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A comment on Advice on accessing BBC News. Parent comment

Re:Advice on accessing BBC News by Angostura on Saturday March 05, 2022 @06:06AM (#30566385)
> BBC News is incredibly biased pro-government.

If anything it's pro status-quo or pro establishment it has a bias towards liberal democratic values and the norms. As politics swings about, the BBC has a dampening effect which is valuable.

So if you look at the extreme of Johnson's incompetance, you will see the BBC scrutinising it quite heavily - but similarly with Corbyn in the past.

The fact that government culture secretary Nadine Doris is attacking the BBC puts into context your assertion that it is 'incredibly pro government'.

The BBC News department recognised the problems with 'false balance' several years ago and I think that it's got a lot better on that front. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/07/bbc-we-g...

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Re:Advice on accessing BBC News by rvieira on Saturday March 05, 2022 @06:37AM (#30566589)
I gave my opinion on Dorries' approach further down on the thread.

Interestingly, the heavy scrutiny only came after the govt's threat of "defunding" the BBC in 2021. It was never there for the 2019 election, for instance or the Brexit referendum.

Also, the Tory party never accused the BBC of political bias, but rather "wokeness", so this is just an attempt to shift to the public debate to "culture wars", rather than other issues, in my view.

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Re:Advice on accessing BBC News by rvieira on Saturday March 05, 2022 @02:00PM (#30570700)
The incumbent government complains about "wokeness" and not political (party) bias.

Also, those are mostly examples of a hand-full of famously fringe hard-Brexit MPs, over almost 7 years now, that cry foul for anything. Even the 70 MPs open letter said:

"Some of the signatories of this letter shared many of the concerns about the economic impact of Brexit, but all are delighted to find forecasts of immediate economic harm were at best misplaced. So-called ‘despite Brexit’ reporting may be expected of a partisan press, but licence fee-payers have the right to expect better."

This is a vague as possible.

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