I don't think the BBC should give any political opinion on any news story, ever.

But if they want to, why don't they report the story and include their opinion straightforwardly? Why do they resort to the mental gymnastics of issuing an opinion and then reporting on that opinion as a new story as if it's a separate thing? Makes me think they know it's wrong so they contort themselves like this to do it.

The BBC (organisation) is giving the opinion. BBC News (an independent division within the organisation) is reporting on it, likely in the interests of full transparency.

The BBC has certain obligations, one of which is "sustaining citizenship and civil society"[1], of which freedom of the press falls under. So in this case, I'd argue they're obligated to defend it by giving their opinion, especially when it's happening to a fellow public broadcaster (the ABC).

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/bbc-edi...

Their charter also requires them to a reflect a diversity of opinion. Literally quoting your own opinion first is the worst approach to diversity of opinion I can imagine.

That's because you don't understand what "opinions" are (at least, in this context).

News stories should be brief and answer "5W" questions (who, what, when, where, why). As such, they're supposed to be based on the facts alone, and others should draw their own conclusions from them.

Opinions, on the other hand, are used to put the news stories into context. Journalists are supposed to have more background to the stories than you could learn from just reading the facts (since they're the ones that wrote them). That background can be used to help you interpret those facts.

In this case, an incident happened. BBC put out an opinion piece to tell you why you should care about that incident before they had enough facts to answer all five of those questions. A news story links to that opinion so that they could help you with placing those answers into context.

Bottom line for me is - I know the BBC have already made up their mind that this is an attack on press freedoms rather than a legitimate investigation, so I’m now not going to be holding my breath for them to report any developments that are contrary to that view.

That’s why it’s a shame they choose to do this.

"I came up with this strawman that people close to the situation didn't think of (probably because it isn't even close to being true), so I'm going to hold on my own strawman argument even though I have absolutely nothing to base it on."

There, fixed that for you.

Could it be that you're misinterpreting facts? No, it must be that those who have access to first- and second-hand accounts that are wrong. Not you, a person pulling out a hypothesis based off of less info nor any contact with any of the parties in the story.

You’re just being snide and snarky now.

I don’t know why people think it’s extreme to say that I don’t want my public broadcaster quoting their own opinions in the news reports. The article would have been complete without a quote from themselves, or could have used a quote from someone else qualified. Really easy solutions.

There's no such thing as unbiased journalism.

I agree - but people can try. Like not quoting yourself.