Honestly I think it has a general pro-government-of-the-day-bias - as you say, 'used to be the witty cry', indeed! Under New Labour it was still broadly speaking pro-government (generally, it's never totally uncritical, just tending towards friendliness relative to the opposition of the day), it was just a different government with different values.
But people don't notice when something stops being biased against them if they've already stopped paying attention to it because they were previously put off by their perception of its bias, so many of these older perceptions of its bias still exist. This creates the illusion that there's bias both ways, based on people's claims, and that it therefore must be 'balanced'.
>It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased
Thought example. If there was a truly objective, unbiased source of information about political and physical reality, wouldn't it be far too valuable to put in charge of a news desk. They should be running the government in place of the parliament and politicians!
Of course, if you find the idea somehow troubling, this is to demonstrate that unbiasedness is actually more difficult concept than is sometimes given credit for.
But in all seriousness I do accept that unbiased outlets basically don't really exist and it is an impossibly high bar. The reason I talk about this in the way that I do is not as some kind of campaign against the BBC: on the contrary, I think public service broadcasting is in general a good thing and frequently produces higher quality content than the vast majority of privately owned outlets, at least in the UK, despite its biases.
It's just that to me, everything has a bias, and it's important to understand what any particular outlet's biases are before you start accepting information from it. I'd say this is the one redeeming feature of our print media, despite how much crap they often produce, they are at least usually very open about their biases.
You can get a lot of good information out of the BBC news and politics programmes, but I'd say you do have to use a fairly critical lens to get the most out of it.
It's not possible to be an unbiased news reporter. The only thing we can wish for is reporting that wears its bias on its sleeve.
What is this "unbiased" reporting anyway? It can only mean that I happen to share the bias.
Any reporter who thinks their work is unbiased is a reporter who is unaware of their bias; which is much more dangerous than a reporter who is biased, and doesn't care who knows it.
Usually a solid amount accusing her of towing the party line, being friends with Boris, Tory mouthpiece etc then another bunch accusing her of being an example of how the BBC is full of leftie communists who want to reverse brexit. Both equally vitriolic.
The way she draws the hate from both sides is impressive.
Edit: it's definitely going to get worse. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-richard-s...
There is no way that anyone with that level of donation to any political party can ever pretend that they or their organisation is "impartial". Being a Brexiteer just makes it even more ludicrous and guarantees that all the ongoing problems and losses of Brexit will be hidden by the state broadcaster.