When did the BBC News website turn from genuine journalism to becoming a basic Twitter Aggregator?
I’ve relied on the BBC News platform for well over a decade to bring me the latest news, in an unbiased fashion, with deep investigations, opinions, and real-life genuine journalism. I remember having the BBC news ticker when it was first released, and loving it.
There have been times in the past when I’ve thought they may have favoured a certain political party, or have feared to say certain words for fear of damning from one or other of the various political correctness activist groups, but at least that bias has been shown by journalists, investigating and reporting the real news.
Recently though, this has changed. More and more of the articles I read on the BBC News website seem to be simple collections of people’s posts on the Twitter platform (or “tweets“). Last week saw the sad loss of David Bowie – what did BBC News do? They put up a page saying David Bowie had died of cancer, then listed a bunch of tweets from the accounts of various unconnected minor TV personalities. What happened to journalism? What happened to contacting a related party to a news story and asking them for a quote, rather than just copy and pasting a tweet that happens to be on a random person’s account, that may well have been typed by an unknown third party?
Today, I’ve noticed that linked from the BBC News front page, is a whole article just listing twitter posts – why? Why not just link to the Twitter page if they think it’s so important, and report on the fact that it happened?
A few years ago, I closed my account on Twitter because I was fed up of the drivel and marketing that was eating up my life, it seems there’s no escape. I don’t want to know what Ricky Gervais or Stephen Fry (or their marketing and publicity teams that may manage their Twitter accounts) type into a social media program, when a celebrity dies, or a disaster happens. If I did, I’d open my account back up and follow them (again!!).
It gets worse when BBC News not only quotes the tweets, but then inserts a picture of the tweet, in the same page!! How lazy are these guys? I don’t need to see a certain length of news page to be satisfied, I don’t need all the huge pictures and videos that take up your “column inches”. Pictures are nice – one or two, in context, can be helpful. An additional video showing me what you’re reporting can be great. All I ask though is that this media doesn’t take up the majority of the page, and please, just don’t replace the text altogether – some of us in this nation can still read, despite the current trend to dumb us all down!
Come on Auntie, bring back proper journalism. If you want quotes from individuals, contact them directly, get it from the horse’s mouth. Please, shut down the Twitter aggregation, crack on with some real work, and earn my license fee!
Well said.