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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

So you think that Laura is higher profile than say John Cole was 30 years ago - the man was an absolute institution as BBC chief political correspondent. I don’t think she’s any higher profile than Nick Robinson either.

And this stuff about lack of pushback is just in people’s heads - there’s massive pushback all the time. From this morning, for example.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/conservative-robert-b...

> that the BBC is relentlessly anti-Corby. Yet when you look at the details, the evidence is hard to find

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-punch-...

Laura Kuenssberg is effectively the conservative party's minister of propaganda and media advisor to Johnson at this point. The very article you have linked to includes this sentence:

> The story, and the prime minister's weird and wooden response to it, provided the perfect chance for Labour to punch at one of the Conservatives' vulnerabilities

...designed purely to game search for the word "punch" after she publicly, falsely accused protestors of punching an advisor to Matt Hancock because senior Tories told her to. And even when provided with video evidence that this never happened, she wrote "doesn’t look like punch thrown" [1] rather than the true, factual sentence "no punch was thrown".

[1] https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1204091610843226112

What bubble are you referring to there?

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