BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?"
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BBC News is supposedly a reputable international news organization which takes great effort to have reports on the ground in every country and provide up-to-date, unbiased, information about world events.
So why the fuck are they tweeting this:
https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/990971084630560768
Or this:
How is it possible that BBC News doesn't know what news actually is?
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BTW while bitching about how much non-news BBC News pushes out, I came across this account which is pretty funny (click through, onebox is broken natch):
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Literally 3 minutes after I posted this:
Oh fuck off.
I'd say that's pretty newsworthy.
Even if such an occurrence is common in china (which it probably is), that doesn't mean news should stop reporting on it as if it had stopped occuring.
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Because I (and presumably other people as well) am more interested in clicking on those two links than on any serious news I've seen today.
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@cartman82 Fine; then follow BBC Entertainment or BBC Sport or BBC Stupid Facebook Memes or whatever. It's not like there's only one fucking channel on the TV.
If I'm following World News, I expect to see world news. Crazy me.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@cartman82 Fine; then follow BBC Entertainment or BBC Sport or BBC Stupid Facebook Memes or whatever. It's not like there's only one fucking channel on the TV.
If I'm following World News, I expect to see world news. Crazy me.If I go and follow BBC Stupid Facebook Memes instead, that doesn't help the people employed at BBC World News get more clicks, does it?
It's the same reason why Discovery, National Geographic and Nature channels are now all "Cheap Americana reality show" channels.
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@cartman82 Yeah but the BBC is government-funded, so why should they care about that. Do the British people who actually pay taxes to fund this shit want to know about "Peppa Pig" in China? Seriously?
(Now in swarms the Brits to tell me that the BBC is not government funded, it's just funded by a tax enacted by the government which is somehow completely totally different somehow.)
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@blakeyrat
Lucas didn't pay his cable tax and now there is a clickbait shaped hole in their budget
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@cartman82 Yeah but the BBC is government-funded, so why should they care about that. Do the British people who actually pay taxes to fund this shit want to know about "Peppa Pig" in China? Seriously?
(Now in swarms the Brits to tell me that the BBC is not government funded, it's just funded by a tax enacted by the government which is somehow completely totally different somehow.)Don't know, but funding or no funding, I bet the people pushing those stories have some metric like "number of clicks per article" they are measured by. And that's all it takes, the result is the same.
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@cartman82 said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Don't know, but funding or no funding, I bet the people pushing those stories have some metric like "number of clicks per article" they are measured by. And that's all it takes, the result is the same.
Sadly you're probably exactly right.
So are there any Breaking US News and World News twitter accounts that actually serve news? Does such a beast exist?
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@blakeyrat on Twitter?!?
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@hardwaregeek Yes on Twitter.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
How is it possible that BBC News doesn't know what news actually is?
Do you suppose it's possible that it's not BBC News who has the problem here? Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed watching you get upset about this on twitter for a while, so please don't change.
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@blakeyrat Actually serving news would be useful and worthwhile, both of which are the utter antithesis of Twitter.
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@cartman82 said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
It's the same reason why Discovery, National Geographic and Nature channels are now all "Cheap Americana reality show" channels.
Heyyyy. What's wrong with cheap Americana reality shows? What do you mean cheap? :(
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@cartman82 said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@cartman82 Fine; then follow BBC Entertainment or BBC Sport or BBC Stupid Facebook Memes or whatever. It's not like there's only one fucking channel on the TV.
If I'm following World News, I expect to see world news. Crazy me.If I go and follow BBC Stupid Facebook Memes instead, that doesn't help the people employed at BBC World News get more clicks, does it?
It's the same reason why Discovery, National Geographic and Nature channels are now all "Cheap Americana reality show" channels.
Don't forget TLC and History Channel.
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@stillwater said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
What's wrong with cheap Americana reality shows? What do you mean cheap?
They're cheap to produce compared to scripted shows.
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@boomzilla They're also cheap by the standard of reality shows. Shows like The Great Race and Survivor were expensive just because they had to fly a few hundred people all over the world and deal with a ton of different governments and such. Even Big Brother had some fancy set construction going on.
Shows like "we open a storage unit we bought at auction and see if there's any corpses in it" are cheap as fuck.
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They posted a genuine World News article or two, and now this:
Ok that's (relatively) local to me and I still don't believe it belongs on the World News feed. Why does someone in, say, Armenia give a fuck about some deer in Oregon?
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@blakeyrat It's something going on out in parts of the world that aren't the UK. It's like reading the USA Today blurbs about the various states when you only live in one state.
SOME NEWS IS BORING. BORING FILM AT 11.
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Because Twitter is a rare natural resource that shouldn't be squandered on stories that @blakeyrat doesn't find interesting?
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@blakeyrat because pelicans are cool
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@cartman82 Yeah but the BBC is government-funded, so why should they care about that. Do the British people who actually pay taxes to fund this shit want to know about "Peppa Pig" in China? Seriously?
They run ads, at least in the portuguese version.
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@blakeyrat Because the buck stops here.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
BBC News is supposedly a reputable international news organization
Ha fucking ha. At the moment they quite often don't even report some big events in London.
@sockpuppet7 said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
They run ads, at least in the portuguese version.
That's because that's BBC World, which definitely isn't funded by people in Britain. It's (apparently, according to what I've read) got to turn a profit for the rest of the BBC…
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Oh good, Disney Mega Giganto Corp, Inc needed some more free press, that tiny under-funded startup.
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More free press for Disney Megacorp, I think maybe Disney bought BBC World and hushed it up.
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@blakeyrat Deadpool I understand, but what did Celine do? Did her singing make their heads explode, or something? Can't say that social media didn't deserve to be slain, though.
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@hardwaregeek said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Deadpool I understand, but what did Celine do?
I heard she sang her song from the movie on one of the morning shows (Today? Good Morning America? something like that) while someone in a Deadpool costume danced around on stage or something. Kind of silly, I'm told.
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A day-or-two late, but at one point this one was at the top of the front page.
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@remi We're a nation obsessed with the weather, and it's been long noted that it appears to be traditional for public holidays to be accompanied by rain, high winds, and temperatures low enough to make hypothermia a significant concern. That we've got a chance for everyone to get out and increase our chance of getting skin cancer at once is indeed important news…
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@dkf said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
it's been long noted that it appears to be traditional for public holidays to be accompanied by rain, high winds, and temperatures low enough to make hypothermia a significant concern
I thought that was just the UK's default setting.
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I never understood headlines like that. "X destroys Y", "X slays Y". X slays social media I understand in the context of "Erdogan slays social media in Turkey". But not "X made some shit and people are now sharing it like mad".
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@pie_flavor said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@blakeyrat Because the buck stops here.
If it had there wouldn't be a story.
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@e4tmyl33t said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
I thought that was just the UK's default setting.
Of course, but it's generally assumed to get even worse than usual as soon as there's a public holiday. That we've instead had sunshine all day, that's newsworthy. (I'm so glad I've not gone to the coast today; the traffic will be horrible.)
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@dkf said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
That we've instead had sunshine all day, that's newsworthy.
Weather is not news. Weather is weather.
That's why news stations say "news and weather on the 15s". Or sometimes "news weather and traffic". Traffic also isn't news. Traffic can be caused by news. Weather can cause news. But neither is news on its own.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Weather is not news. Weather is weather.
Weather is also news.
@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
That's why news stations say "news and weather on the 15s".
But pretty much all local TV news shows include weather in their show.
@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Traffic also isn't news. Traffic can be caused by news.
That's such bullshit. It's absolutely news and often very important.
I'm glad that you post stupid shit like this so that your sig remains relevant.
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@boomzilla said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
But pretty much all local TV news shows include weather in their show.
Yeah; but comedy shows sometimes have a dance number. That doesn't make the dance number comedy.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
@boomzilla said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
But pretty much all local TV news shows include weather in their show.
Yeah; but comedy shows sometimes have a dance number. That doesn't make the dance number comedy.
Sometimes your posts have correct facts in them. That doesn't make your larger point make any more sense.
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@blakeyrat said in BBC News and the case of the "why the fuck is this news?":
Shows like "we open a storage unit we bought at auction and see if there's any corpses in it" are cheap as fuck.
At least they didn't show the corpse.... :D :D :D
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Their category sorting is odd too.
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So there's some kind of wedding coming up and the BBC is really excited about it to the point where they posted a BREAKING NEWS!!!!! alert that someone may or may not attend.
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@blakeyrat Added bonus, CNN posts the same bullshit not-news:
https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/996126499601375232
But at least the replies to it have this gem:
https://twitter.com/0DGMETHHAZE666/status/996126835359535104
HAVE NIZE MAN TO NOT BLAME HER
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Shameful.
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@pie_flavor The first reply