There seems to be a clear pattern of negative posts about the BBC. Certain accounts are at it on a daily basis. I find myself wondering why.
Some motives for such behaviour I could think of are:
- The BBC wrote a story that hurt them
- Reporting did not reinforce their world view
- They expected the BBC to be perfect and inevitable failures to meet that standard lead to disappointment
- They found the style of reporting annoying
- Perhaps some reporters were annoying
I’m sure that list is nowhere near exhaustive as my imagination is rather limited.
A cynic might think that something deeper is going on, for example, a systematic campaign to erode trust in the BBC. Perhaps such a campaign is not just limited to feddit.uk communities, as mightily influential as they are, and could be happening across social media.
Such a cynical person might further wonder what groups, organisations, or perhaps even states with well resourced intelligence organisations might want to mount such a campaign.
I’m not a cynic, and as mentioned don’t have much of an imagination, so such thoughts don’t even cross my mind.
I’m simply wondering why some people hate the BBC so much. For me it, with all its failings, is one of the best public broadcasting organisations in the world.
I think the shift in reporting is a reflection of the society more than anything else.
Perhaps - though the comedy, drama, radio, documentaries etc are mostly still fairly “centre to centre left” - it’s mostly just the news reporting.
It often seems like the “shift in society” has been manufactured, and that that the BBC have been part of this manufacture - and that shift is really just a change in boldness, volume and support - people are loud and proud about hating people over race or gender etc.
I feel a far larger part of the shift was when the Tories threatened the BBC with funding cuts, cancellation and “sharing the licence fee with poor impoverished media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch” unless they removed their “left wing bias” (actually central bias at the time) and starting promoting a “balanced” (actually right to far-right) viewpoint. This was accompanied by sacking and replacing key staff members with their own right-promoting appointees.
That’s continued and got worse - they’ve spent much of the last decade promoting the voices of increasingly extreme right-wing viewpoints, and either silencing, mocking or generating controversy about any minor centre or left-wing viewpoints.
None of those people changed when the government did, so it’s stayed in the right and possibly drifted even further. Remember that in terms of many of its social policies, our current Labour government is more right wing than Cameron’s Tory government was.