The BBC is worse than biased, it’s a morally vacuous horseshit hosepipe, repeating “the truth” as it is dictated to them from on high

 Fri 11:36 am +00:00, 14 Nov 2025  3

posted by pete fairhurst 2

 

Source: https://off-guardian.org/2025/11/12/trump-vs-the-bbc/

onald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for one billion dollars is yet another fake division intended to prop up the make-believe “sides” in the political debate.

That’s the short version. Here’s the backstory.

Last month, the BBC’s flagship anthology documentary series Panorama aired an episode on the January 6th “insurrection” which “accidentally” edited together two speeches by Donald Trump, making it seem he explicitly ordered people to attack the Capitol (he did no such thing, but that’s old news).

Under public pressure from the Trump administration, the BBC have now admitted the “error” and both the Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness have resigned.

Now, President Donald Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1billion unless there is a full retraction and apology by Friday, the 14th of November.

This has spurred British pundits and politicians alike to jump to the defence of the BBC, repeating age-old nonsense about being perceived as “biased against both sides”:

 

Or how right-wingers are trying to undermine our faith in institutions.

Or that the BBC “isn’t perfect but”…blah blah blah:

 

Now, I hate this discourse because it is fake.

Partly, because it is yet another pretend divide. A fake binary between the fake President and the fake journalists at the BBC.

But mostly, I hate any discussion about media “bias” because it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the BBC is and how it works.

To make my point, let’s go back in time twenty-four years.

On September 11th 2001, BBC correspondent Jane Standley was reporting live from New York to the BBC studios in London. She told the UK’s rapt television audience that World Trade Centre Building 7 – the Solomon Brothers Building – had just collapsed due to fire.

The only problem was that, not only had the building not collapsed, it was actually visibly still standing just behind her left shoulder.

The real collapse occurred about thirty minutes later.

Tellingly, neither the BBC nor the reporter herself have ever offered a real explanation for this incident, and certainly never meaningfully explored its implications. Indeed, they went to some lengths to pretend it never happened.

This is an infamous story. Cited often for good reason: It illustrates irrefutable fore-knowledge of the collapse.

But it does more than that. It shows us how things work, and allows us to infer what went wrong. Broadly, one of two things must have happened:

1. The BBC was given the information and reported it early by accident.
2. The BBC reported the information on time, but the implosion faced an unforeseen delay.

We can deconstruct this further and then extrapolate out to learn a lesson about the media in general — namely, that the media report what they are told to report regardless of reality.

Standley was in the middle of reporting to the country that a 47-storey building had fallen down while it was still there.

She could see it, but she told the entire world it was gone. Why? Because someone told her it was. She never checked because she’s not employed to check. That is her function, that is what she’s for. To paraphrase Chomsky, if she wasn’t like that she wouldn’t be there.

She didn’t just report it, she believed it.

That is not just her, it’s not even just the BBC, it’s the media in general. They are not liars, they are biological megaphones amplifying messages they lack the capacity to analyse.

Dummies, literally.

Their corporate masters have all five fingers deep inside them and flap their wooden jaws to create the illusion of speech. When the BBC talks, you can barely see the Deep State’s mouth moving.

That’s why it’s funny to me to talk about the BBC being biased. It’s a naïve acceptance that the BBC is what it pretends to be, a journalism outlet, rather than what it is – a state-backed entity designed with the sole purpose of maintaining state control over narrative.

The BBC isn’t biased. You need agency to be biased. You need personality, ideas and opinions.

The BBC is worse than biased, it is a morally vacuous horseshit hosepipe, repeating “the truth” as it is dictated to them from on high.

…and more and more people know that, or at least feel it. The allegedly plummeting number of license-fee payers is evidence of that.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump and his pending lawsuit.

It is a contrived conflict intended to satisfy fans of either side by reinforcing pre-existing notions. Those invested people watching are so brainwashed into the fake divide that they don’t even see the same things; their eyes cloud over with pre-programmed interpretations.

TEAM A watches the news and sees big bad bully Trump attacking the well-meaning (but in this case accidentally in the wrong) BBC. They think they are the decent minority speaking truth to power.

TEAM B watches the same news and sees Daddy Donald being unfairly victimised by the media because he’s fighting the good fight.

Trump gets a boost to his fading credentials as an outsider, the UK government can whip up patriotic support for the poor little BBC.

This kind of win-win is the tell-tale sign of the fake news false binary. If you doubt that, you need look no further than its origins for confirmation: A “leaked” memo handed to the Telegraph, expressing “concerns” about institutional bias.

Or, indeed, see how it’s already being used to brand the BBC as some kind of resistance hub:

 

Or to support previously unsupportable positions:

 

That’s political activist Femi, arguing that “yes the BBC edited footage to change what Trump said, but that’s OK because we know that’s what he really meant”.

The idea that there is some higher truth you can only achieve by lying is not something a rational society can support…but here we are.

So, in the case of Trump vs the BBC, who wins?

Since the BBC already admitted to wrongdoing, and with so much “they’re not perfect” discourse, I’m guessing Trump just scrapes a win here. Not a comprehensive one, but 55-45 split.

In the end, don’t be surprised if there is some kind of reform of the “ideologically captured” BBC requiring a “temporary increase” in the license fee or a change in the way it’s paid, or increased penalties for refusing or whatever…we all know how this works by now.

But who wins and by how much isn’t the point of the story; the spectacle is. Pick a side and cheer.