Originally published at: BBC won't broadcast Attenborough episode on destruction of wildlife over fear of right-wing backlash | Boing Boing
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BBC won't broadcast Attenborough episode on destruction of wildlife over fear of right-wing backlash
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WTF is wrong with the BBC this week
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There is no sports reporting on the BBC right now, on a Saturday afternoon. This is unheard of.
And then there’s this
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Ruining your own habitat isn’t even a good short term strategy.
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Is that comment about the environment, or the current state of the BBC?
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I look forward once again to conservatives insisting that they’re champions of free speech.
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Ah yes, that bastion of radical wokeness known as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who believe in crazy ideas like birds should be shot with cameras instead of guns.
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I hate to see this kind of thing happening. In my area here, two drag story time events at local libraries were canceled due to threats, and a local town council down the road had to cancel a public feedback period because it got taken over by a mob of bigots and conspiracy theorists.
I get that sometimes we have to for safety, but I’m really sad that threats and hate are succeeding to some degree at shutting down anything in society that they don’t like.
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Right-wing snowflakes aren’t an endangered species, so why?
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The RSPB push hard for Grouse moor reform and investigate widespread raptor shooting by gamekeepers.
Tories love grouse shooting and all the classist trappings that come with it.
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Press office clarification by the BBC
“Wild Isles consists of five episodes: Our Precious Isles, Woodland, Grassland, Freshwater and Ocean. Saving Our Wild Isles is a separate film inspired by the series that was commissioned by the RSPB and WWF. We’ve acquired it for iPlayer.”
You mean a minor correction that in no way alters the main story. That’s what you mean isn’t it?
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Yes, the RSPB are hardly the “Crazy woke environmentalists” that the Torygraph is trying to paint them as. They’ve spent much of the last decade campaigning against renewable power because of inaccurate concerns about its impact on wildlife, while ignoring the impact of global warming on the very birds that they’re supposed to protect.
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…and made by the same people.
If the producers had been looking for a way to get around political sensitivities, this is what it would look like.
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Apparently chickens are not endangered at the BBC.
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There are legitimate questions about whether a state broadcaster should take funds from groups that lobby politically in order to produce documentary content.
HOWEVER, it is also the BBC’s responsibility to produce content that is in the public interest, particularly when it is documentary content that is factual. In this case the approach should be air the documentary, then defend the facts to anyone who wants to take issue with it. The discourse should be about the content, not who paid for it. The onus should be on the critics to show that the BBC’s acceptance of funds from RSPB and WWF (two of the most mainstream, milquetoast conservation orgs you can name) somehow slanted the truth or didn’t present a complete picture.
Avoiding criticism and debate is self censorship at its worst. Even the reasoning behind the decision could be interpreted as left-wing bias by somebody disingenuous enough: “OHHHH, so the real reason you didn’t show the documentary is that you didn’t want us to score a win in the court of public opinion, and not because of conflict of interest! Too bad for you, cancelling this just proves we were right!”
In other words, you can’t win here, so you may as well broadcast the documentary. Making it available on iPlayer isn’t going to spare you the criticism. SMH
Edit: Also, what a slap in the face to the people who worked on the show itself.
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How disgraceful. The Nazis have silenced a national treasure without having to lift a finger. Never give Nazis a veto; they must be fought on every front!
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When was that an actual fact?
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The critics in this case have demonstrated that they think truth, accuracy and reflection of reality are all irrelevant.
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It’s not “fake news” that same quote from the BBC was featured in the same original Guardian article where they stated that “Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right”
So even if it really was never intended to be shown as the 6th episode of the series, and was always intended as an iPlayer exclusive, they have still essentially taken all of the critical environmental stuff that might piss the right wingers and the countryside lobby off, quarantined it in a single episode, and tucked it away on their online streaming services.
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