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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Two BBC bosses, Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness, both resigned after a scathing dossier (full memo) was published days ago, showcasing strong bias in BBC's reporting.

An example from the dossier where BBC's partiality may be readily observed, without requiring to into the weeds of culture war issues, is BBC produced special, airing a week before the most recent US presidential election about Donald J. Trump. In the part of the spcial about the 1-6 Incident, editor had spliced together without indication of doing so, Trump quotes an hour apart:

So near the beginning of his speech, Trump stated:

We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women

Then, roughly an hour later:

Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, I wanna thank you very much and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.

As quoted in the allegedly biased pre-election special:

We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country any more.

(Also in video form)

Also elaborated upon in the dossier are bias in reoprting on the US POTUS election generally, alledging without evidence the existence of racial discrimination in insurance, covering up illegal immigration, distorting opinions of historians to promote racially incendiary historical narratives, parroting the LGBTQ activist line regarding transsexuality. Coverage of the local consequences of the 10-7 Incident is in particular depth critiqued.

Here is the punchline: Mr. Davie had in the past worked issued guidelines which would have been violated, if these accusations are true. He is more closely associated with the Conservative, rather than Labour, party. Strange that a man who can be accused of at most trying and failing to correct the ship, resigns. Now with Labour in power, the person replacing him will be more likely to be sympathetic to those who feel called out by this dossier and less likely to see the dossier as pointing at a real issue.

With a reputable report, whose accusations are confirmed by resignations, showing leftist bias in media, trust in media takes another hit.

As someone on the left I can assure you that the BBC is not in any way representative of actual left wing thought, or indeed the views of the left wing base. They represent and serve the interests of the establishment, with no real consistent political valence beyond that. They were relentlessly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn and still are - despite the fact that he's who the left actually wanted representing him. I'm not saying they don't hate Trump, far from it - but their hatred stems not from his being a conservative but from him disrespecting the established political order.

And, of course, there's the Palestine issue - the BBC's editor in charge of reporting on this topic, Raffi Berg, is utterly devoted to Israel and the Mossad. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/bbc-middle-east-editor-suing-said-mossad-made-him-proud

"Or things like that which really - as a Jewish person, an admirer of the state of Israel, then, to know that these people carry out these kinds of fantastic operations, it's really, it's what makes you tremendously proud. Absolutely.

"Talking about it still gives me goosebumps."

In August 2020, Berg posted in celebration that his book was pictured on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bookshelf.

I don't think you can really call a news organisation with an editor like this remotely leftist even if they hadn't already spent hundreds of hours trying to get rid of a leftist candidate.

The BBC are establishment progressives. They do largely adhere to the status quo, except on cultural issues where they are invariably well to the left.

That one of their editors appears to be a bit of Zionist apparently had no impact on their fawning coverage of Hamas talking points, as demonstrated in the reply right below yours. It's a similar argument that Davie and Turness are both Tory appointments with conservative leanings; somehow it didn't prevent the BBC from this blunder, or the hundreds of Gaza blunders, or their "LGBTQ desk" somehow getting veto power over any and all trans related articles.

That one of their editors appears to be a bit of Zionist apparently had no impact on their fawning coverage of Hamas talking points,

This isn't actually true at all. People have done the research - the numbers were even included in that article. But if you want another source... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/israel-palestine-bbc-news-coverage-bias-gaza-war/

We found that “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could been seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

In the current Gaza war, when a former Israeli general was interviewed for BBC Online, he was described as “straight-talking” when he said that innocent civilians would have to be killed when Israel “crushed” its “enemy” and that “we need to be tough”. It is inconceivable that any Palestinian group would be given space to describe the need to kill Israeli civilians – let alone be described as “straight-talking” when doing so.

The main reason people believe there's any equivalency is that zionists tend to be incredibly histrionic and react with screaming meltdowns at the idea that anyone could oppose their genocidal ethnostate. Here we have a media organisation that the evidence shows is objectively biased towards the zionist perspective, and yet zionists still wail and whine that their coverage of "Hamas talking points" is fawning or that they committed hundreds of Gaza blunders when the evidence is clear that the coverage was objectively and explicitly (as confirmed by Raffi Berg) biased in their favor.

"LGBTQ desk" somehow getting veto power over any and all trans related articles.

I'm on the left but I agree this was bad - I don't think that trans issues have been handled well by the left at all. At the same time I don't think that a genuine concern for trans people was behind this coverage, but I'm not really going to fight you on this issue. You're right, it is a problem.