As someone with British lineage I tend to take more than a passing interest at what transpires across the pond, and as someone who’s overseen plenty of projects involving their media and worked collaboratively with dozens of their executives, I tend to take notice when they make news.
Hence when this breaking news hit my inbox during my football-filled Sunday I took an extended break from refreshing my fantasy teams’ stats. Among the more balanced recaps was this from CNN’s Sophie Tanno and Mitchell McCluskey which was updated early this morning:
Two top leaders at the BBC resigned on Sunday amid an escalating scandal over impartiality and bias that plunged Britain’s public broadcaster into one of its biggest crises in recent years.
The BBC’s most senior executive, director general Tim Davie, and the chief executive of the news division, Deborah Turness, both quit after the leak of a deeply critical memo that, among other things, revealed that the BBC had misleadingly edited a speech by US President Donald Trump to make it appear that he had directly called for violence on January 6, 2021.
The resignations come after the Telegraph newspaper published details of a leaked internal BBC dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on editorial standards and guidelines.
In an internal whistleblowing memo, Prescott revealed that last year the BBC had broadcast a “doctored” Trump speech, making it seem that the president had encouraged Capitol Hill rioters, telling them he was going to walk with them to “fight like hell.”
PA MEDIA’s Ted Hennessey shared how the executive closest to this process attempted to express her remorse:
The chief executive of BBC News said “the buck stops with me” as she announced her resignation after the broadcaster was accused of editing a speech by US President Donald Trump. Ms Turness said in her statement the controversy around the edit on the BBC’s Panorama documentary programme had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love”.
She went on: “As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me – and I took the decision to offer my resignation to the director-general last night. “In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down…In a polarised world, BBC News journalism is more vital than ever, and I could not be prouder of the work that you do.”
ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA’s Elissa Steedman provided some details of exactly how smoking the gun that Turness was caught with may have been:
The “internal whistleblowing memo”, which the Telegraph later published in full, had been sent to the BBC’s editorial standards board.
Mr. Prescott was the political editor for the Sunday Times — a Murdoch-owned outlet — for 10 years. He opened the memo by saying the concerns were serious enough for him to bring them to the board’s attention. The BBC had “repeatedly failed” to address issues he raised while in the role, and “in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all”, he said. Mr. Prescott went on to detail a string of concerns around bias in the corporation’s reporting. The memo discussed findings from reports into four areas of coverage — the US presidential election, racial diversity, biological sex and gender, and Gaza.
Now right there I’m certain a number of you are chortling “a-HA!” at the reveltation that Prescott has ties to outlets that clearly would paint these issues in a different light than what BBC has. But lest you think he’s alone with the tainting of compromise, do consider where Turness was employed during a crucial five-year span which her Wikipedia page colorfully describes:
In 2013, she was appointed president of NBC News and served in the role until February 2017.[8] Under her leadership the news division had gains in ratings for Meet the Press and the Nightly News shows, but she appointed Jamie Horowitz to run Today, who only lasted ten weeks in the role.[8][14] In response to the Brian Williams controversy over his misleading statements, Turness was criticised heavily. Vanity Fair reported that several NBC News executives were displeased at her work and felt she was not qualified to do the job.
Turness rounded out her Douglas MacArthur “confession” with this qualifier:
“While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong>.
Sorry not sorry, Madame, someone who ran an operation during an era where Trumpism was rising and who looked the other way while talent was misrepresenting facts is not beyond reproach.
Especially since viewers still loyal to those outlets are literally blowing up my social media this morning publishing a rogue’s gallery portfolio of the eight Democratic senators who chose to reverse course and set up the Senate for a 60-40 vote that will ultimately accept the Republican terms to reopen the government. Natch, they’re calling for their heads on silver platters, especially in light of the piss and vigor they’re filled with after the so-called Blue Wave of last week. Ah, but with the exception of one, they represent states that had no elections of consequence going last Tuesday–and even the one who did was remarkably nuanced in his explanation, as reported by USA TODAY’s Joey Garrison this morning:
Tim Kaine, D-Virginia
One of the Democratic votes came from Kaine, a popular former governor and the Democrats’ 2016 vice presidential nominee.
“I have long said that to earn my vote, we need to be on a path to fixing Republicans’ health care mess and to protect the federal workforce,” Kaine said in a statement. “This vote guarantees a vote to extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which Republicans aren’t willing to do. Lawmakers know their constituents expect them to vote for it, and if they don’t, they could very well be replaced at the ballot box by someone who will.”
Meanwhile, back in the other hemisphere they may not be paying quite as much attention to this latest wrinkle, as there’s further news circling about the imminent demise of free thinking, which our resident worrywort Rick Ellis on TOO MUCH TV apparently was kept up extra late pondering, considering the atypically late 3:24 AM PST time his “nightly” newsletter plopped into my inbox:
While a fair percentage of the readers of this newsletter are based outside the United States, most of the people reading this right now have only the very slightest knowledge of the UK’s Sky and ITV. So the news that they are pursuing a merger doesn’t mean much to them.
But it’s a very big deal and incredibly bad for consumers and for the viability of the UK television industry. I was going to write up a breakdown of everything, but then I saw this new post from Ed Sayer at The TV Whisperer, who does a fabulous job of explaining the current situation and why the proposed merger is a terrible idea:
The logic being peddled is seductive. If you are fighting global behemoths like Netflix, Amazon or Apple, you need scale, right? In theory, yes. In practice, it is poison. When two large companies collide, the first things to be “rationalised” are always the people and the ideas that make each organisation distinct. The redundancy letters will be written before the press conference is over. Two commissioning heads become one, two digital teams are merged, two marketing departments are “aligned.” On paper this looks efficient; in reality, it replaces creativity with exhaustion.
Once the people are gone, the budgets follow. Maintaining two commissioning pots will be deemed “duplicative,” so the money is pooled, then quietly reduced. Before long, the new entity is indeed larger, but what appears on screen is smaller: cheaper shows, narrower ambition and a creeping sense that the numbers matter more than the stories. I have watched this happen too many times to mistake it for progress.
The parallels are obvious given what has already transpired at CBS NEWS, both last year in the wake of the now-infamous Kamala Harris “doctoring”, the lack thereof in last week’s softball treatment of Trump and the looming potential that this sort of preferential treatment could soon be applied to CNN. Which has the natives especially restless here, and it would appear over there as well–especially in the new light of how their own “Tiffany” entity has now been accused of behaving.
At the risk of bleeding still more apopletic followers of mine, I’ll yet again remind you that news is only one division of a network and the goal of any business first and foremost is to fulfill the tastes of desires of as many PEOPLE as possible–ideologies aside. Those ideologies do evolve over time–after all, Britain beat us to the punch by electing their own scandalous and unhinged leader, who was able to use many of the research tactics of Cambridge Analytica that the Republicans eventually used to achieve their own victory–over Kaine and his running mate.
Right now, the elections and undercurrents in New York City, Virginia and California notwithstanding, and regardless of how polls may be trending, following the Trump train is a path that any responsible executive responsible for the bottom line can’t not take. That Norah O’Donnell interview last week drew 14 million viewers–the biggest audience any episode of 60 MINUTES has had this decade. Were many hate-watching? Probably. Did as many show up last night, especially with no direct NFL game lead-in? Hell, no. But a lot more than who watch NBC NEWS last night ultimately did. I know Deborah Turness knew that reality during her American sojourn, and now that she’s got more time on her hands she’s likely to refamiliarize herself with it.
And as for those of you who are screaming through their thumbs at the betrayal you’ve seen from the senators of Nevada, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Hampshire and Maine let me ask you–perhaps they actually ARE listening to their THEIR constituents who have been forced to accept the reality they are dealing with and chose the desire to eat over the desire to fight? Unless your name is Jimmy Kimmel, I didn’t see any of you opening up new food banks to feed them–and I’m wholly unaware of any that were even attempted in those states.
So enough already with the high-minded lecturing, gang. Deborah Turness and her boss have learned the price of doing that. If you must, take your lead from the British. When was the last time you saw any of them get overly emotional without the help a pint or two?
Until next time…