Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Balance only ever goes one way.

Tim Montgomerie on Newsnight again now appears to be displaying symptoms you’d associate with a neurological condition such as cerebral palsy. He is still fairly coherent and articulate, however, he appears very different to how he did, say, 5 or 6 years ago.

BBC news 24 is fucking shit. Stuck in garage waiting for car to be repaired, and it's on the waiting room screen.

Interview with Swedish MEP about EU and tariffs cut short so the presenter can offer useless commentary on the former South Korean president moving house. No insight or analysis, just repeating the same few sentences over and over.

Economics reporter does report, first half being mainly about himself.

It's got much worse since the cuts to integrate the domestic service with the international service.

It's a service that we simply don't need any more - I'd rather they axed it and used the savings to give to Arqiva to buy a modern solid state transmitter for Droitwich.

It was just the way they went from quite relevant to who cares (apologies to anyone interested in South Korean politics but the ex-president leaving the presidential mansion is not that important), purely because they had some footage. No thoughts to go with it, mind.

Also, breaking news that Trump's special envoy has arrived in Moscow, followed by - look, I get that they're trying to be vaguely neutral, but don't say he's there to bring about peace, and then say that Ukraine is excluded from whatever they're discussing.

The presenter clearly had someone shouting in their ear, and looked really uncomfortable.

Without wishing to defend the indefensible, this is what happens when you try and combine a domestic service with an international one. What you saw would have been more suited to the former BBC World, which just doesn't work for the domestic market and once again underpins the folly that is 24 hour rolling news.

Despite the BBC being a PSB (and not a "State broadcaster", as many BTL muppets claim), it still pursues viewing figures to justify the licence fee.

Heard someone the other day - might have been James O’Brien - describe Mishal Hussein as the finest current affairs an politics journalist in the country, bar none, whom the BBC must have been crazy to let go.

I think there was a heavy implication that a large part of the reason for her departure was the decision to favour Kuenssberg ahead of Hussein for the Sunday morning politics show gig, a decision I agree looks inexplicable.

Not if you consider the composition of the BBC senior management team.

Foreign aid cuts, apparently.

David Lammy is asking BBC bosses to draw up tens of millions of pounds’ worth of cuts to the World Service as part of the spending review, as the fallout continues from Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the aid budget.

Sources have told the Guardian the Foreign Office has asked the BBC to draw up a budget of up to £70m a year lower than bosses say it needs over the next few years, and well below inflation.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/ ... et-slashed

The World Service get some funding from the license fee and some from direct from the government. So there may be some jockeying between the two rather than a nailed on budget cut. The government grant went up quite a lot last year.

But it would be bad if the overall budget went down by a lot this time. It's stuff like this, and everything else really, where you realize that a £2.5bn hole in the OBR budget caused by reducing immigration like the white paper implies is quite a lot of money,

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 6:01 pm The World Service get some funding from the license fee and some from direct from the government. So there may be some jockeying between the two rather than a nailed on budget cut. The government grant went up quite a lot last year.

It used to be entirely funded by the Foreign Office until Osborne (I think) told the BBC it had to pay for it from the licence fee.

An English speaking Turkish service popped up on timeline broadcasting unfounded stories about Russia and the Putin regime on the brink of collapse. Even when a channel broadcasts bias you want to hear you can still smell the propaganda bullshit. Fortunately the BBC World Service smells just fine.

[media]https://bsky.app/profile/stephengraham. ... jlvqpnjc2k
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Feck it, how do you get Bluesky posts to display?

copy the URL and paste it into the reply box.
Highlight it and click the little icon of a monitor in the bar above.

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 9:19 pm copy the URL and paste it into the reply box.
Highlight it and click the little icon of a monitor in the bar above.

Thanks for that Malc, I never knew about that, some links display automatically.

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 9:19 pm copy the URL and paste it into the reply box.
Highlight it and click the little icon of a monitor in the bar above.

Tried but it's not working,

It can be temperamental...

Keep at it.

"... latest attempt to blame the Conservatives..."

Is this prick's (Chris Mason) memory so short that he can't remember the Cuntservatives still blaming Labour 10 fucking years into their term in office?

A year ago today, Rishi Sunak called the general election.

I think the suit I was wearing that day is still a bit damp now.

Standing in Downing Street in the driving rain, with a lectern and a script but no coat and no umbrella, Sunak said the country would elect a government on 4 July.

Labour went on to win and win big, but the going in government got tough and got tough quickly.

Today, 12 months on, we can expect a blizzard of news.

Some in government are trying to dress this up as what they are calling "legacy Thursday" - their latest attempt to blame the Conservatives for what they are now having to do...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3qlnqv7w8o.amp

Now read on (if you can stomach it)


This is what I have come to regard as normal BBC political impartiality - the Tories got a free pass for banging on about "the mess we inherited" lie for over a decade, Labour get sneered at for stating the truth about the shitshow the Tories left behind.

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 8:36 pm [media]https://bsky.app/profile/stephengraham. ... jlvqpnjc2k
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Feck it, how do you get Bluesky posts to display?

Just a thought, TWA: I'm not on Bluesky and when I clicked on that link, it requires me to sign in. Obviously, other posts don't and I can read those. Might the need to sign in be a reason it doesn't display?