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Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
331–340 of 434 posts
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#332[flagged]
Oh look the Israeli tech workers are online. Everyone knows it's a genocide. "Gaza victim narrative", the absolute state of you.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is, we've seen how that ends up: you get bad actors masquerading as news (e.g., Fox News, Info Wars, OAN, etc.) and people flocking to low information, high entertainment vendors over good faith (if sometimes or even often flawed) traditional news (e.g., Associated Press, Reuters, BBC News, etc.). As such, you end up with a large cohort of people believing immigrants eat their pets, vaccines have microchi…
Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of receiving and imparting information and ideas. The United Nations was fully aware when making the declaration of human rights that bad actors existed. However the outcome of not having those rights have shown to be universally worse. It is not that one has to accept that we are inevitably screwed. That assumes that no…
Here's the rub: the current polarization and championing of censorship have come from abuse of free speech protections.
We've had decades of Fox News and the like declaring things like "War on Christmas" and "War on Christianity" to make people in the majority feel like victims, presenting immigrants as subhumans that take jobs and commit crimes as they invade our country, and presenting trans people as deviant threats to our children, trying to make them all trans, too.
This is a completely fictional world, but such a large number of people have become believers that they've now been able to take over political power.
As a result, we get state laws that directly attack freedom of speech via book bans and scrubbing school curriculum of anything parents deem objectionable, which can include innocuous things like acknowledging gay people exist or that the civil war was fought over slavery. We also got our current administration, which has used lawsuits and other threats to attack any speech the president doesn't like.
I don't see where it gets better anytime soon - and I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to get a lot worse before they do get better, because a large cohort of people are cheering it on.
And before anyone chimes in that this is a both sides issue: I've yet to see actual legal action taken by the left wing to curtail speech. Instead, I've seen social pressure levied - largely in the form of freedom not to associate with individuals or businesses that engage in speech people find objectionable. This is the correct way to engage in an environment of free speech, even if I find it distasteful how far it's been taken and how petty it's been in some cases.
I'm not really advocating for censorship myself. Ultimately, I'm merely reflecting upon how an environment of nearly absolute adherence to free speech has been eroded by a number of bad actors utilizing propaganda and lies to chip away at that very free speech over the decades, bringing us to a point where we're sliding down the very same slope towards destruction of freedoms that free speech absolutism was intended to prevent. The whole exercise feels like a Catch-22, hence my prodding for something a little more concrete yet specific than "censorship = bad".
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#334The BBC recently showed a documentary that was pro-Palestinian and factually wrong. They also paid Hamas affiliates and relations to star in it. I have no idea where the "BBC are pro-Israel" thoughts come from but as a brit - I don't see it.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I can see how it’s read that way but people really do seem to forget that billionaires buy media companies as an investment. It’s not a strictly financial investment, either; they get to shape public opinion with them.
How many people know that Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post? How many people know that MSNBC is owned by Comcast? How many people know that Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post are all owned by Rupert Murdoch? How many UK citizens know that he also owns Sky News and The Times of London? How many people have heard the name Rupert Murdoch? (Everybody knows Elon Musk owns Twitter. Why do people say he bought an election again? How did that happen?)
They have a point and it is not anti-Semitic. The people who own the means to shape public opinion are exclusively in the billionaire class.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as there are barriers to reporters here, it seems less than most other conflicts. Its not like journalists have unrestricted access to the Ukraine/Russia front line. Access to other conflicts like Sudan or Myanmar are also very restricted in practise.
That doesn't appear to be correct. How have you reached that conclusion? Israel has not granted access to journalists to report independently since October 2023. There has been very limited escorted trips with external journalists but all tightly supervised by the IDF. Journalists already in Gaza have been killed regularly and there are credible accusations that many are deliberately targeted by the IDF.
> Israel has not granted access to journalists to report independently since October 2023.
Has Russia granted access by independent journalists to russian occupied Ukraine in that time period? As far as i know the answer is no.
And even on the Ukraine side there has been significant restrictions
E.g. a quote from https://theintercept.com/2023/06/22/ukraine-war-journalists-...
“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”
Maybe its hard to say which one is worse, but they seem to be at least in the same neighbourhood
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government". >Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring wh…
> They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government". They might be murderous terrorists, but they were, in fact, elected in as free an election as Gaza was likely to get. They're as much a legitimate government there as the current US administration is here.
The current US administration was elected less than one year ago. Hamas was elected 19 years ago. By law they should have held another election in 2009, but they refused to hold that election and have refused to hold any other elections since. This would seem to raise some doubts as to their status as a legitimate elected government.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet? Whenever a group publicly criticizes a behavior, you see the rhetorical question “Why are you surprised?”, and that feels dismissive and disingenuous. Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought. Every actor has reasons to behave. People are critical of the behavior,…
> Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought My point is they are responding to external constraints shaped by the broader society - the very same group who seems to put up with Israel's outrageous stunts. To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. The BBC is not quite a weathervane, but like so many commentators in this…
>To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me.
Where are you getting this from, this idea that the ones that are angsting about the first, are not angsting about the second?
pg just recently tweeted about the ludicrousness of the 83 year-old historian (?) getting arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestian Action, now effectively deemed a terrorist organization in the UK as I understand it.
This post is about the BBC, so the comments are about this specific news about the BBC. The BBC is constrained but not as much as the UK government obviously. It even tries to report objectively on scandals inside the BBC, to what extent it succeeds is always up for debate, as it is in this case debated here.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought My point is they are responding to external constraints shaped by the broader society - the very same group who seems to put up with Israel's outrageous stunts. To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. The BBC is not quite a weathervane, but like so many commentators in this…
>To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. Where are you getting this from, this idea that the ones that are angsting about the first, are not angsting about the second? pg just recently tweeted about the ludicrousness of the 83 year-old historian (?) getting arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestian Action, now effectively deemed a terrorist organization in the UK as I unde…
This thread is literally full of confused commentary, which is what my (slightly meta) post obliquely referred to.
I ma glad there are people out there who do care.
Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza
#340The BBC recently showed a documentary that was pro-Palestinian and factually wrong. They also paid Hamas affiliates and relations to star in it. I have no idea where the "BBC are pro-Israel" thoughts come from but as a brit - I don't see it.
Cite much?