BBC: social engineering - not honest reporting

The problem with the BBC is that, traditionally, its university educated journalists (back when a university education meant something) were smarter and better connected than the average viewer. Fast-forward to today when we have greater expertise at our fingertips, more time and willingness to be informed, and a greater mistrust of prestige sources, BBC audiences are likely to have a broader range of influences and experiences than the average BBC hack who spends most of their time talking to politicians and other journalists inside the same square mile, week in, week out.

We now find that the best analysts and commentators are from outside the traditional media because they utilise audience interaction to learn and grow, when the average BBC "transmit-only mode" hack believes the audience are low intelligence, and must, for their own benefit, be protected from alternative sources. This is how we got a class of modern journalist that believes in censorship, and that they alone possess the critical faculties to decide what is and isn't a legitimate source.

This is how modern journalism has become an object of ridicule. They genuinely don't have the first idea how out of the loop they are, or how anachronistic their methods are. The information revolution was something that just happened to other people. We now have a class of intellectually incurious "citizen of nowhere" journalists who have no idea what makes Britain tick, no idea how anything works, and no particular desire to find out. Ed Conway is perhaps the only one close to an inquisitive mind among the entire lot of them. 

The saddest thing of all, is that I could have written this at virtually any point in the last fifteen years. Social media is not a new thing, nor is the internet. They haven't evolved in the slightest. Through the use of their inherited institutional prestige, they continue on in their own start-up vessels, speaking only to a very narrow audience of metropolitan liberals, producing self-congratulatory confirmation bubble drivel without the slightest hint of self-awareness.

The good news is that they are a dying creed. Their continued presence in the media landscape is the toxic legacy of terrestrial media monopolies, but this can't last forever and they're the last generation. Marianna Spring is their latest and last attempt to manufacture a young clone of themselves, and she's widely ridiculed and, rightly, treated with contempt. Independent media leaves them standing. You get more informative and interesting content from @BritishThgtLdrs and @nickdixoncomic , and there will be more like them. And though GB News is televisual chewing gum, you're still more likely to be exposed to different ideas and perspectives than the BBC equivalent, which is no longer capable of prioritising actual news. The sooner Sky TV and the BBC are wound up, the better off we will be.