Facts are sacred but thin on the ground

The BBC offers the most comprehensive guarantee. Politicians and lobbyists want to influence it more than any other news organisation because, despite occasional lapses, its reporters have earned the right to be believed.

The corporation should be becoming the most important news institution not merely in Britain but the world.

Nick Cohen likes the BBC, loves the EU…he thinks the BBC should be the goto source for reliable accurate news…but is it? The BBC has the same idea but its method of ensuring its dominance is not to improve its journalism and ethical standards but to close down and harry its commerical and political opponents including those it perceives as ‘right-wing’ bloggers on the internet.  In 2009 Cohen wrote…

In this time of upheaval, the BBC has a public duty to invest and broadcast the journalism that others cannot afford. It is failing spectacularly to live up to its responsibilities.

The BBC is so uninterested in content that it is sacking its content providers or journalists as we used to call them.

The paradox of the BBC’s strategy is that the more it spends on expanding into cyberspace the less it has to say.

In 2017 I’d say nothing has changed.

Back in 2006 Cohen was even more critical of the BBC...the BBC’s fact content, ironic considering how the BBC professes itself as the only trusted purveyor of facts today, being somewhat less than fully saturated….

The BBC – where facts are expensive and comment runs far too free

Although it is impossible to generalise about such a vast organisation, the bias charge has enough truth in it to stick. If you doubt me, research one opinion outside the liberal consensus.

You will then notice something disconcerting about most BBC presenters. Although they subject opponents of, say, abortion to rigorous cross-examination, their lust for ferocious questioning deserts them when supporters of abortion come on air. Far from being tested, they treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth.

The way out for the BBC is not to swing to the right – it is not an advance to replace soft interviews for Menzies Campbell with soft interviews for John Reid – but make a tactical withdrawal from the opinion business.

Isn’t that what we have just commented on as the BBC shut down Jenni Murray’s personal views published outside the BBC, and impose its own ‘acceptable’ views on her to be broadcast as such on the BBC….but it is not the BBC’s job to pronounce on what is ‘acceptable’,  it is their job to report facts and events.

Cohen goes on…

Producers know that comment is free, but facts are expensive. As well as being cheap, fervent opinions can increase market share because their very vehemence can hold the attention of the channel-hopping audience for a few more minutes….reporting should be true.  If the BBC governors abandon that principle, they will end up with a corporation which isn’t so much left-wing or right-wing, but irrelevant.

Might have been written in 2006 but again still relevant today…unlike the BBC whose reporting is ever more comment and fact-free.