Archive of paywalled Atlantic article
Peter Mandelson, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Washington, was recalled Thursday after the extent of his friendship with the disgraced financier became impossible to deny. In a 10-page message in the now-infamous 2003 scrapbook, he called Epstein his “best pal” and included several photos of himself. Describing the financier as “mysterious,” Mandelson said that he would often be left alone with Epstein’s “interesting” friends—an assertion that appeared over a picture of an unknown young woman in her underwear.
[…]
Americans might be tempted to look at the situation in Britain and think: Consequences for misguided actions—remember them? That’s the right impulse. In the United States, the Epstein scandal has devolved into a mere political soap opera, in which the victims are largely forgotten and Trump is so far unscathed. British voters who are angry with their government might find some small consolation in the fact that on their side of the Atlantic Ocean, ethical lapses can still carry a serious political price.
the whole thing is a bit weird though - his assosciation was known since last year, and he was transparently visiting Epstein in prison. Why now?
forced to confront it because of the bday book I suppose. which is pitiful but our media… goddamn we need a return to old school journalism, I just can’t see how it happens without newspapers.
Sucks that billionaires own the privately owned media, and what they don’t own they can just buy. That’s where national news services should step in.
defend the beeb at all costs. it’s imperfect but better than dang near anything we have.
That’s… Out of date at best.
The minutes from the BBC’s March (April? Around then) 2025 meeting specifically include the progress made on their overarching aim to ‘win the trust’ of Reform voters, using programming, editing choices, etc. As in, explicitly.
The BBC have never recorded, or evidenced, am intention to appeal to a specific section of voters before. No other political party has ever been singled out as the BBC’s ideological goalposts, not even when a party had been in power for over a decade, or when a party wins a massive majority of votes.
Reform UK are the first, and only party that is officially courted by the BBC. And no, there has been no mention before or after of any effort to balance viewpoint or maintain the trust of any other voters or (hilariously, I know) maybe go for some sort of neutrality.
I’m not linking to the minutes, because it’s only available as a pdf, because nobody should change their minds on the basis of a random link on social media, and because plenty of people have made a concerted effort to ‘spread the word’ apparently believing that if people actually see in black and white ‘we the BBC are aligned with Reform UK and have been for a while now’, posted by the BBC on a BBC platform, maybe they’d stop saying ‘the BBC is the truth incarnate and anybody who criticises it is a troll, foreign, or a leftist’.
I won’t post the link, because I don’t think people do that. I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Either most British ppl on social media support Reform and think BBC fealty is perfectly natural, or most are pathological liars, trolls, bad actors, or just don’t really care about much of anything.
I console myself with the assumption that most normal Brits are not on social media, that the right wing tend to be over represented online, and that I don’t spend much time in the left wing arena because, well, it’s not a fun place to be.
Anybody else? Google the minutes. It’s 3 pages long, you can read the whole thing in a minute or so. Then you can Google historical precendent, I suppose, or some sort of keyword search for previous equivalents, but you won’t find any.
And then, or if you can’t quite be bothered to do that: doing tell people that the BBC is fantastic and you’ll ‘protect it at all costs’ until you have done that minimal amount of research and agree with the policies. You can probably extrapolate that to any company, really.
Otherwise, people can only assume that you’re one of those voters.
a week later you reply with this screed and expect what?
what’s out of date?
pfft, god forbid you allow your mind to be swayed by factual reporting gha the nerve
you won’t post a link because you’re lazy and it probably doesn’t actually endorse your premise.
and I won’t read it, because I’m already done with this convo. shows up 7 days later and expects people to give a shit? did you read this 7 days ago and spend all that time working out a reply?
Or just really slow?
Otherwise, I can only assume you’re one of those numpties.
The beeb is already captured. Their reporting on Gaza is amongst the worst, and the chairman is Tory who uses “impartiality” as an excuse to suppress common sense and compassion
the beeb has had good times and bad. the trick is to rescue the institution and it’s legacy while purging the fuckwits.
it’s worth it to try.
I fail to see how the good stacks up evenly against the bad, when the bad includes the promotion of the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
I dread to think about your moral compass if you think the beeb is still worth defending. I gave up on the bbc in 2016, and it’s gotten so much worse since then.
I don’t think about you. at all.
Yeah, that’s the kind of mindset that leads folk like you to believe the BBC is still a reputable institution.
He was going to face questions from us media that would embarrass and intensify the scandal for the us administration.
They knew, guy was unrepentant and still gushing over epstein and referred to his residences with a yum yum comment. Guy fucked kids and was Israel’s bitch as a result, but liked it.
Journalists uncovered that he had misrepresented the facts when the Prime Minister chose to ask him specific details before appointing him.
so this is just the PM effectively distancing himself from his previous decision of appointing him
Pretty much.