January 14, 2025 - 10:00am
If the BBC is serious about combatting misinformation, then it should lead by example. For instance, the content of the BBC News website shouldn’t just be true â it should also be news.
So why is the site running stories that don’t even come close to meeting the second criterion? Consider the following headline from Sunday: âTackling the anxiety of finding a plus size prom dressâ. The report that follows is about a Welsh schoolgirl pondering what to wear to a forthcoming dance. In a dramatic turn of events, it’s revealed that there’s a local shop called âFfansi Ffrogsâ that âspecialises in prom dresses for plus sizesâ. Crisis averted.
Let’s hope that the prom-goers have a fun evening, but itâs difficult to see why this is a matter worthy of reportage by a national broadcaster. Whatâs more, it’s far from the only example of non-news on the BBC News website. In the last few days alone, dispatches from the front include: âEd Sheeran shocks pupils with surprise performanceâ, â’Being good looking isn’t enough’: can Love Island still make you rich?”, âOur Yorkshire rhubarb is eaten in Paris and Miamiâ, âGirl’s message in a bottle found 200 miles awayâ, and âZebra died after rhino punctured stomach â zooâ. Line up the Pulitzers!
âAnd finallyâ stories have long been part of the news business â even on the BBC â but as the name suggests, they used to know their place. Now, theyâre clogging up the flow of information. For proof, one only has to look through the all-but-useless BBC News (UK) feed on X.
Itâs not hard to detect the influence of commercial clickbait models, which have gone all-out to generate page views and therefore advertising revenues. Iâm sure that Stuart Millar, the BBCâs Digital News Editor (who joined from BuzzFeed) would insist that the corporation maintains higher standards than the tabloid websites. But just because our national broadcaster can tastefully churn out online articles of dubious news value doesnât mean that it should.
One can, however, understand the temptation. The corporation doesnât depend on adverts, but it has always had to defend the licence fee in terms of both the quality and popularity of what it produces. The latter can seem especially important in the digital age, because audience sizes are easily monitored. Chasing page views with clickable content is a quantifiable way of justifying the BBCâs relevance â and as the author Peter Drucker once put it, âwhat gets measured gets managed.â
Our politicians should send a clear signal that quality is the priority, not popularity â and that the BBC is, first and foremost, a broadcaster. If editors wouldnât put a story on the BBCâs flagship television and radio news programmes, then it shouldnât appear as an online news article either. Production costs may be low and audiences all too available, but the BBC must not dilute what makes it special.
In 1897, the owner of The New York Times coined the slogan âall the news thatâs fit to printâ. Today, the BBC should take the same approach, only with âfit to broadcastâ as the test. This would mean a smaller and more focused BBC News website, but sometimes less is more.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThe BBC is an institution that abuses it extraordinary power (derived from its enormous resourcing via taxation) to propagandise (brainwash) the UK population (and wider targets overseas) with its Woke worldview. It is nakedly and unapologetically Left-wing, feminist in its orientation. Here is a selection of the standard bias that are incorporated in almost every news bulletin almost every day:
[1] Climate change (whatever that means) is the cause of every natural disaster and the developed world must pay reparations to the undeveloped world for its environmental crimes. Praise and suck up to the likes of Greta Thunberg (AKA ‘The Doom Goblin’). And never refer to massive over-population as being the underlying cause of environmental catastrophies.
[2] Black and ethnic minorities are victims everywhere, especially in institutionally racist UK
[3] Britain’s racist colonialist history is built on the profits of slavery – and every aspect of British history, heritage and culture should be decolonised, and alien cultures featured, lauded and promoted ad nauseam.
[4] Men are negatively portrayed via tropes like ‘the partriarchy’, ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘misogyny’, ‘sexism’ (no female sexism reported) etc.
[5] ‘Wimin’ (i.e. middle-class Guardian readers, preferably with Oxbridge degrees) are victims of a patriarchal, colonialist history and bang their heads against the glass ceiling, experience sexism in the workplace and leisure area, who are constantly enjoined to throw off their patriarchal shackles and place careers before family.
[6] The horrendous treatment of fellow women in dreadful Muslim societies and nations is barely acknowledged let alone constantly condemned – compare this with the constant moaning about the victimhood of ‘wimin’ at home.
[7] Hammer Brexit at every opportunity. Always place it in a negative context – and never acknowledge the extent to which it was undermined by a determined Woke Establishment or admit that it had any merits whatsoever.
[8] Immigrants are beneficial for the UK – overlook the fact that over 1 million of them a year, with huge numbers of single young men amongst them, are swamping public services and consuming huge amounts of government funding.
[9] Human rights of minorities are much more important than those of the majority.
[10] The Far-right is a massive threat to the UK’s security – feature this angle at every possible opportunity, and play down Islamic terror and the crimes committed by large numbers of immigrants.
[11] Labour = good … Tory = bad.
Blah, blah, blah … ad infinitum …
They have too many platforms, there isn’t enough news, and much of the news that there is requires them to tow either a government or Nanny G./ Tweaker Owen-style party line.
The problem with BBC News is much bigger and more longstanding than a recent upsurge of teeny clickbait. âThe Newsâ is a fundamentally bogus concept and always has been….one that allows uncurious people to delude themselves that they know whatâs âimportantâ in the endless unfolding of events. Of course The News is biased; how could it not be, given its inevitable editorial selectivity…..some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention â some stories âtrendâ and others fail to âcapture the public imaginationâ etc etc.
The digital ecosystem has it’s own huge problems too of course but its inroads into this clapped out legacy media ‘News’ model is to be welcomed nevertheless. (And while we’re talking of the ‘World According to the BBC’, its insidious but ostensibly apolitical drama serial output is a much bigger distorting mirror: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining)
If you bury real stories, what else is there left to publish?
The BBC is the biggest supplier of news in Britain but, as you say, if something is just omitted it means that most people donât know about it. I once had a one-minute discussion with a primary school teacher about NetZero. I said that some of the government spin could be wrong and misleading. The answer was, âWhat government spin?â
I would say that a huge proportion of what is discussed on UnHerd is taboo on the BBC. A similarly huge proportion of topics are not allowed on UnHerd. So, we are only discussing a tiny, tiny fraction of the news and we think that we are special. It is difficult to see the light.
The BBC is the biggest supplier of
newsmisinformation in BritainFIFY
Yes, the BBC, like so much else in Britain, is in decline.
WE are in a dire state regarding journalism generally, not just the BBC. Unherd is an exception! I struggle with The Guardian. I have never known it to be so pointless. I also struggle with the Telegraph and the Times. The best journalism among the UK dailies now is the Financial Times, I am not particularly interested in the financial aspect, but the news is excellent.
Once a week I buy the Guardian. Clearly, it is written for middle-aged graduates who feel that they have missed their way in life. They support the left-leaning thoughts that all students have – particularly students of Sociology.
The rich must be punished but what is the definition of rich? All races must live together but not in my street. Britain has been evil in the past and those who have supported this evil must be punished but not Tony Blair because he was on the left. Margaret Thatcher closed the mines but my children would never work in mines. We need to encourage the trades but that is for other peopleâs kids. Etc.
I have recently given up my subscription to the Guardian & Observer. It was so frustrating coming across man-made climate armageddon non-inferences. I (almost) feel for the poor sods who (have to) write this nonsense.
The moment you omit ‘news’ because it doesn’t fit the approved world view (for instance the criminality of some recent immigrants) then you have reduced what you can write about. But those column inches or pixels need to be filled.
At least Rebecca Reid has gone back to school.
One of the most egregious examples is “the weather”. Digitals columns are expended on telling us what we already know by looking outside, or can find out on… the BBC Weather website.
If there’s a natural or human disaster due to a weather event, that’s newsworthy, but the constant “warnings” about (omg!) snow in winter, strong sunshine in July or rain all the year round are tedious beyond measure. And yet, nary an article goes by without the BBC seeking to ‘measure’ the weather against the most recent comparative event, e.g. the most rain in Blogstown since 2017. So f…ing what??
In short, the BBC News website seeks to pathologise the weather, and of course we know why, since the phrase “climate change” is never omitted.
These weather disaster warnings are copying The Weather Channel in the USA. One day I was flying back from Atlanta and happened to switch on The Weather Channel. There was a warning about tornadoes in Atlanta, which was scary. When I was checking out I mentioned this to the receptionist, who burst out laughing. He said, âIn my memory we have never had a tornado in Atlanta. Youâve been watching The Weather Channel and if they said, âThereâs nothing to report.â theyâd be out of a job.â
The afternoon was pleasantly warm and sunny.
And of course reference to the average, e.g. ‘below average temperature for this time of year.’ WTF – whoever expects the average at all times?
“the quality and popularity of what it produces.”
I’m afraid these two don’t sit comfortably together these days.
It’s not always the stories that are covered but also the ones that are not. The bias we perceive is inherent in what gets on air or appears on a website. There is also material that is never given the light of day for fear that it will tell some malicious truth that either offends someone or makes people look bad.
This is where the legacy media is failing its audiences and perhaps more important, itself. There is no longer an effort to cover “all the news that is fit to print.” Journalism has been replaced by activism and a tribal mentality among reporters who no longer report, but rather, parrot the talking points of the day without the slightest bit of skepticism.
I think that you are forgetting that one of the three primary roles of the BBC is to ‘entertain’ – just because it doesn’t interest or entertain you doesn’t mean that others are not. There is a lot of guff on here about ‘further education’ being a bad thing, well here is something for those who haven’t been educated.
The article is specifically about the BBC News website, not the BBC website, never mind broadcasts, as a whole.
There isn’t a BBC news website. News is just part of the main website
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news
Well done genius. Good grief.
The BBC website is far from perfect , or indeed far from being impartial, but to suggest it shouldn’t have some broad appeal is taking a rather snobbish definition of news
The suggestion is that it shouldn’t be cretinous.
Some comments seem to miss the point, which was well stated by Dougie Undersub: “The article is specifically about the BBC News website, not the BBC website…” Quite so. I am constantly annoyed by the very thing Franklin is talking about: under the heading of “News” are far too many trivial or peripheral ‘stories’ which cannot by any definition be called news. Equally, the BBC News website often fails to mention real news items which I have caught on various other news sites.
“the BBC must not dilute what makes it special.”
The BBC lost all semblance of trust – the only thing that made it ‘special’ – during the pandemic. By parroting government propaganda, suppressing any criticism of the approved narrative and spreading a thick dose of fear porn across every day’s news headlines, it effectively decredibilised itself in the eyes of the public.
Its laughable attempt at ‘fact checking’, BBC Verify, only serves to emphasise how much the once-respected corporation has lost its way. Desperately trying to compete with social media for clicks is just one more symptom of an institution in terminal decline.
I could not agree with you more about the pandemic and lost trust in the BBC (among plenty of others admittedly). How many journalists would say that the proper role of a journalist/the media is to unquestioningly back the government line, and indeed egg them on to even greater erosion of civil liberties while feeding the populace a stream of fear-inducing stories to ‘nudge’ them into compliance.
How many journalists would say that?
Yet, when it counted, they (with a few honorable exceptions) shamed their profession.
Isn’t the BBC still not allowed or not supposed to advertise? Because it sounds like piece this starts with is an ad for the prom dress shop.
Perhaps the clickbait shift, designed for attracting larger and younger users, is also the reason it chooses to be biased in favour of certain issues.
Prince Harry was crushed to hear that the son of his former nanny was shot in New Orleans.
In other news water is wet!
We watched the BBC World News on PBS for years, but no longer. The is little actual news, and there is a strong left bias. Plus the interviewers are pathetic…long interviews with the the interviewee answering the same questions over and over again with the same prepared talking points. It seems like the interviewer hopes that if they keep pounding at the interviewee, they may ultimately get the answer they want. So dull and meaningless.
And by such “reporting” the legacy media is complicit in the ever-widening gap between a minority comprised of the well informed and well educated, who prosper from ferreting out valuable content, and the poorly informed and under-educated, who do not. Rather cynical I’d say.
Today in The NY Times there was a report from Ukraine. No, it wasnât on the war, the prospects for peace, the immense suffering, the widespread corruption, the illegal trade in Western-supplied arms or what the biowarfare labs in the country are up to.
No, it was all about Ukraineâs âdrama kidsâ struggling to put on a show in Kiev.
âFor These teenagers in Ukraine, Hope Arrived at the Stage Door.â