say “it’s yours now – sell it to whomever you like”.
It’s like with the left wing reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder (glee, and then a united front to try to prevent left wing media creeps facing consequences for gleefully spreading lies on air about a guy who was killed for trying to debate people)
Consequences are supposed to be for people on the Right. Left wing media people are supposed to be made men and womyn who can say whatever they want. So they can lie about the US president with impunity, but conservatives are supposed to live in fear of being cancelled for calling someone a nagger 12 years ago on Twitter. Roger Scruton was cancelled for telling the truth about Muslims and Soros, but it’s intolerable that the head of the BBC should face consequences over the BBC lying about the President of the United States of America.
Hence her frustration that the Right is playing the game now. “It’s not fair! You’re supposed to lose, and we’re supposed to win!”, said the impartial journalist.
The Beeb weren’t the only ones doctoring Trumps speech. The same thing was being done by US networks. But I remember reading about this just days after the event, not years later…
I’m sure the BBC’s bit of cut & paste was well known at the time. That the Yanks had been doing it provided cover. The BBC version matched the “öfficial” history. Then the wheels came off the Yank stuff & the BBC felt obliged to “investigate” itself. I doubt there was an actual investigation. It wasn’t necessary. The leaked docs were more about damage limitation.
this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.
A communist.
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2025/11/07/new-jersey-governor-voter-turnout/
Slightly OT but on a recent thread here I pointed out in response to media crowing about Democrat victories in last week elections that it merely confirmed how polarised the country was with the results in question clustered in blue states and cities.
Reading the above article now makes me suspect that there could have been considerably more to it. The utter unconcern of mainstream media on both sides of the pond to the Biden 2020-like levels of voter turnout is as striking as it is predictable.
Trump threatening billion dollar lawsuit against BBC.
NYT says:
He just doesn’t like them. Has nothing to do with libel. No. Just personality conflict, I guess.