. Well, some of them have been coming here, so maybe some of us should go there. I don’t normally say a lot to anyone about the NHS. They were good to my Grandma and bad to my Grandpa, and family members tend to end up dying there. I think though that in BBC coverage of the NHS it’s worth bearing in mind that they are kindred spirits, both formed in the expansionist phase of statist Britain (BBC circa 1928, NHS 1945), after people had turned back on expanding the British Empire to spend time building up the State instead. Many people today take pride in that enterprise (the building up the State part- strangely unfashionable during the Thatcher years, where the earlier bit had a flurry of interest). Actually, ‘Boss Hogg’ (see below) in particular has some bold things to say about a publicly owned company, which might help explain the Beeb’s benign attitude towards rocketing public spending on the NHS, much of which goes into salaries (- see discussion above). By the way, the license fee increased above the level of inflation this year too. I wonder what the ‘Boss’ gets paid?
State Mates
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The purpose of a news organization is to report the news accurately and impartially. Mr. Dyke seems to forget this, arguing that it is the BBC’s job to “to challenge governments or even popular opinion”.
That is an advocacy role, which is incompatible with honest news reporting.
“Experts” given airtime by the BBC are, typically, partisan advocates of one sort or another. More often than not, the BBC correspondent or presenter fails to impart that information to the audience. Softball and incendiary questions, often based on unstated or unsubstantiated premises, invariably follow. Similar techniqes are used on those TV info-mercials trying to sell us something, but those paid advocates are known as shills.
Trotting out a pair of biased advocates, each representing an opposing point of view, does not constitute balanced news reporting. It merely represents giving airtime to two partisan advocates.
(I wonder how the BBC determines what opinions are popular? Having someh