Just finishing the first part on BBC2 – basically a documentary about the bit of a mess of the Tories/government since 2016, with interviews with various leading players.

Proper car crash, rubber necking TV, but fascinating precisely because of that.

She would know having been rather close to the No. 10 press office.

This makes interesting reading

https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/laura-kuenssberg-bbc-political-editor-was-a-catastrophic-systemic-failure/

Will watch it, but guess it’ll make me even more hacked off at those who voted for this shower of grifters and idiots.

How she can be so rubber necked to report this way and not take a single morsel of responsibility is beyond me.

First 5 seconds was Gove saying “We were a global laughing stock”. WHOSE ****ING FAULT WAS THAT THEN YOU TOADY FACED **** ***? ****s.

I had to turn it over before I had a coronary.

Kuenssberg can **** right off – utterly complicit

“Johnson at Ten” is worth a read. The section about Covid just beggars belief.

Just read the BTL comments on the Guardian review. Sounds like revisionist history fronted by a client journalist who is partly to blame for enabling this horror show. The Beeb see the wagon wheels falling off the cart and are putting out stuff like this to say “wasn’t me Guv”.

“Johnson at Ten” is worth a read.

It’s an extraordinary book. The first since my undergrad days that I’ve marked in the margin I think!

Thanks for the tip on the book.

I saw it and understood it to have quite a narrow scope, about the implosion(s) of the Conservative government(s) and the political skulduggery behind that. With that in mind, it seemed OK.

Just to join in the LK pile on…

How did someone who writes as poorly as her make it as a journalist of any sort?

I know she’s predominantly a broadcast rather than print journalist but her writing is dreadful.

For balance will the BBC be covering the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, EU and remainer view of this? Probably not.

For balance will the BBC be covering the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, EU and remainer view of this? Probably not.

No need. IIRC according to the BBC (at the time) the vote was so overwhelmingly pro leave, there is no need to consider the tiny number who voted to remain.

Bizarrely it had a nice aerial shot of Todmorden in it where you can see STW towers and my local boozer. That was probably the highlight.

LK seems to have zero awareness that she is part of the problem. You can see in the childish excitement she displays that politics is nothing more than a big soap opera to her, and her gossipy hack pieces were central to the dysfunction. And then she tries to do a high and mighty ‘how did it all go wrong’ doc? Amazing.

Are they still blaming everyone else?

I heard her trailing this yesterday morning and decided I wouldn’t watch it because it would make me angry.

She regards the whole thing as nothing more than an opportunity for her to be excited about chaos and to make a name for herself. On the trailer she was actually bemoaning the relative stability of UK politics prior to 2016.

She is barely a reporter – she likes to think of herself as an influencer but still pretends to be a reporter. She isn’t, she’s utterly complicit in this current mess and she has done it willingly and consciously. She was practically a microphone for Cummings (remember him?) et al.

Dreadful person.

She never did anything to ask “but isn’t that made up bollox” to those she was fawning over.  Because she knew if she did call out the lies and deceit, she’d not be their pet mouthpiece given the access she had,  in the BBC.

I used to be a big supporter of the BBC, in the days of quality journalism.  But for the past 10-15 years it’s got worser and worserer.

Even I’d just now just scrap nearly all of it – in its bid to be ‘unbiased’ it totally fails to do anything other than broadcast and amplify the lies and tripe that is given to them.

(And excluding D Attenborough, Spring/summer/autumn/winter Watch, and a couple of other wildlife docs, its all mind numbing dross or dumbed down pseudo-science.  What happened to decent intelligent documentaries or insights where the viewer wasn’t assumed to had severe ADHD and had to have everything repeated to them 7 times.)

i hated to see the pile-ons on LK at the time, because she was getting it in the neck from all sides – from the tories who are convinced the BBC are lefty revolutionaries, from the lefties who believe it’s a neoliberal hellscape, and from the people who thought she was just crap.

But she WAS just crap!

As that Byline Times article highlights – she’s great as an energetic, stand out the front of parliament, keeping up on all the latest rumours of who’s in, who’s out, what’s the word on the political streets, type of reporter. But an Editor role means being a lot more discerning. Which, for whatever reason, she didn’t do.

Even I’d just now just scrap nearly all of it – in its bid to be ‘unbiased’ it totally fails to do anything other than broadcast and amplify the lies and tripe that is given to them.

This. I wouldn’t mourn the BBC if it was abolished tomorrow. Just another ‘state broadcaster’ along the lines of Russia, China etc.

Even I’d just now just scrap nearly all of it – in its bid to be ‘unbiased’ it totally fails to do anything other than broadcast and amplify the lies and tripe that is given to them.

It does do that, and has programming that manages that just fine. I think the issue for Kuennesberg was two fold. 1. Her first job was to absolutely report the goings on at Westminster in a “live outside No10 way” that could leave the careful analysis, combative interviewing to others. She was literally just Johnny on the spot. which was fine, but she didn’t seem to change that when she became the person that should be carefully analysing and combatively interviewing what politicians were saying,

and 2.The sorts of barefaced lying and contempt for norms that was amplified by the Johnson Govt threw any notions of fairness out the window. The sorts of political reporting that the BBC is set up to do only works when both sides have agreed to a set of working principles that broadly fall into “This is really what we think or what we’ll do, and you can report it verbatim in the knowledge that we’ll stick to it” when one side of that has determined that they will use the BBC (that they hold in contempt); to broadcast crap, and at the same time hold them to ransom if they do not means that rather than hold the Johnson govt to account, people direct their ire at the BEEB who’re are just trying to do their job. They failed becasue the Johnson gvt made it their business to make sure that happened, and there was nothing (realistically) the BBC could do about it via Kuenesberg.

TL:DR Cummings was smarter than the directors of the BEEB and used it to his advantage becasue he’s a psychopathic scheming sack of shit with no morals.

Just another ‘state broadcaster’ along the lines of Russia, China etc.

Have you ever watched state TV in Russia or China, especially the domestic feeds? It’s quite eye-opening if you have.

Her first job was to absolutely report the goings on at Westminster in a “live outside No10 way” that could leave the careful analysis, combative interviewing to others

She was the politics EDITOR, wasn’t she ?  Wouldn’t the editor be exactly the person expected to lead or at minimum, direct, “the careful analysis, combative interviewing”

Yes eventually, at first she was just a reporter, and breathlessly reporting what some policy wonk had told her in the corridor was exactly her job, she just never really changed.

… and that’s the point – over-deferential, credulous “reporting” is maybe OK for a “reporter”; highly questionable in anyone more senior and utterly unacceptable in an editor.  Complicit in the entire bullshit circus

Well that all may be true about LK but it’s an interesting and possibly significant thing to have made.

Despicable,complicit, arrogant, stupid, moronic, unethical, immoral and uncaring without a shred of humanity.

Snake eyed and worm tongued.

I wouldn’t mourn the BBC if it was abolished tomorrow

I’d miss BBC4. Other than that (maybe some sports coverage – athletics particularly) YMMV

Just another ‘state broadcaster’ along the lines of Russia, China etc.

I was thinking exactly that as I watched the new documentary ‘Putin – 20 Years of Chaos’ on Russia Today

The thing that did it for me was the amount of air time they gave farage ‘in the interest of balance’.

LK pretty much compounded the issue, and gave the nastiness a friendly face to the hard of thinking … she may as well call her self ‘tory correspondent’  rather than news reporter.

She’s complicit in the decline of the UK, absolutely complicit.

I’m far from a fan of LK but the vitreol in this thread I find a bit puzzling, in fact, possibly troubling.  Nobody woke up hating Kuennesberg that much so somebody is feeding that hatred, and if you really believe that you just happen to have all the insight into how evil she is just from your one intellect – then surely most people in the country with a fraction of your intellect could see through her.

I wouldn’t mourn the BBC if it was abolished tomorrow.

I bloody well would. It needs protecting from govts and perhaps reform, but we need it. Everyone needs a state funded impartial, free and non-commercial broadcaster. The BBC doesn’t currently tick all those boxes but it could.

@poly – honestly, have a read of this – https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/laura-kuenssberg-bbc-political-editor-was-a-catastrophic-systemic-failure/

The case is not that she’s evil, rather that she was the wrong person for that particular job (of Political Editor), with the wrong bosses (terrified of the Tories) at the wrong time (arguably the first time the UK Prime Minister’s office had been known to lie so brazenly and frequently)

@mucker A bit sugar-coated 🙂

Nobody woke up hating Kuennesberg that much

I don’t hate her at all, just don’t really think she is very impartial in respect of this particular time in her career

Everyone needs a state funded impartial, free and non-commercial broadcaster. The BBC doesn’t currently tick all those boxes but it could.

Is that really the case?

C4 and Sky are none of those, but I consider their News to be higher quality than the the BBC.

if you really believe that you just happen to have all the insight into how evil she is just from your one intellect – then surely most people in the country with a fraction of your intellect could see through her.

Depends what you expect from the BBC, I guess.  I didn’t want a TV version of the Sun, thanks

I hate the failure of the BBC news “machine” to provide anything other than almost totally unthinking non-crtical reportage of whatever shite was fed to it, particularly from the Johnson/Cummings perspective.  The individuals principally responsible for that critical thinking/review were its editorial staff.  Sure, their managers might’ve made them do it but those with anything about them made that implication clear enough to get themselves moved sideways (or, yeah, sacked).  Those who didn’t were complicit in the <whatever> and should have the slef-awareness to at least not now look back and say “ooooh, they were bullshitters, weren’t they?” when their job was to do that several years ago.  They should leave that to the ones with some moral credibility

C4 and Sky are none of those, but I consider their News to be higher quality than the the BBC.

Yes – earlier versions of the BBC raised the bar for all broadcasters systemically. Just look at the cesspit that is the US media, where every news outlet is nothing but a political campaign platform. You don’t want that.

poly
Free Member
I’m far from a fan of LK but the vitreol in this thread I find a bit puzzling, in fact, possibly troubling.

I you are not referring to me! I’ve had her pegged as a tory mole within the BBC ever since I was aware of her existence.

Or at least a sympathetic shill.

Probably sometime in 2015.

David Attenborough can’t have much left in him… He’s getting on a bit… Once he’s dead… What is the BBC really for?