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Two BBC bosses, Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness, both resigned after a scathing dossier (full memo) was published days ago, showcasing strong bias in BBC's reporting.
An example from the dossier where BBC's partiality may be readily observed, without requiring to into the weeds of culture war issues, is BBC produced special, airing a week before the most recent US presidential election about Donald J. Trump. In the part of the spcial about the 1-6 Incident, editor had spliced together without indication of doing so, Trump quotes an hour apart:
So near the beginning of his speech, Trump stated:
Then, roughly an hour later:
As quoted in the allegedly biased pre-election special:
(Also in video form)
Also elaborated upon in the dossier are bias in reoprting on the US POTUS election generally, alledging without evidence the existence of racial discrimination in insurance, covering up illegal immigration, distorting opinions of historians to promote racially incendiary historical narratives, parroting the LGBTQ activist line regarding transsexuality. Coverage of the local consequences of the 10-7 Incident is in particular depth critiqued.
Here is the punchline: Mr. Davie had in the past worked issued guidelines which would have been violated, if these accusations are true. He is more closely associated with the Conservative, rather than Labour, party. Strange that a man who can be accused of at most trying and failing to correct the ship, resigns. Now with Labour in power, the person replacing him will be more likely to be sympathetic to those who feel called out by this dossier and less likely to see the dossier as pointing at a real issue.
With a reputable report, whose accusations are confirmed by resignations, showing leftist bias in media, trust in media takes another hit.
I thought this was evident already for anyone who’s ever seen a BBC Hardtalk interview. All these institutions are prejudiced and to that end are involved in setting the agenda. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or left either.
Demonstrating bias in this context is very hard. For the most part the emotional resonance one picks up from weeks or months of accepting information from a biased source is hardly if ever a culmination of a singular aspect of that information. It's also the lack of information regarding some things, differential treatment of otherwise similar events, or the opposite. It generally tumbles along until your gut tells you that something is wrong. But by that point you're months deep into the information stream. Where it's practically impossible to do a comparison since you could not know that the source was biased or in what way.
To that extent this revelation is just a handy receipt of what everyone with a brain already knew, but could not confidently assert. To my mind a much more obvious example was the 3 day hesitation period after the Pakistani rape scandal was published about in British newspapers.
That hesitation period was very reminiscent of Swedish news publishing at the time, that centered around minimizing negative backlash against migrant crime. Which in and of itself was based on a theory that if migrants could be accepted and integrated into Swedish society, the true social cause of the crimes would be dealt with. In contrast, news publishing that stoked negativity towards migrants would only hinder integration and acceptance. I always liked that theory and its practical application as it demonstrated just how insane the progressive/neo-liberal economic project is in practice, and how inhumane and sadistic the necessary policies to sustain it are.
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