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Good, impartial analysis in @prospect_uk of what the BBC has failed to get right on Brexit, by someone who (like me) treasures the BBC and wants to believe the best of it. But - some big buts... prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mark-…
From one "senior presenter": "if a substantial number of people believe, so to speak, that bananas are blue we have to treat that seriously". What this should mean is not "so we get them to express that view and then pose "robust" questions"...
...because that view is false, and perhaps merely a lie. "Seriously" means you start from the position that it is wrong, and analyse what it can be that has led a substantial number of people to believe it. We don't need to hear the "believers".
And people who have track record of telling endless lies, with damaging consequences, should not be given more airtime. Even if they were the foreign fucking secretary (but are now a backbencher). They have forfeit their platform.
Science programs on the BBC do not invite serial liars back to spread more lies. Political and current affairs programs can apply the same standards. That is simply a public service.
Some senior presenters took the view that, once the referendum was over, there was no more argument and it was just a matter of how we now do Brexit. And events have shown that to be a catastrophically bad call. But have there been any consequences? Any reflection?
The UK is due in three weeks to take the most transformative and fraught policy decision since 1939, and we have a government that cannot even tell us if it will happen, let alone how. And the BBC has been treating this as if it is normal political hurly burly...
... and not a national scandal of staggering proportions. It looks out of its depth and unable to adapt to the deep political abnormality of the moment. And history will consider this very odd indeed.
