Tim Davie resigns as Director-General of the BBC

I wouldnt disagree. I was just replying to the suggestion that privately owned right wing media needed to be balanced out by a left wing publicly owned outlet. I was not saying that the BBC was left wing per se.

For one thing because I don’t see women’s rights as being right wing, and nor should fair coverage of Israel/Gaza be right wing, and for another because anyway the BBC should be objective, not balance other media out.

So based on an interview on a privately-owned channel that you didn’t actually watch in full, you think it’s not all that bad that taxpayer-funded news and Investigative programming has been shown to be biased?

Is that a principled opinion of yours or is it just because you like what the BBC said about Trump and didn’t like what the GBN guy said?

If GBN had made a news programme cherry picking quotes from Michele Obama to make it sound like she said white people were all racist (I bet that could be done fairly easily with her recent hair madness), would you think that was fine?

If not why not?

It seems you only feel it is an issue because of there being a publicly funded organisation accused of being so.

No that's completely wrong. I’m sorry if this is too complex for you. I had bolded some of the words so I thought it was clear but let me break it down for you.

There are different levels of requirement for objectivity.

1. An interview with someone is different from reading the news or carrying out an investigation. Hence Jeremy Paxman was constantly rolling his eyes and scoffing at his interviewees yet he never got sanctioned, but Martine Croxall was hauled over the coals for rolling her eyes at a factual mistake in the script she was given to read. To make it extra clear, if she’d rolled her eyes at the news that Trump (or Labour) had been re-elected that would have worse again.
2. The fact that the BBC is publicly funded and has a core mission which explicitly requires objectivity does make it worse. Yes. Not sure how to make that clearer. Except maybe by pointing out yet again that ONLY the BBC is allowed to force people to pay it whether or not they choose to watch it. Under threat of prison no less.
3. On the rest of your post: the question of the revolving doors from politics to news analysis and/or big business is a thorny one. IMO though, it’s a far wider problem than having “the leading favorite to become next PM” as a presenter. For one thing “a week is a long time in politics”, and there’s not going to be a GE in the next month never mind the next week.

Look, all people had to do was join in the condemnation of objectively disgraceful BBC propaganda editing, and call for higher journalistic standards free of bias but they couldn't even do that.They jumped straight to “standing by the BBC” and going after the centre and right for daring to call out the state-funded broadcaster's blatant propaganda, and even making out that it was all a diabolical far right conspiracy from probably the only openly conservative person left on the board of the BBC after Conservative party member Tim Davie stood down. At least one poster upthread has tried that conspiracy nonsense.

So quite clearly a lot on the left have no interest in impartial and fair journalism. They're quite happy with a state sponsored disinformation machine as long as it's the kind of disinformation they approve of. And that’s what you seem to be saying too. Am I wrong?

And you didn’t answer my question: if a speech by Michele Obama had been cherry-picked to make it sound like she was saying that all white people are racist, would that be ok by you? And would you be happy to continue paying a licence fee to the company that had made/broadcast that spliced speech?

Seems you don’t care about the core mission of the BBC.

Fine. But in that case, you really are calling for it to be defunded, something I absolutely do not want.

Barring a very, very limited set of exceptions such as Hillsborough, the right wing press here is held to no standards whatsoever. The attacks on the BBC are an attempt to delegitimise it and erode the justification for its existence, paving the way for a sell off or privatisation.

I lived through Brexit where the press repeatedly lied to and gaslit the public. There was no attempt to hold the government to account from the rightist media because they were pushing an agenda instead.

It's hard to think of anything more worthless than the Telegraph making a mountain out of a molehill over a "memo".

And could that have anything to do with the BBC uniquely having a guaranteed taxpayer-funded income in exchange for (supposedly) fulfilling a core mission that none of the other media bodies, right or left wing, have to do?

I get that you want to present this as a right/left issue. What I don’t get is how you can’t see that you are playing right into the hands of the far right by doing so. I mean, what higher standard is the Guardian held to that the Times or the Daily Telegraph are not, and by whom?

John Humphrys, who presented Today for years, describes how he was shut out for having dared to use a couple of hundred words in a 10,000 word book, to criticise the BBC’s bias. And that was well before this Trump business.

John Humphrys: A few words on its bias and the BBC shut me out

The point being that the BBC’s sense of entitlement is such that it punishes any criticism, rather than investigating it. And that this is not news and not related to Trump.

Rather hypocritical considering they’ve got a whole department, BBC Verify, whose task is to investigate various claims and counter claims. But only those made against others it seems.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/john-humphrys-bbc-culture-trump-speech-panorama-apology-br3g5b2f5

John Humphries disagrees with you but I suppose what would he know. 🤯

Anyway, if we can get on to some of the more important issues raised by the Prescott report, I wondered a while back what effect this row would have on the Irish media which has been, if anything, even more supine than the UK media in prioritising male interests over women’s in sports and elsewhere.

So here, hopefully, is the beginning of Irish journalists finding their own backbone. The Indo rather than RTE, but it’s a definite start:

Tommy Conlon: Tide is starting to turn in sport and in society against men masquerading as women

You can't be much of a BBC stalwart if you don't know who John Humphrys is, but FWIW I had already linked to an article by him just above so I naively expected that would help those who might not listen to Radio4 and its flagship programmes.

(It's amusing that I'm being accused of wanting the destruction of the BBC when I seem to listen to it more than some of the posters so eagerly jumping to its defence.)

Here it is again:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/john-humphrys-bbc-culture-trump-speech-panorama-apology-br3g5b2f5

And here's an archived version: https://archive.ph/aKh48

I'm still shocked but sadly no longer surprised that so many people seem unable/unwilling to discuss the OTHER aspects of the Prescott report, to the extent that the poster above was actually puzzled when I brought women's rights back into this thread which is about Davie's resignation, not about Trump.

There's an article in the Times about this refusal to hear women's voices, with a quote from Nick Wallis which I think gets to the heart of it:

Nick Wallis, a former BBC journalist known for his work on the Post Office scandal, recently turned his attention to covering transgender issues. “I think the reason that women in the BBC were ignored is just rank misogyny,” he said. “It shows how easy it is for powerful men to brush aside serious and valid concerns because they are coming out of the mouths of women.”

Messages dating back five years show female staff raised concerns with bosses but felt rebuffed or ignored

So you see? Men can get it, if they just make the effort. 😚

This sort of forced teaming is exactly the sort of thing that I find dumb beyond belief and that seems to have become the norm for some people. Personally, I don't have to agree with every single thing that Humphrys says on every single issue to agree that he has a point that the BBC have certain biases - and that this is serious because it's the BBC.

On the row with, was it Jane Garvey? Catherine Mayer? I'm not aware that he ever said women didn't deserve equal pay. Did he?

This may surprise you, but I think most top BBC presenters are wildly overpaid anyway - including Humphrys. Lineker's pay is shameful IMO. That some presenters aren't happy because others are even more overpaid is something that doesn't stop me from sleeping. They can fight their own battles but it does seem more about oneupmanship than anything else. I'm more annoyed at the custom of removing older women as TV presenters once they're no longer young and sexy - but first, Humphrys isn't responsible for that and he was on the radio anyway, where it's less of a problem. And second, I think it has become less acceptable anyway.

Speaking of Woman's Hour though, Jenni Murray had to leave WH of all places for saying that transidentifying males were not actually women. Again, not Humphrys fault, but crazy, given their target audience.

Anyway, all of that is completely irrelevant except in some strange mixed-up attempt at deflection from you. Either the BBC are biased - and Humphrys gave another, different example of an issue where he described finding bias - or they aren't.

This may stun you, but I care about facts, not whether I like and approve of John Humphrys.

That aside, he had his own questionable record on partiality and the fact that he serialised his book in the Daily Mail immediately after leaving the BBC would give some suggestion as to where his ideologies lay. And of course the article you linked is from the Times, itself being seen as a ring wing outlet.

That's just character smearing by association.

Do you consider him an impartial and unbiased commentator on this topic?

Do you have evidence that he isn't??

his own questionable record on partiality

ETA: I've no idea what you mean by the bit I've requoted here. Wikipedia has nothing that jogs my memory so you're going to have to explain.

About his political views though, I see he says this on Wiki:

Humphrys … does not view himself as conservative … He also stated that his political views are heavily influenced by what he sees and who he talks to as a reporter. "So every other bloody week I change my mind about something or other, and when you vote, you look for the party that comes closest to what you believe."

When asked if he was happy with having the extracts of his books published in the Daily Mail, Humphrys responded, saying: "Yes. They did and they not only did that, but they also sought my approval. I was not particularly happy with the splash [the headline] the Mail used, but you know… I don't give a flying **** whether people think that a particular newspaper is biased in this way or that way. All I'm concerned with is that my material is presented in the way I've written it and they didn't change a word."

He also responded to a further question titled "Do you understand why some people don't like the Daily Mail?" saying that he has always read the Daily Mail simply because it reaches an awful lot of people, and that it may not always be compatible with his own views, but said that he also thinks the same about The Guardian, which hosted the interview.

So yeah, it seems you're big into shaming by association. I think that's a terrible thing to do.