8 ms·

In the U.K. outright TV and print media bias is the new normal. The UK already has one of the least trusted media in Europe, and I think it's safe to say the ho

by k1m 7y ago

In the U.K. outright TV and print media bias is the new normal. The UK already has one of the least trusted media in Europe, and I think it's safe to say the hostile and one-sided coverage (relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party) is unlikely to change that impression. If anything social media should be praised for offering an alternative that actually connects with so many people.

trwhite 7y ago
You don't think the media attacks Boris and the Tories? That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media?
- Symbiote 7y ago
  > That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? It wasn't. There's an official statement from the hospital confirming they had no beds left. Of course, the media chose to report it, but they aren't lying. The right-wing media lied about it though, and it's a very relevant example of online disinformation: "Despite the claim that the photo was staged having been acknowledged as false, it [the claim] has continued to spread on both Facebook and Twitter [...] Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson retweeted screenshots of the Facebook page to her followers twice, telling them “I presume this is genuine”, and adding later that the photo was “100% faked”. Her posts have received thousands of retweets between them." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-account-hacked-to-post-fake-story-about-hospital-boy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-acc... (This is already downvoted, along with every non-pro-Tory comment in this discussion. Probably it will recover, HN usually does, but it would be better if people who disagree counter the arguments, rather than just downvoting what they're uncomfortable with.)
  - cmsd2 7y ago
    the rise of this submission to the front page and the swift sinking back under the waves, along with the vote war on comments here is interesting. this place isn't nearly so left-leaning as i'd assumed.
    - non-entity 7y ago
      It seems mostly to be socdems and right-libertarians, depending on what thread you're on.
  - trwhite 7y ago
    I agree with your point in parentheses. It appears I've been downvoted into oblivion despite not even indicating my own leaning. Even if we're acknowledging that this story wasn't a setup, it's wrong to suggest that there's more right-wing bias in British media than left. It's probably about the same, though of course some establishments will always have particular leanings (e.g. Guardian to the left) Even the Beeb, which one would assume is neutral, regularly jumps on the Boris-bashing brigade.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > You don't think the media attacks Boris and the Tories? Not really. Boris outright lies all the time, and he's rarely picked up on for it. There are also several instances of Newspaper's running stories on the exact same policy, positively when suggested by the the Tories, and negatively when suggested by Corbyn. You can't get much more objective bias than that.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50711868 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50711868 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50630355 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50630355
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  I'm less certain about the hospital incident and overall left-vs-right bias, but I can tell you: Wow, Labour is really, really good about sounding the chorus "we're being unfairly targeted! smears!" whenever there's a new story that another MP has resigned over the party's systematic antisemitism (or that someone who was fired, ostensibly to actually deal with anti-semitism, has been mysteriously re-hired). (Our local "anti-Zionist" friends in Labour will mod me down for this, I know.)
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    The current Conservative leader has called Muslim women "letterboxes" and black children "piccaninnies" [1] with "watermelon smiles". Maybe someone has made a systematic review of the reporting of Conservative and Labour racism, and the reporting of it, but just throwing up a statement like yours, without also including the racism of Conservative party members/leaders, is just fuelling the fire of hostile debate. There will be racist people in both parties. Step back, and compare the depth of the racism and the number and influence of the people involved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaninny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaninny
    - fennecfoxen 7y ago
      Trust me, I am always glad to say that the island's politics are a poorly contained dumpster fire, and point out the big stuff, like the Windrush scandal, or the English-proficiency-test scandal (not the original cheating, the Home Office response where they told thousands of international students their tests were invalid and they were subject to removal). But if we're playing the "which one is really worse?" game, instead of striving to better either, we've lost.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  No, it was not. However, the claim that it was was a lie that was spread far and wide through social media and by the right-wing media. So again, no, it's not "both sides do it". It's mainly the right.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  > That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? It's been proved beyond any doubt that the boy sleeping on the hospital floor was in fact true[0], despite an army of twitter and facebook bots being deployed to try and discredit the story[1]. The hospital involved publicly apologised for the incident. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 [1]: https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1204175955314577410 https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1204175955314577410
- iso1631 7y ago
  > That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? No, it wasn't. The lies about it being a setup were started shortly by the unnamed sockpuppet trolls and spread fast. The media can't seem to fight this https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/10/trolls-claim-photo-boy-hospital-floor-faked-labour-activists-11589821/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/10/trolls-claim-photo-boy-hospit...
- barryhoodlum 7y ago
  The "left-wing" media? Who is that exactly?
  - iso1631 7y ago
    Guardian and Mirror
  - trwhite 7y ago
    There's an institutional left-wing bias in the media. Said by someone who (nearly) worked for it.
teh_klev 7y ago
For many of us in Scotland this is nothing new. The coverage and reporting leading up to the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum was pretty appalling, with the BBC operating in full "Defence of the Union" mode. Both TV and print media ran scare story after scare story repetitively despite most being debunked.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Which scare stories are you thinking of? My memory of that time is that the nationalists were making a lot of claims during the campaign that they'd not laid any groundwork for, and which didn't hold water. Mostly of the form "after leaving the UK we'll still have access to X" or "Y won't change" but they hadn't actually asked anyone in the British government, so there was a lot of public back and forth over that, in particular, what it'd mean for Scotland to keep using the pound. Because they talked about future hypotheticals it is hard to say whether they were 'debunked' or not. One claim I remember very clearly was that post-independence Scotland would be able to keep funding its much higher levels of government spending because of high oil prices. The media did question this claim, and it turned out rightly so: oil prices collapsed just months after the vote and never recovered rendering the SNP's financial plans irrelevant. Independence would certainly have meant rapid and dire cuts in spending. However nothing I saw would have risen to the level of "disinformation", whatever that means. It was just people disagreeing on the relative merits and probabilities of things.
  - teh_klev 7y ago
    I'll just point you here: https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/ Fully sourced and referenced. Stu Campbell isn't everyone's cuppa, but his writings on the shite, filth and corruption that went on during the Scottish Indyref in 2014 are reasonably bulletproof. I'll happily admit that the one thing the SNP messed up on was the currency question and that they should have had the balls to say they'd launch their own currency and central bank, or create a Scottish Pound tied to the UK pound (at least for the first few years - and is not unusual, there are many dollar currencies tied to the value of the US$). I can also answer questions on the balance of media exposure between pro-Union parties and the Yes parties (SNP and the Scottish Greens). Professor John Robertson (an academic who's work was to analyse media bias all around the world) of the West of Scotland University performed an analysis of this and when he presented his findings there were calls for him to be fired from his job - by BBC executives. https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc-over-academic-report-indyref-bias-scottish-media-blackout-must https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc... https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/ https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/ http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/BBC%20charter/BBCProfJohnRobertson.pdf http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/B...
Angostura 7y ago
This is certainly the view in the bubble, that the BBC is relentlessly anti-Corby. Yet when you look at the details, the evidence is hard to find. The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, is frequently the target of attacks as being biased against Labour, but those critics always seem to ignore stories like this which is currently the featured bit of analysis on the BBC Website elections page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167
- iso1631 7y ago
  I find a lot of the problems with the media, and Laura being an example, is the need to put the journalist at the forefront. It isn't "the BBC say", it's "Laura Kuensburg says" This inflates journalist egos, and leaves them more open to manipulation. They want to think they are important, not the publication. They have a personal "brand". There's always been some of this, but that "brand" was usually well earned, after decades of coverage, and used in a very humble way. When word came of how John Simpson "liberated Kabul", he was rightly denigrated. Now in John's defense it was a warzone, and people can speak too quickly. "Celebrity" journalists, with personal following thanks to things like twitter, get "scoops" from "unnamed sources" which turn out to be lies, and spread them far faster than the truth can emerge. This is the second part of the problem - speed. 20 years ago, news was gathered by journalists, and packaged into a well researched piece for the news bulletin at 6pm or 9pm or whenever. 24 hour news started to erode this, where speed was more important than accuracy, but things like Twitter completely destroyed it. It's no longer important to be right, it's important to be first. News organisation, and the BBC specifically, had a duty to resist the noise of "social" media, and instead concentrate on being accurate. Channel 4 news still does this, but the BBC doesn't. Laura can do immense damage by errantly tweeting that a labour activist had got into a fight with the health secretary. Doesn't matter if they retract it later. The final problem is the lack of challenging from presenters. Politicians can lie to millions of people and are completely unchallenged. There's a time for that - it's a "party political broadcast". In the news, if someone comes out with a lie, they need to be immediately told that's a lie, and not allowed to continue. If they keep lying, they should not be given any airtime at all.
  - 7y ago
mnw21cam 7y ago
You're arguing that the media are constantly attacking the Labour party. My wife is always complaining to me about how the media are always attacking the Conservative party. I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall. However, what I would much prefer to see is much more moderate coverage of the different political parties. However, that would require that the political parties make moderate claims about each other, rather than just painting the other parties as the devil incarnate. At the moment, media coverage of UK politics is dominated by outrage. I get it, outrage sells news stories to a very large proportion of the population. It puts me off, and makes me distrust the news. I'd like to see more "We think this policy would be best because..." and less "OMG the other party are killing babies as we speak." Social media does not achieve this.
- dean177 7y ago
  > I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall. This is a very “Judgement of Soloman” type stance to take, as it ignores the merit of the complaint each side is making.
  - mnw21cam 7y ago
    Yeah, at the moment, I'm seeing the majority of the news on politics coming my way is outrage-inducing, and I by default ignore articles like that. They don't actually convey any useful information, but they sell. I think it's reasonable to assume that none of the political parties actually want to murder babies. I'm getting very little actual real reasonable information about what the politicians will actually want to do. The truth is, good things will happen and bad things will happen in the country. No political party can prevent that. They might be able to make a very small change, but that's it. They are all trying to make improvements, and they have different ideas on how to do that. Which one is right? Well, if we knew that, the parties would agree on it and argue about something else.
    - barryhoodlum 7y ago
UglyToad 7y ago
There was even a study which found that there is an actual, quantifiable, bias against the opposition. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
- get_off_my_lawn 7y ago
  I don't think you can take away any useful information from this "study". A single glance at the sources is enough to tell you that the author selected a sample that would guarantee them the conclusion they wanted. All the newspapers in the screenshot are notoriously right wing, as is every other paper that gets mentioned, apart from the Guardian. I guess that one was included to make the biased sample seem less obvious, and since they happen to be quite neutral on Corbyn, so they don't offset the stats too much. This study is the equivalent of only looking at "Fox News" and other similar news broadcasts, and drawing the conclusion that American media as a whole is very conservative and supportive of Trump.
  - UglyToad 7y ago
    Hmm, it's perhaps a valid point but as far as I can tell the only English paper missing is The Times (other than small mad ones like the Daily/Morning Star). I'd take the opposite interpretation. It probably says even more about bias that those are the sources available to choose from (though I'd also say the Mirror is left wing, the Guardian sort of centrist and who knows what's going on with the Independent though in further reduction of the free media pool they've just been bought by a right winger). I wouldn't call it sampling bias if it reflects the actual existing reality, those are the media sources available (except in Scotland and NI) and they're biased against the opposition.
    - get_off_my_lawn 7y ago
      Aside from all the Times flavours, The Observer and "i" are both left leaning papers that are missing. Although there are overall probably more left wing than right wing papers among the small ones (like the Daily/Morning Star, as you mentioned), there do seem to be more conservatives newspapers among the big names. That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given the situation is the opposite when it comes to non-print media. I struggle to think of a news channel which is obviously conservative. I definitely wouldn't call BBC that, and others like Channel 4 are as openly left-wing. As someone who predominantly follows television and online news, I haven't personally noticed any conservative bias in the available options, and even a slight under-representation if anything.
cal97g 7y ago
It’s not like they don’t deserve criticism, their policies are financial suicide. Additionally they’re lying about the NHS along with every left wing rag out there. Tories wanting to sell the NHS is fake news. It’s fear-mongering. Labour already sold the NHS essentially, allowing provisions of services by private companies. The Tories haven’t made any cuts to the NHS while in power. So why do labour and their supporters keep touting rubbish?
- thu2111 7y ago
  I vouched for this post to bring it back from the dead, because HN flagging shouldn't be used to engage in partisan political suppression. As a Brit I've also found the rhetoric around the NHS to be depressing. People talk like one of the major parties has a manifesto pledge to shut it down, but there's no such discussion anywhere. One major party spends much of its time attacking policies the other doesn't actually have. This doesn't seem right.
gwbas1c 7y ago
Ironically, in the US, the BBC is the media source that I trust the most. It has so little bias, probably because it has very little interest in the outcome in our elections.
- thu2111 7y ago
  It absolutely has bias, just not so much with respect to Tories vs Lib Dems vs Labour. Its bias is, like most London based governmental institutions, towards Blairite/Cameron-esque "moderate centrism". This can be summed up as: 1. Feminism/social justice is good. 2. The EU is good. 3. "Experts" (academics) are morally good, wise, and always right. They may in fact be the pinnacle of civilised society. Graduates are one level below academics and the uncredentialed (e.g. older people) are below graduates. 4. Culture is primarily about interesting local dances and dresses and more of it should be encouraged through immigration, but beyond that people's morals and cultures should be essentially homogenous. 5. Climate change is the most important issue of our time. 6. A reasonably large welfare state but without very high taxes is economically optimal. If you want to see the BBC's biases in action, try a simple experiment. Load BBC News Online every day and count how many pieces of news are directly related to the above agendas in some way. When I've tried this I tend to find that there's always at least one article about women or female empowerment and often more like 4-5 of them, and that's just the first point. Corbyn supporters feel like he gets a lot of stick from the press because as an unreformed 1970s era socialist he doesn't fit into the biases of most journalists: he doesn't actually seem to care much about social justice culture wars, he has historically always been anti-EU and now tries to just avoid discussing it, he's quite badly educated (two E grades at A Level) and doesn't have a degree, culture-wise he doesn't seem to engage in travel except for political reasons, he has no track record of environmental activism and finally, he defines himself through wanting much higher government spending/taxes. This runs against most of their preconceptions about what progress would look like.

by k1m 7y ago

trwhite 7y ago

You don't think the media attacks Boris and the Tories? That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media?

Symbiote 7y ago
> That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? It wasn't. There's an official statement from the hospital confirming they had no beds left. Of course, the media chose to report it, but they aren't lying. The right-wing media lied about it though, and it's a very relevant example of online disinformation: "Despite the claim that the photo was staged having been acknowledged as false, it [the claim] has continued to spread on both Facebook and Twitter [...] Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson retweeted screenshots of the Facebook page to her followers twice, telling them “I presume this is genuine”, and adding later that the photo was “100% faked”. Her posts have received thousands of retweets between them." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-account-hacked-to-post-fake-story-about-hospital-boy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-acc... (This is already downvoted, along with every non-pro-Tory comment in this discussion. Probably it will recover, HN usually does, but it would be better if people who disagree counter the arguments, rather than just downvoting what they're uncomfortable with.)
- cmsd2 7y ago
  the rise of this submission to the front page and the swift sinking back under the waves, along with the vote war on comments here is interesting. this place isn't nearly so left-leaning as i'd assumed.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    It seems mostly to be socdems and right-libertarians, depending on what thread you're on.
- trwhite 7y ago
  I agree with your point in parentheses. It appears I've been downvoted into oblivion despite not even indicating my own leaning. Even if we're acknowledging that this story wasn't a setup, it's wrong to suggest that there's more right-wing bias in British media than left. It's probably about the same, though of course some establishments will always have particular leanings (e.g. Guardian to the left) Even the Beeb, which one would assume is neutral, regularly jumps on the Boris-bashing brigade.
nicoburns 7y ago
> You don't think the media attacks Boris and the Tories? Not really. Boris outright lies all the time, and he's rarely picked up on for it. There are also several instances of Newspaper's running stories on the exact same policy, positively when suggested by the the Tories, and negatively when suggested by Corbyn. You can't get much more objective bias than that.
- Angostura 7y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50711868 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50711868 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50630355 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50630355
fennecfoxen 7y ago
I'm less certain about the hospital incident and overall left-vs-right bias, but I can tell you: Wow, Labour is really, really good about sounding the chorus "we're being unfairly targeted! smears!" whenever there's a new story that another MP has resigned over the party's systematic antisemitism (or that someone who was fired, ostensibly to actually deal with anti-semitism, has been mysteriously re-hired). (Our local "anti-Zionist" friends in Labour will mod me down for this, I know.)
- Symbiote 7y ago
  The current Conservative leader has called Muslim women "letterboxes" and black children "piccaninnies" [1] with "watermelon smiles". Maybe someone has made a systematic review of the reporting of Conservative and Labour racism, and the reporting of it, but just throwing up a statement like yours, without also including the racism of Conservative party members/leaders, is just fuelling the fire of hostile debate. There will be racist people in both parties. Step back, and compare the depth of the racism and the number and influence of the people involved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaninny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaninny
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    Trust me, I am always glad to say that the island's politics are a poorly contained dumpster fire, and point out the big stuff, like the Windrush scandal, or the English-proficiency-test scandal (not the original cheating, the Home Office response where they told thousands of international students their tests were invalid and they were subject to removal). But if we're playing the "which one is really worse?" game, instead of striving to better either, we've lost.
DagAgren 7y ago
No, it was not. However, the claim that it was was a lie that was spread far and wide through social media and by the right-wing media. So again, no, it's not "both sides do it". It's mainly the right.
teh_klev 7y ago
> That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? It's been proved beyond any doubt that the boy sleeping on the hospital floor was in fact true[0], despite an army of twitter and facebook bots being deployed to try and discredit the story[1]. The hospital involved publicly apologised for the incident. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606 [1]: https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1204175955314577410 https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1204175955314577410
iso1631 7y ago
> That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media? No, it wasn't. The lies about it being a setup were started shortly by the unnamed sockpuppet trolls and spread fast. The media can't seem to fight this https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/10/trolls-claim-photo-boy-hospital-floor-faked-labour-activists-11589821/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/10/trolls-claim-photo-boy-hospit...
barryhoodlum 7y ago
The "left-wing" media? Who is that exactly?
- iso1631 7y ago
  Guardian and Mirror
- trwhite 7y ago
  There's an institutional left-wing bias in the media. Said by someone who (nearly) worked for it.

teh_klev 7y ago

For many of us in Scotland this is nothing new. The coverage and reporting leading up to the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum was pretty appalling, with the BBC operating in full "Defence of the Union" mode. Both TV and print media ran scare story after scare story repetitively despite most being debunked.

thu2111 7y ago
Which scare stories are you thinking of? My memory of that time is that the nationalists were making a lot of claims during the campaign that they'd not laid any groundwork for, and which didn't hold water. Mostly of the form "after leaving the UK we'll still have access to X" or "Y won't change" but they hadn't actually asked anyone in the British government, so there was a lot of public back and forth over that, in particular, what it'd mean for Scotland to keep using the pound. Because they talked about future hypotheticals it is hard to say whether they were 'debunked' or not. One claim I remember very clearly was that post-independence Scotland would be able to keep funding its much higher levels of government spending because of high oil prices. The media did question this claim, and it turned out rightly so: oil prices collapsed just months after the vote and never recovered rendering the SNP's financial plans irrelevant. Independence would certainly have meant rapid and dire cuts in spending. However nothing I saw would have risen to the level of "disinformation", whatever that means. It was just people disagreeing on the relative merits and probabilities of things.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  I'll just point you here: https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/ https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/ Fully sourced and referenced. Stu Campbell isn't everyone's cuppa, but his writings on the shite, filth and corruption that went on during the Scottish Indyref in 2014 are reasonably bulletproof. I'll happily admit that the one thing the SNP messed up on was the currency question and that they should have had the balls to say they'd launch their own currency and central bank, or create a Scottish Pound tied to the UK pound (at least for the first few years - and is not unusual, there are many dollar currencies tied to the value of the US$). I can also answer questions on the balance of media exposure between pro-Union parties and the Yes parties (SNP and the Scottish Greens). Professor John Robertson (an academic who's work was to analyse media bias all around the world) of the West of Scotland University performed an analysis of this and when he presented his findings there were calls for him to be fired from his job - by BBC executives. https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc-over-academic-report-indyref-bias-scottish-media-blackout-must https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc... https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/ https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/ http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/BBC%20charter/BBCProfJohnRobertson.pdf http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/B...

Angostura 7y ago

This is certainly the view in the bubble, that the BBC is relentlessly anti-Corby. Yet when you look at the details, the evidence is hard to find. The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, is frequently the target of attacks as being biased against Labour, but those critics always seem to ignore stories like this which is currently the featured bit of analysis on the BBC Website elections page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167

iso1631 7y ago
I find a lot of the problems with the media, and Laura being an example, is the need to put the journalist at the forefront. It isn't "the BBC say", it's "Laura Kuensburg says" This inflates journalist egos, and leaves them more open to manipulation. They want to think they are important, not the publication. They have a personal "brand". There's always been some of this, but that "brand" was usually well earned, after decades of coverage, and used in a very humble way. When word came of how John Simpson "liberated Kabul", he was rightly denigrated. Now in John's defense it was a warzone, and people can speak too quickly. "Celebrity" journalists, with personal following thanks to things like twitter, get "scoops" from "unnamed sources" which turn out to be lies, and spread them far faster than the truth can emerge. This is the second part of the problem - speed. 20 years ago, news was gathered by journalists, and packaged into a well researched piece for the news bulletin at 6pm or 9pm or whenever. 24 hour news started to erode this, where speed was more important than accuracy, but things like Twitter completely destroyed it. It's no longer important to be right, it's important to be first. News organisation, and the BBC specifically, had a duty to resist the noise of "social" media, and instead concentrate on being accurate. Channel 4 news still does this, but the BBC doesn't. Laura can do immense damage by errantly tweeting that a labour activist had got into a fight with the health secretary. Doesn't matter if they retract it later. The final problem is the lack of challenging from presenters. Politicians can lie to millions of people and are completely unchallenged. There's a time for that - it's a "party political broadcast". In the news, if someone comes out with a lie, they need to be immediately told that's a lie, and not allowed to continue. If they keep lying, they should not be given any airtime at all.
- 7y ago

mnw21cam 7y ago

You're arguing that the media are constantly attacking the Labour party. My wife is always complaining to me about how the media are always attacking the Conservative party. I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall. However, what I would much prefer to see is much more moderate coverage of the different political parties. However, that would require that the political parties make moderate claims about each other, rather than just painting the other parties as the devil incarnate. At the moment, media coverage of UK politics is dominated by outrage. I get it, outrage sells news stories to a very large proportion of the population. It puts me off, and makes me distrust the news. I'd like to see more "We think this policy would be best because..." and less "OMG the other party are killing babies as we speak." Social media does not achieve this.

dean177 7y ago
> I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall. This is a very “Judgement of Soloman” type stance to take, as it ignores the merit of the complaint each side is making.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  Yeah, at the moment, I'm seeing the majority of the news on politics coming my way is outrage-inducing, and I by default ignore articles like that. They don't actually convey any useful information, but they sell. I think it's reasonable to assume that none of the political parties actually want to murder babies. I'm getting very little actual real reasonable information about what the politicians will actually want to do. The truth is, good things will happen and bad things will happen in the country. No political party can prevent that. They might be able to make a very small change, but that's it. They are all trying to make improvements, and they have different ideas on how to do that. Which one is right? Well, if we knew that, the parties would agree on it and argue about something else.
  - barryhoodlum 7y ago

UglyToad 7y ago

There was even a study which found that there is an actual, quantifiable, bias against the opposition. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...

get_off_my_lawn 7y ago
I don't think you can take away any useful information from this "study". A single glance at the sources is enough to tell you that the author selected a sample that would guarantee them the conclusion they wanted. All the newspapers in the screenshot are notoriously right wing, as is every other paper that gets mentioned, apart from the Guardian. I guess that one was included to make the biased sample seem less obvious, and since they happen to be quite neutral on Corbyn, so they don't offset the stats too much. This study is the equivalent of only looking at "Fox News" and other similar news broadcasts, and drawing the conclusion that American media as a whole is very conservative and supportive of Trump.
- UglyToad 7y ago
  Hmm, it's perhaps a valid point but as far as I can tell the only English paper missing is The Times (other than small mad ones like the Daily/Morning Star). I'd take the opposite interpretation. It probably says even more about bias that those are the sources available to choose from (though I'd also say the Mirror is left wing, the Guardian sort of centrist and who knows what's going on with the Independent though in further reduction of the free media pool they've just been bought by a right winger). I wouldn't call it sampling bias if it reflects the actual existing reality, those are the media sources available (except in Scotland and NI) and they're biased against the opposition.
  - get_off_my_lawn 7y ago
    Aside from all the Times flavours, The Observer and "i" are both left leaning papers that are missing. Although there are overall probably more left wing than right wing papers among the small ones (like the Daily/Morning Star, as you mentioned), there do seem to be more conservatives newspapers among the big names. That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given the situation is the opposite when it comes to non-print media. I struggle to think of a news channel which is obviously conservative. I definitely wouldn't call BBC that, and others like Channel 4 are as openly left-wing. As someone who predominantly follows television and online news, I haven't personally noticed any conservative bias in the available options, and even a slight under-representation if anything.

cal97g 7y ago

It’s not like they don’t deserve criticism, their policies are financial suicide. Additionally they’re lying about the NHS along with every left wing rag out there. Tories wanting to sell the NHS is fake news. It’s fear-mongering. Labour already sold the NHS essentially, allowing provisions of services by private companies. The Tories haven’t made any cuts to the NHS while in power. So why do labour and their supporters keep touting rubbish?

thu2111 7y ago
I vouched for this post to bring it back from the dead, because HN flagging shouldn't be used to engage in partisan political suppression. As a Brit I've also found the rhetoric around the NHS to be depressing. People talk like one of the major parties has a manifesto pledge to shut it down, but there's no such discussion anywhere. One major party spends much of its time attacking policies the other doesn't actually have. This doesn't seem right.

gwbas1c 7y ago

Ironically, in the US, the BBC is the media source that I trust the most. It has so little bias, probably because it has very little interest in the outcome in our elections.

thu2111 7y ago
It absolutely has bias, just not so much with respect to Tories vs Lib Dems vs Labour. Its bias is, like most London based governmental institutions, towards Blairite/Cameron-esque "moderate centrism". This can be summed up as: 1. Feminism/social justice is good. 2. The EU is good. 3. "Experts" (academics) are morally good, wise, and always right. They may in fact be the pinnacle of civilised society. Graduates are one level below academics and the uncredentialed (e.g. older people) are below graduates. 4. Culture is primarily about interesting local dances and dresses and more of it should be encouraged through immigration, but beyond that people's morals and cultures should be essentially homogenous. 5. Climate change is the most important issue of our time. 6. A reasonably large welfare state but without very high taxes is economically optimal. If you want to see the BBC's biases in action, try a simple experiment. Load BBC News Online every day and count how many pieces of news are directly related to the above agendas in some way. When I've tried this I tend to find that there's always at least one article about women or female empowerment and often more like 4-5 of them, and that's just the first point. Corbyn supporters feel like he gets a lot of stick from the press because as an unreformed 1970s era socialist he doesn't fit into the biases of most journalists: he doesn't actually seem to care much about social justice culture wars, he has historically always been anti-EU and now tries to just avoid discussing it, he's quite badly educated (two E grades at A Level) and doesn't have a degree, culture-wise he doesn't seem to engage in travel except for political reasons, he has no track record of environmental activism and finally, he defines himself through wanting much higher government spending/taxes. This runs against most of their preconceptions about what progress would look like.