It suits the BBC to blame Panorama’s treatment of Trump for these resignations because the BBC calculates, with some justification, that so many UK viewers either hate, or are indifferent towards, Donald Trump that it makes the BBC’s problems seem somewhat less serious. An editorial oversight. A one-off.
The reality is however that the BBC’s problems are widespread, systemic and chronic, as the Prescott memo laid bare. And the Times is keeping the pressure up this morning with an interview in which a former BBC staffer sets out the way she was forced out of the corporation for having sacreligious views on gender.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/256...7186d4758d2138
(Should be a free-to-read gift link)
Quote:
A BBC News at Ten editor “deferred” to a junior reporter on what language he should use when reporting transgender stories, a veteran BBC broadcast journalist has claimed.
Cath Leng, a former chief writer for BBC News, also alleged that she was “forced out” in 2023 over her gender critical views after 25 years of working for the corporation.
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… meanwhile Times Radio interviews a former Panorama producer, David Elstein, who also was Channel 5’s launch CEO and is a former Head of News at Sky, i.e. he knows of what he speaks. It’s worth listening to the whole 3 minute clip; it isn’t just a ‘wouldn’t have happened on my watch’ - although he insists it wouldn’t have and is bemused at how standards can have slipped so far that it happened now - it’s a patient take-down of the BBC’s failure to engage with a serious, well-researched critical report for six months and then to try to trivialise it by claiming, as it has been doing all weekend, that its problems go little further than a cutting room error vis a vis Donald Trump - an error which, in Elstein’s view, would result in a very substantial libel settlement in Trump’s favour, were he inclined to sue.
https://x.com/timesradio/status/1987...330922995?s=61