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    BBC reporters cannot wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts in newsroom, says Tim Davie

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    BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general has said.Tim Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically. You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that.“So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.“I find some of the hatred in society at the moment utterly abhorrent, personally, really upsetting, but that is a campaign that has politicised objectives. Therefore, it is not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“And, for some people joining the BBC, that is a very difficult thing to accept. And it has not been an easy thing to get done this, and we wrestle with it every day.”Speaking about diversity and impartiality at the BBC at the Cheltenham literature festival, Davie also drew a parallel with impartiality when reporting on mainstream political campaigning.“I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable,” he said.The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavie was also asked whether he felt safe when he had been shouted at and people had come into his personal space.He said: “It’s not for the faint-hearted; these jobs in public life now, I mean, they are really quite demanding. I’m no great Californian hippy, but you have to look after yourself, you really have to.” More

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      BBC accuses White House of misrepresenting fatal Gaza attack report

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      The BBC has defended its reporting on the war in Gaza and accused the White House of misrepresenting its journalism after Donald Trump’s administration criticised its coverage of a fatal attack near a US-backed aid distribution site.Senior BBC journalists said the White House was political point-scoring after Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the corporation of taking “the word of Hamas with total truth”. She also falsely claimed that the BBC had removed a story about the incident.Leavitt launched her attack on the BBC after being asked about reports that Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution centre in Rafah. Brandishing a print-out of images taken from the BBC’s website, she accused the corporation of having to “correct and take down” its story about the fatalities and injuries involved in the attack.The Hamas-run health ministry had said at least 31 people were killed in the gunfire. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) later said at least 21 Palestinians were killed by IDF troops.In a briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt said: “The administration is aware of those reports and we are currently looking into the veracity of them because, unfortunately, unlike some in the media, we don’t take the word of Hamas with total truth. We like to look into it when they speak, unlike the BBC.“And then, oh, wait, they had to correct and take down their entire story, saying: ‘We reviewed the footage and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.’”The BBC swiftly issued a robust statement. It said that casualty numbers were updated throughout the day from multiple sources, as is the case of any incident of the kind in a chaotic war zone. It also clarified that the accusation from Leavitt that the BBC had removed a story was false.“The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong,” it said. “We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism.View image in fullscreen“Our news stories and headlines about Sunday’s aid distribution centre incident were updated throughout the day with the latest fatality figures as they came in from various sources … This is totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story.”It said the White House had conflated that incident with a “completely separate” report by BBC Verify, the corporation’s factchecking team, which found a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre it claimed to show. “This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting,” it said. “Conflating these two stories is simply misleading.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe BBC called on the White House to join forces with its calls for “immediate access” to Gaza. International journalists are prevented from entering by Israel.Jonathan Munro, the deputy director of the BBC News, said the claims were wrong, adding: “It’s important that accurate journalism is respected, and that governments call for free access to Gaza.”Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international editor, accused the White House of launching a political attack. “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself,” he said. “She’s making a political point, basically.“Israel doesn’t let us in because it’s doing things there, clearly I think, that they don’t want us to see otherwise they would allow free reporting.“I’ve reported on wars for the best part of 40 years. I’ve reported on more than 20 wars. And I’m telling you, even when you get full access, it is really difficult to report them. When you can’t get in, it’s even harder.” More

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      In a world full of wedgies, are you a wedger like Trump, or a wedgee like me? | Adrian Chiles

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      Sir Ed Davey has made more than one significant contribution to the tone of political discourse over the past year. Obviously, there’s all the surfing, rollercoasting, bungee jumping and so on. There’s also his use of the word “wedgie” in relation to trade tariffs. That’s some trick to pull off. Respect. Here’s what he said earlier this month: “Despite backing the US in every major conflict this century – and offering to water down our tax on US tech billionaires – we’ve been rewarded with the same tariffs as Iran. It’s like we’re meant to be grateful Trump gave our friends a black eye and left us with just a wedgie.”This was quoted on The World at One on BBC Radio 4, which involved the presenter Sarah Montague using the word wedgie, too. Something else I never thought I’d hear. Even over where I work on BBC Radio 5 Live, where we’re less squeamish about using the vernacular, Davey’s wedgie-bomb came as a bit of a shock. But we soon gathered ourselves enough to hatch a plan on where we should go with the idea. My editor suggested it may be profitable to consider how mankind – and I believe we are talking about a largely male pursuit – can be divided into wedgees and wedgers. That is, those who have been wedgied and those who have done the wedging.I should explain to those unfamiliar with this ghastly practice – one generally but not exclusively experienced in our schooldays – that a wedgie is when you come up behind someone and, unbidden, take hold of the elastic of their underpants and … Actually, let’s leave it at that. If you know, you know. If you don’t, be grateful.My editor – who is called Tom Green, by the way, if you want to complain about any of this on taste grounds – is, like me, very much a wedgee. It’s why we get on. The current president of the United States is plainly a wedger. I use the present tense there, not because I think President Trump is an active wedger, but because it’s not a label you can shed. Once a wedger, always a wedger. Our prime minister, equally obviously, is a wedgee, and this is greatly to his credit. His predecessor, Mr Sunak, is a wedgee too. Liz Truss? Let’s not go there. Boris Johnson? Most definitely a wedger.To be clear, not all wedgers are bad. Some of my best friends are wedgers. But it’s the rest of us who are on the side of the angels. Hard though it is to believe just now, it’s the wedgees who will inherit the Earth. More

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      The week in audio: Die Die DEI; Drama on 4: The Film; Good Hang with Amy Poehler; Confessions of a Female Founder and more

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      The Slow Newscast: Die Die DEI (Tortoise Media)Drama on 4: The Film (Radio 4) | BBC SoundsGood Hang with Amy Poehler (The Ringer)Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan (Lemonada)Working Hard, Hardly Working (Grace Beverley) | Apple podcastsThe Slow Newscast is usually worth a listen. Take Die Die DEI, from the week before last. Queasy and pointed, it tackles the issue of the Trump administration’s “war on woke”. As soon as the orange man-baby got into office, his government started shutting down inclusion programmes, and corporate US followed. Why? It’s not about saving money, or terminology-wrangling. It’s far more deeply prejudiced.View image in fullscreenWritten and presented by Stephen Armstrong, the show focuses on one particular member of the Trump administration: the deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller. Described baldly by one contributor as “a violently rightwing racist who is pushing a white nationalist agenda”, he is far from a nice guy. But Armstrong is wise enough to tell Miller’s story gradually. He was brought up in liberal, multiracial Santa Monica, California. Yet as a kid he dumps one of his friends by telling him exactly why he doesn’t like him. “Among that list of things,” recalls the friend, “was my Latino heritage. That was one of the things that disqualified me from being his friend.”We follow Miller through his college years, a controversial rape case (not his: he supported some lacrosse players who were falsely accused of sexual assault) and into the Senate. There, he uses the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) approach against itself, telling white people that they are, in fact, victims. “Hijacked victimhood” is what it’s called: the idea that your lifestyle – your life – is put in a precarious position because other people are different from you. The way Miller plays it, it’s a zero-sum game. You must triumph and “they” – people not like you – must be vanquished.Armstrong’s script is excellent. I could quote from any part of the show, but he really hits his stride towards the end. “Don’t get distracted by absurdities. This administration is throwing out so many bouncing, multicoloured balls that it’s almost impossible to focus on what’s important. The trick is to watch Stephen Miller. When he says something, it matters… The truth is, his views haven’t changed since he dumped his best friend for being Latino.”There’s something at once modern and classic about Armstrong’s script, and I thought about this while listening to Drama on 4: The Film, a small gem of a radio play about a movie. Its subject is a true story. In 1945, Sidney Bernstein, a film-maker and producer, was given hundreds of hours of footage from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Shot by British army crews for the Ministry of Information, the footage was basic but devastating, full of appalling, cruel, hellish murder. How to make this into a film that would both engage and expose the public to the horrors of the Holocaust? How to do justice to the suffering? Amazingly, Bernstein asked Alfred Hitchcock to help. And Hitch, initially reluctant, said yes.Written by Martin Jameson, The Film is a Radio 4 drama of ye olde school: rather stagey, with theatrical speeches and performances. But it’s also nicely paced, well acted, clear, moral. I found myself almost relieved that it exists. Not just because it’s about the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten, but because it’s an interesting real-life story that’s a play, as opposed to an episode of a clever news podcast. Old-fashioned audio.View image in fullscreenHere’s an example of new-fashioned audio, and it’s one that promises much. Amy Poehler, delightfully funny comedian and actor, has decided “about four or five years too late” to give us a podcast. The pitch for Good Hang with Amy Poehler must have had producers drooling: Poehler simply scrolls her contacts list, calls up a famous mate and has a chat, avoiding anything controversial in favour of having a laugh.Her first episode was with Tina Fey, who, being Tina Fey, took over and gave us insight (she works 12 hour days, plus “homework” in the evening) and wit (she’s worried about becoming one of those older Hollywood types who just “tells it like it is”). But, God, it only takes a couple of episodes before we find ourselves riding on fumes. All is slapdash and self-congratulatory. An episode with actor Ike Barinholtz gives us almost nothing. There’s a passing reference to him getting in an ecstasy mess in Amsterdam when he was younger, but we breeze past, and by the end of the show we know him no better. In every episode, Poehler enthuses so much about her guest – to their face! – that it feels performative. She laughs too much and for too long. Are these incredibly successful, creative, funny people so insecure that they need bolstering every other sentence? (Yes, clearly.)View image in fullscreenIn a similar vein, please welcome Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s latest podcast venture, Confessions of a Female Founder. Actually, don’t bother, unless OMG-yes-sister-and-you-look-so-good-while-doing-it is your thing. Honestly, I think it’s just how they talk over there. Their idea of a good hang, or a good podcast, is different from ours, and involves a lot less piss-taking.Meghan’s first show is with Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of dating app Bumble, but, nope, we don’t learn anything much, except about how Megs and Whits met (it was NYE and Wolfe Herd was wearing a rhinestone cowboy costume! The embarrassment!) and how supportive they are of each other.View image in fullscreenIf you want a decent podcast from a 28-year-old entrepreneur who’s already built three companies and is generous with her business tips, then I recommend Grace Beverley’s Working Hard, Hardly Working, now on episode 133. She also interrupts her guests too much to talk about her own life, but you get far more corporate insight and life practicality. The world, it seems, is full of these frantically perfectionist, success-obsessed, greige-swathed young women trying to get their life to work. I’d say relax, but they can’t. More

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      Farmer styles need an illustrative update | Brief letters

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      The illustration published with John Harris’s column (1 December) showed a “typical” farmer hoping for a break in the (economic) clouds. Did he have to be from 1960s central casting? Flat cap, neckerchief, green wellies and chewing on straw? Leaning on a spade in an obviously ploughed field? Surely the Guardian doesn’t share the government’s archaic view of farmers.Ian StewartBrackley, Northamptonshire Simon Jenkins lauds that “thing of wonder”, the US constitution, which has “held the union together … for two and a half centuries” (Biden pardons his son, Trump will absolve his criminal allies. America shouldn’t stand for this, 2 December). Has the small matter of the civil war – southern secession, four years of armed conflict, over 600,000 dead and a divisive legacy – slipped his mind?Alan KnightEmeritus professor of history, Oxford University In his confession (‘Phantom gnome snatcher’ of Formby admits prank almost 50 years on, 26 November), the perpetrator said “I hope the statutes of limitations have passed on this one”. Did he mean statues?Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Surely we need a “Middle-class woman of a certain age” mug from the Guardian, to sit proudly alongside a “Tofu-eating wokerati” one (As a middle-class woman of a certain age, all I can say is: ‘Thank you, Gregg Wallace’, 2 December)?Gabe CrispShoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex Was Gregg Wallace not “in a good headspace” when making his Instagram comments (Report, 2 December) because he couldn’t find one large enough to accommodate his ego?Paul McGilchrist Cromer, Norfolk More

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      The BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue: ‘I knew those were gunshots, and then realised Trump had stopped talking’

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      Born in Norfolk in 1968, and becoming blind by the age of eight, Gary O’Donoghue studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. After graduating he joined the BBC as a junior reporter on the Today programme, later becoming Radio 4’s chief political correspondent. Now the BBC’s senior North America correspondent, O’Donoghue was in attendance at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania where Donald Trump was hit by a bullet; his interview with eyewitness Greg Smith subsequently revealed astonishing security lapses. With election day on Tuesday and Americans worried there could be more violence to come, O’Donoghue spoke to us from the corporation’s Washington DC bureau. He divides his time between Washington DC, London and Yorkshire with his partner and their daughter.Where will you be when America goes to the polls?I’ll be covering election day and night, and the fallout afterwards, from Mar-a-Lago, Trump HQ.You’re just back from swing state Michigan. Any sense of which way things will go?We always laugh when people ask us this. I have no idea. It’s a cliche but it really is decided in these swing states. In Michigan, the phrase “the lesser of two evils” was said dozens of times – and by the way, when people say that, they’re usually voting Trump.A recent poll found that a quarter of Americans fear civil war following the election. Does that seem a credible threat to you?The idea of America is under enormous strain. The divides are everywhere – between the coasts and the centre, the north and the south, the urban and the rural, the religious and the unreligious. They are so entrenched that there is very little crossover communication, very little empathy. I find that incredibly sad. Do I think there could be civil war? I don’t but you’d be a fool to rule out violence. I mean, we’ve already had violence, haven’t we?View image in fullscreenRight. What went through your mind as you dived for cover at Butler?I knew immediately that those were gunshots, and then suddenly realised Trump had stopped talking. That’s the “Oh shit!” moment. Your mind is working at a million miles an hour – you have no idea whether it’s over or not, and then you hear the screaming start and you think, we’re in a pretty exposed position.You ended up getting a vital interview – with a man wearing a Trump visor topped with fake hair and holding a beer can.I don’t know what prejudices I’d have brought to it if I could see. One of the advantages of being blind and in journalism is that you can focus on the words. I’m a listener. If we’d put someone on air live who was lying or got it wrong, it could have really inflamed the situation, but Greg Smith was consistent.Advances in technology must have made your professional life simultaneously easier and still more challenging.Keeping up with information and the world as it is now, I feel like I’m paddling furiously under the surface the whole time. You’re listening to things mainly on audio, so it’s all linear, you can’t skim in the way you can when you can see. I rely on the wonderful Iona [Hampson, O’Donoghue’s senior producer] to let me know what’s trending and what I’m missing, but I must spend 70% more time than my colleagues just trying to keep up.Does it ever get you down?Sometimes it takes its toll because you’re obviously dealing with the same kind of life stuff that everyone has. I was in Chicago to report on Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC when my mother died. I had a bit of a wobble recently because I realised I hadn’t thought about her once in four or five days. The guilt was just awful.How has broadcast journalism changed over the course of your career?When I started out, there were no anti-discrimination laws. People could say: “You can’t be a reporter, you’re blind.” Now they can’t say that, which makes it harder to spot, but there are still dinosaurs around who believe it. Fortunately the key people at the BBC get it and they’re kind of chuffed – I mean, I am the first ever disabled foreign correspondent. We’re publicly funded, we need to walk, talk, look, sound, smell like the country who pays our salaries, right?View image in fullscreenWhere does your resilience come from?I lost my sight when I was eight and was sent away to boarding school, because that’s where blind children were educated in those days. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me because I ended up with a Rolls-Royce education. But the other thing that happens is you’re forced to build some resilience because a thousand times a day there are micro-aggressions, as they call them nowadays.You’ve spoken about how your mother once confided that things were so hard in your childhood, she’d thought of killing you both. Presumably she betrayed none of that at the time?None at all. It was really tough and my parents weren’t educated people, but they were incredibly foresightful: they knew that getting me an education would give me some independence in life. It must have broken their hearts sending me away but they did the right thing.What’s the most distressing news story you’ve ever had to report on?The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. I’d done other mass shootings but there was so much horrible detail about what happened, every sinew in me was screaming. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to losing it on air.Is there a story you’re especially proud of?The Trump conviction. I basically did the whole 10 o’clock news with Clive Myrie. The drama was magnificent but the thing I was particularly pleased with is that the years of working hard to understand America meant I could sustain something as high profile as that, for all that time.What do you do to decompress?I’m continually rereading the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, but fiction is the thing that calms me down. I love Colson Whitehead, Claire Keegan, Henry James.Is there anything you miss about the UK?London, mince pies and proper chocolate. American chocolate sucks, as they say. More

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      A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast | Will Hutton

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      The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More

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      Even the BBC Now Offers US-friendly Propaganda on Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Melodrama

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The BBC’s flat Earth policy should be roundly condemned | Letters

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      The BBC’s flat Earth policy should be roundly condemnedHelen Johnson, Bob Ward, Dr Richard Milne and Piers Burnett on the BBC’s director of editorial policy and his pursuit of impartiality It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the BBC’s latest pronouncement rejecting cancel culture, when the example given is the willingness to give a fair hearing to flat-Earthers (BBC does not subscribe to ‘cancel culture’, says director of editorial policy, 11 January). It’s nothing new for the BBC to give a platform to fantasists, of course; but there did seem to be an acknowledgment post-Brexit that it had perhaps been wrong to give equal weighting to fact and delusion. And there must be someone at the national broadcaster who regrets affording quite so many opportunities to Nigel Lawson to deny climate change reality on the airwaves.Which other minority beliefs can we now expect to be expounded in the 8.10am interview on the Today programme? It’s surely time we looked seriously at the view that the Covid vaccine is connecting us to a vast AI network, and that upstate New York was once inhabited by giants. There are also apparently people who still believe that Boris Johnson is a great prime minister, though finding a government minister to represent that view this week may be beyond even the bending-over-backwards, non-cancelling capacity of the BBC.Helen JohnsonSedbergh, Cumbria It was disappointing to read that David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, told a House of Lords committee that “if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more” in order to ensure impartiality. He appears to have forgotten that the BBC’s editorial guidelines also state that the broadcaster is “committed to achieving due accuracy in all its output”. Or perhaps he is genuinely unaware that for the past couple of millennia the shape of the Earth has not been just a matter of opinion, but instead has been established as a verifiable scientific fact.Either way, let us hope that the BBC’s new action plan on impartiality and editorial standards does not lead the broadcaster to promote more of the daft and dangerous views of those who believe that Covid-19 vaccines do not work or greenhouse gas emissions are not heating Earth.Bob WardPolicy and communications director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment The BBC’s stated policy to “represent all points of view” is worrying on two levels. First, where does the policy stop? There are people out there who think the value of a person depends upon their gender or skin tone – should those views be represented? What about Holocaust deniers? And those who think homosexuality, or marrying the wrong person, should be punished by death?Second, one of the BBC’s worst failures this century has been to present ill-informed opinion as being equal in value to professional expertise – most notably on climate change. At the absolute minimum, it needs to make crystal clear who is and who is not an expert. A lot of misinformation originates from well-funded pressure groups, which need no help getting their message across. So if we must hear ill-informed opinions, let it be from a person on the street – then at least the defence of representing public opinion would have some merit.Dr Richard MilneEdinburgh According to your report, David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, told a Lords committee that the corporation does not subscribe to “cancel culture” and that everyone should have their views represented by the BBC, even if they believe Earth is flat, adding that “flat-Earthers are not going to get as much space as people who believe the Earth is round … And if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more.”I understand that many Americans fervently believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory and most of the Republican party believes that Donald Trump won the last presidential election – and here in the UK there are substantial numbers of anti-vaxxers. I assume that Mr Jordan will now ensure that the views of these groups are given airtime on the BBC’s channels commensurate with their numbers.In fact, it appears that Mr Jordan has no genuine editorial policy – which would require him to make judgments based on facts and values – only a desperate anxiety to appease the cultural warriors on the right of the Conservative party.Piers BurnettSinnington, North YorkshireTopicsBBCHouse of LordsConservativesClimate crisisCoronavirusBrexitQAnonlettersReuse this content More