>the government

There is no 'the government'.

The government is an entity of elected and unelected people. They have their own bias, their own friends, their own wants.

I have stopped using Facebook because it sucks, but if the government sucks, I am forced to use them.

Yes, people will invariably point to some instances of the BBC receiving flak for errors in judgement (edit: see below for examples). But if we collectively can no longer agree that there is a difference between the BBC and, say, infowars, then we have lost anyway, and all that’s left is to gleefully watch civilization circling the drain.

My personal opinion is that the BBC's political coverage was thoroughly kneecapped after the Hutton Inquiry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry ) at which point they decided to surrender to the government line rather than fight suspected falsehoods.

I guess it is doing something right!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_cent...

I think the simultaneous accusations of both left and right bias are because separate parts of the Corporation are biased in this way. If you sum those biases then yes maybe it sums to zero, but I'd rather the individual parts were not biased at all.

Politics is about rhetoric, persuasion, spin and - if you can get away with it - outright lies, smears, and distortions.

Claiming that reporting is biased, when in fact it's merely objective but unfavourable, is an absolutely standard weapon in the arsenal of spin.

The only way to attempt to enforce a lack of bias would be to have independent editorial oversight - much like the journalistic equivalent of an independent judiciary.

The Board of Trustees used to attempt that, but the financial reality is that the BBC gets most of its funding from the government, and so is always vulnerable to financial pressures.

IMO lack of access to "clean" unspun fact-based reporting is probably the number one political problem of the moment. Knowingly lying to the public or attempting to influence opinion for personal/political gain should be as much of a crime as dumping asbestos in a school yard.

But currently the political system relies on dishonesty to operate. It's essentially built on denying facts and replacing them with expedient lies, emotional manipulations, and fake "explanations" of why things are the way they are.

So you can't solve one problem without solving the other. And that's a huge, huge challenge.

BBC4 documentaries and things like Arena remain amazing, so they can do quality if they want to and it's not overwhelmingly a cost matter. It's more like populism vs Reithianism, and if the BBC isn't Reithian it will end up not existing.

It's Tory through and through, and apparently unapologetically so.

See also:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question...

That's just one example from a list that is becoming worryingly long now.

Apparently there were "no costs" associated with this, which is even harder to understand. https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-ques...

Would probably make a good test case for anyone's "fake news" detectors.

As for the second article, how to spend your extra £1,000, yes, that one is atrocious.

I agree the BBC is more trustworthy than other sources. But if we're talking legislation how do we write a rule for that? Do we literally legislate 'the BBC, the Telegraph, ... are trustworthy'? Or do we write a qualitative test? But then what is the test? As I said the best idea at the moment seems to be literally 'you know it when you see it'. Which doesn't work.

The tech community has this idea that it’s impossible to make laws affecting such concepts that cannot easily be expressed as an algorithm giving boolean answers. But in reality, that’s exactly what jurisprudence does for a living. Otherwise there would be no need for lawyers and judges and juries.

The “I know it when I see it” quote is, obviously, one coined by a judge, and a supreme one at that. It became famous for both being somewhat true, and for leaving us wanting for something better. And even though the definition of pornography has somewhat advanced since then, and become somewhat less relevant, there still is a gray area: some gangbang on pornhub is probably porn. A bag of Doritos is not porn. In between are the image of Kim Phuc, Michelangelo’s David, and many a work of art. But the existence of that gray area does not negate the possibility to definitively say that the bag of Doritos is not porn, as far as the law is concerned.

A teenage couple tried as adults for child pornography because they sent each other naked pictures of themselves. That is clearly not what the law intended, but the state went after them for it anyways.

Vague/overly-broad laws can be abused. Any law that can be abused will be abused.