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8 tweets,
2 min read
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1) If you don’t call people out for lies you get a post-truth society. The system has been gamed.
2) What a revealing tweet from the BBC's director of editorial policy, which reveals the flaw baked into the very base of the BBC. By that logic, all that it needs for a lie to spread on the BBC is for it to be aired. The far-right worked that out years and years ago.
3) The BBC's policies were likely drawn up in a room of socially and racially homogenous people who - and this is the most important point - were very possibly well-meaning and did not fully anticipate the motives of bad faith actors.
4) A key reason many senior figures at the BBC are possibly feeling so defensive is that they are regarding this structural critique as a personal one. They are feeling personally attacked because they are emotionally invested in a system that is fundamentally flawed.
5) Impartiality sounds like a wonderful principle if you're, say, playing cricket. But it's less useful if you've invited a quick-witted Holocaust denier on your show, and you don't have the guts to outwit them. The truth then depends on how good you are at intellectual tennis.
6) Sorry to dwell on this. I just think it is one of the most remarkable quotes I have seen from UK media. "I think it’s probably unwise for the the BBC to get ourselves in a position where we’re calling out people for being liars or racist." I have to break this down more.
7) Consider the logic. This is an admission of why climate change denial has reigned supreme for years, why the public discourse has been distorted. Because all that well-paid liars had to do was get on the show and muddy the waters. It is a devastating revelation.
8) That quote explains so much; why interviewers have often not interrogated bad faith actors with sufficient rigour, and why charlatans are currently running UK politics. Because the BBC and other institutions have handed arsonists the matches, the petrol and the woodpile.
