Tim Davie resigns as Director-General of the BBC

Though I actually came back to post this from Telegraph sportswriter Oliver Brown who has stood up for women in sport for years:Nothing shows BBC bias like its gushing over men in women’s sport(I’ve put a gift link. Just to annoy anyone who disapproves of the Telegraph on principle 😆 Personally I took out a sub when Julie Bindel, a lefty working class feminist who spent much of her career working against and writing about male violence against women had to start writing for them because the Guardian wouldn’t publish her any more, because she’d offended all the middle class “Be Kind” activists employed there by refusing to say that men could be women.)

And here’s a great article from Julie Bindel while we’re about it:

How the ‘Be Kind’ brigade exposed their hypocrisy

The ‘just be nice to everyone’ narrative hides an uncomfortable truth – that women must be careful not to say the wrong thing
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/7ca72a74d0eeb083

IMO the problem is not opposition to something Israel has done or is doing - plenty of Israelis protest, sometimes in the streets, against their own governments. That’s the thing about being a democracy.

The problem is what a lot of non Israelis actually mean by opposition to Israel: turns out (and I was naive about this before) that in practice it is often a more-or-less openly declared opposition to the very existence of Israel.

And that, IMO, is antisemitic. Clearly so. No other country, however it came about, is constantly delegitimised by people with no connection to that part of the world. For instance, Pakistan is no more “legitimate” than Israel - less so in some ways, and its inception led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, none of whose descendants are now considered to still be refugees. It’s fairly similar for Jordan, Iraq or Turkey. Yet only the descendants of Palestinians have refugee status. The Jews expelled from Yemen aren’t considered refugees by the rest of the world. Why not?

I can only conclude that there is a desire, in Europe as well as in the Middle East, to deny the legitimacy of just one country. All the others are grand.

It’s also deeply ironic to see posters on here regularly refer to Israelis as Eastern Europeans, when for centuries Jews were attacked in Europe for being foreign. Indeed surviving Jews who returned to Eastern Europe after the war were subjected to pogroms and told they were foreigners who should “go back” to the Middle East.

As they should have. The BBC thing is a non-story being blown out of all proportion by US corporate media. The most powerful man in the world being best friends with the most famous child sex trafficker in history should always lead IMO.

The "document" was written by a right wing lobbyist.

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/11/11/bbc-bias-memo-lobbyist-trump-tech-giants/

The BBC does how a weird history of being accused of bias by both sides. Remember when they depicted Corbyn as being in red square dressed like a communist or Keunssberg chummy relationship with Boris and the tories.

I don't really see that that helps much, because there's a new allegation, unrelated to Prescott's report, that Newsnight did much the same thing a couple of years earlier (the splice wasn't at exactly the same point) and were called out on it at the time by a US interviewee who was in the studio:

That said, as I've said before, I don't think this is by any measure the worst thing that the Prescott report has shown up - indeed Trump barely takes up a couple of pages of the 19 page report while the BBC's damningly biased coverage of Gaza takes up about 8 pages. Their abject failure to consider women's rights in their coverage of transgender issues is also significantly longer than the Trump section.

But of course it suits both Trump and the those at the BBC who are desperate to find a way to discredit the report to pretend that it's all about Trump. It's not.

Can I just say that nevertheless I really hope the BBC will tell Trump to go fk himself?

I assumed initially that they would completely cave to him, but I’ve heard a number of legal people saying that he would have a very hard time winning any such case in Florida, for one thing because the BBC doesn’t broadcast in the US so he can’t say they cost him anything when almost no Americans will have seen it. (I hope the same is true of the Newsnight one, which was earlier. The time limit for bringing a case in the UK has elapsed, so he can’t do it there.)

So I’ll be really disappointed - but not completely surprised - if despite all that, the BBC folds anyway. It’s not even their money after all, so they might.

What I very much do want though is for any case about Trump to be dismissed, but absolutely not for it all to go back to as it was but with two new bosses. There needs to be a serious clear-out of the people responsible for the hostile atmosphere towards unruly women even on Woman’s Hour of all places. And over Gaza too. Those were not the doing of Tim Davie nor even Deborah Turness. The rot goes much deeper than that.

It’s biased but I like the side it’s biased for. It doesn’t matter that they bury stories or opinions that are valid, misrepresent and flat out lie all while being funded by the taxpayer under threat of prison if they don’t pay.

Exactly.

This morning the BBC have said that they apologise for what happened, because it was wrong, but that they don't accept that any harm was done to Trump, since the programme wasn't broadcast in the US and anyway he won the election, so they won't pay out.

A surprising degree of backbone from them on this, which is good. Their legal advice must have been pretty definitive for them to refuse to negotiate at all. Often companies pay up just because the costs needed even for a win may well be higher than what the "offended" party will settle for. I think a lot of Trump's "wins" over the years have been based on that calculation.

Now we need to see how they respond to their far more egregious offences on Gaza and against women.