and the bullying around them all

Big article at Unherd on the capture of the BBC. I’m short on time today so I’ll just leave a couple of bookmarks.

A former BBC News boss has claimed she was driven out of the top job by trans activists.

Fran Unsworth, the director of BBC News from 2018 to 2022, said she had been bullied out of the role by gender ideologues employed by the corporation.

Speaking for the first time since leaving the BBC, Ms Unsworth said: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult.”

Been there done that. Freethought Blogs was and is not the BBC, but the miasma is the same.

In an interview with her former colleague Rob Burley, published by UnHerd, Ms Unsworth said BBC News had become “increasingly unmanageable” during her tenure.

“It was bullying,” she said. “But it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe-spaces shit.”

And the “incredibly vulnerable” shit – the wildly exaggerated doom-mongering about what a tragic fate it is to be a man who pretends to be a woman, combined with the joyous indifference to the fate of women pushed out of their own institutions and politics and spaces.

Ms Unsworth suggested that programme editors had avoided critical reporting on trans issues for fear of being attacked by their own colleagues.

She claimed that news reporters came under an “awful lot of pressure” from “other parts of the BBC if they felt that the editorial direction of the story was not supporting their particular point of view on it”.

Yep. Again: been there, seen that.

However, problems with the BBC’s coverage of trans issues continued after Ms Unsworth’s departure.

Last year, The Telegraph published a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, the corporation’s editorial standards adviser, in which he claimed its trans coverage had been subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters.

But there is no LGBT. It’s a mirage. T is not LGB; T is the monster substituted for the real baby.

While Ms Unsworth rejected claims that Stonewall had directly influenced editorial output, she said the charity’s gender-affirmative ideology had become pervasive and was creating problems for reporters.

“Nobody, ever, ever said to me as director of news, ‘you need to get points in the Stonewall league table’,” she said. But she acknowledged that “there was a sea in which we all swam… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”

Oh hell yes it was. But why? Why the desperate eagerness to “be kind” to people pushing such a ridiculous and women-harming ideology?

To be continued.