Best Of

https://x.com/steven_swinford/status/1988274649830928799?s=46

BREAKING:

David Lammy admits that another prisoner may have been released in error **last week** on November 3. The prison service is investigating. Amazingly it doesn't actually know if the prisoner is still at large

Your joking....not another one.....

To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.

It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.

The early release scheme almost certainly means more mistaken releases. If you are tearing up the normal procedures and doing everything in a hurry things will go wrong.

Not even trying to hide it, they’re casually smoking in the middle of the day now.

https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1988223117421146475

"Orsknefteorgsintez" Oil Refinery, Orsk, Russia.

They hit the Saratov oil refinery last night too.

Hopefully the Ukrainians can keep chipping away at Russia's oil infrastructure and supply,

Indeed, the Flamingos appear to be flying well.

The other really interesting bit in the last couple of days is the European and Middle East operations of Lukoil and Rosneft being either taken over or nationalised by the countries in which they operate, depriving the companies of a significant flow of hard currency.

Wasn't hard currency exchanged when those companies werre taken over/nationalised? Or were they simply expropriated?

It appears at this stage to be mostly the latter. Any that are being sold are at fire-sale prices and probably not actually paid while the economic sanctions persist.

You would expect a report on bias in an organisation to be objective, and not itself to be massively biased. That's why I think the BBC board engaging a partisan hack as its bias consultant is a bigger problem than any of the issues he has identified. Any big organisation has issues that get resolved some how, but a leadership guided by consultants not acting in good faith is a leadership seriously adrift, in my view.

The idea that there's a room full of Plato's Philosopher Kings wing to be released upon the world to give us Pure Impartiality is... improbable.

In the real world, you get biases. It's a bit like working with a mill or lathe. Nothing is perfectly true. But with clever techniques, you can used a lathe to make *a more accurate lathe*.

No but there's already a review process in the BBC for bias, which is dealing with most or all of the genuine issues including the Panorama edit. This process appears to be much more rigorous and objective than Michael Prescott's hatchet job. So why not run with that?

I have no problem with Prescott having a personal view of how he would like stories to be reported but it's concerning the BBC board have delegated overall editorial judgement to an outsider with an agenda.

They haven't delegated editorial judgement to an outsider.

He wrote a report/memo on editorial judgement. Which, in among the partisan stuff, deals with a number of objective failures in meetings standards.

Which is why people resigned.

The sane approach is to prevent the same shit happening again.

I accept the report mentions a couple of genuine failings - the Panorama edit, some of the reporting on Gaza - which are being dealt with through the proper process already. The "partisan stuff' is the problem. Not even because it is partisan - anyone can have a view - but because the board has decided to make it their totem.

The problem is that "The Proper Process" is reactive and after the event.

What is needed is to prevent them happening again. Which means changing behaviour.

I'm not sure what "changing behaviour" would actually mean here. I think there's one with the BBC Arabic service where the journalists over identified with "their people" rather than reporting objectively. That's a specific issue the organisation is dealing with specifically, correctly in my view. The rest? The BBC is responsible for a huge amount of content and the number of incontestably wrong calls identified by the report is tiny. How do you generalise that in organisational, behavioural terms?

The government should name Trevor Philips as new BBC DG, give him a licence to clean house and bring back impartiality.

I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge amount of time for Trevor Philips.

Good afternoon

He is the outstanding political journalist of the media and he would be a perfect fit if he wanted it

Is it really a journalism job, though? I'd have said it was more about management of a big organisation, and he's relatively inexperienced in that area.

Errrhhhh head of the Commission for Racial Equality for 4 years and Equality and Human Rights Commission for 5 years not count?

He is much more Labour friendly so not a terrible option for the government.

Pretty good article.

The truth about impartiality at the BBC
And the hysteria of the current "crisis"

https://goodallandgoodluck.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-impartiality-at-the?r=4i04j3&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
...There have been real and appalling scandals in the BBC’s recent history. This is not one of them. Any sane political/media environment would treat it as what it is: a minor, to the point of trivial embarrassment. Instead the reaction has been hysterical. The edit in question was clearly a mistake. It was unfair to Trump because it gave the impression of his saying something that he did not. But how much does it matter? Did the edit fundamentally mislead the viewer about the events of that period and Trump’s role within them? Can anyone credibly claim that the overall subject and critique of the documentary was not based in truth and fact? 1) Donald Trump lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and continues to lie about it to this day. In so doing he introduced a toxin into American politics which will take a generation to exorcise. 2) Trump did incite the mob on January 6th. Put simply, had he not lied about the election, they would never have been there in the first place...

...Instead of some proportion from much of the British media class, we are treated to the tragicomic absurdity of a former British prime minister willing to admonish the national broadcaster and demand the resignation of its Director General, all in the name of defending Donald Trump’s reputation for truth-telling. But it’s worse than that- it is a textbook example of how populists win. We have the ridiculous carnival of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, of all people, admonishing the BBC for its lack of integrity. And they can get away with it, because no-one expects anything from them and yet we expect everything from the people and places who actually give a damn..

Like the petty criminal caught shoplifting at Poundland. It was dreadful. And importantly it’s not about Trump, it’s about integrity. To dismiss this as well that person isn’t very trustworthy anyway, and do we really believe he didn’t mean it, what does it matter if we splice things together to make it sound like what we want it to be? I believe this isn’t too far away from the Police’s defence of fitting up the Birmingham 6.

A ridiculous comparison.

Do you really deny that Trump continues to lie to this day about the 2020 election, and his role in the aftermath ?

I have never defended the edit - and nor does Goodall, though his view is more lenient than mine. His essential point, though, remains sound.

The person "isn't very trustworthy" ?
Trump is the most brazen liar of our times, and practices media intimidation on an institutional scale.

https://x.com/steven_swinford/status/1988274649830928799?s=46

BREAKING:

David Lammy admits that another prisoner may have been released in error **last week** on November 3. The prison service is investigating. Amazingly it doesn't actually know if the prisoner is still at large

Your joking....not another one.....

To be fair to Lammy (and I find it remarkable that I am writing that) it would be interesting to see what the rates of incorrect release have been historically. Is this a new thing or is it something that has been going on for ages but has only now caught the imagination of the public/press.

It doesn't make it any less serious, nor does it excuse Lammy per se as the buck stops with him. But it would be interesting to see what the rates of mistaken release were a year ago, 5 years ago and a decade ago.