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Comment by nannal | Hacker News Reader

I'd advise steering clear of anything related to UK politics published by the BBC.

There's been a clear pro-right trend for a number of years evident most clearly during the most recent election and Scotland's independence referendum of 2014.

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In my experience, everybody complains that the BBC is biased, which probably means they're fairly neutral.

That's not how it works. One side's accusations can be completely unfounded while the other side's aren't. See this twitter thread for the evidence and decide for yourself: https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/120699288684119245...

trying to think of a lazier, more harmful analysis than this both-sides bullshit but I've got nothing

Do those on the right say Fox News is biased?

Regardless of political affiliation, intelligent people realize that every source has a bias and usually an agenda.

Other people think anything that they disagree with is "biased" and accept only information that confirms what they already believe.

To answer your question: do those on the right say Fox News is biased? Some do, some don't.

I'm on the right, I believe Fox is biased-right.

(Of course I see a lot of left-lean in a bunch of others.)

I do understand there are different POVs but there is also fact vs non-fact.

Example with Photo: https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-refers-to-el-salvador-guat...

Fox News Headline: "Trump Cuts Aid to 3 Mexican Countries"

Issue: There is only one "Mexican Country" -- Mexico.

Regardless of political leaning, there is an issue with news like this.

I'm right leaning on some issues and left leaning on other issues. If you want right-leaning news, The Wall Street Journal is a far better source for right leaning news. I used to subscribe to the WSJ. Now I subscribe to the Financial Times which conveniently side-steps most US politics alltogether.

That was funny, but from the page you linked to it seems that was a bungled caption onscreen for a few seconds, hardly a "Fox News Headline" or "news".

Not to mention the appalling coverage of Jeremy Corbyn.

What was appalling about its coverage? Any sources or evidence? From what I understand they go to great lengths to remain as impartial as possible so curious what it is in particular you are referring to?

BBC's coverage (and that of other media) of Corbyn has been overwhelmingly negative ever since he announced he is running for Labour leadership.

Having said that, I think what's more interesting is the BBC's accidental editing of his main opponent in the recent election. That is, the first time they "accidentally" aired 2016 footage, and the second time they "accidentally" edited out the audience laughing at Boris Johnson after he was asked a question.

On both occasions the BBC apologised but I'm not sure it mattered. Obviously this does highlight that since the BBC is willing to do this, how many other times have they done this that hasn't been noticed?

Mostly allowing themselves to be led around by unnamed "sources".

Laura Kuenssberg's Twitter feed was particularly bad. Reporting on advance postal votes: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/11/bbc-denies-pol...

Misreporting a punch, contradicted almost immediately by video: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/10/photo-...

The official BBC line is that these are "mistakes", although they all seem to err in one direction and there is no investigation or plan to reduce the mistakes in the future.

Subjecting everyone except Johnson to interview by Andrew Neil (who is also chairman of Conservative magazine The Spectator) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/01/boris-johnson-...

> Subjecting everyone except Johnson to interview by Andrew Neil

The BBC doesn’t have the power to subject people to interview by force. If he declines an interview which he is not obligated to give what should they have done?

Either:

(a) not announce "interviewing all the leaders" until all the leaders were confirmed. This could be a competence rather than a bias issue; wasn't it Fyre Festival who were announcing acts who they hadn't booked to perform?

(b) empty-chair him

(c) given that Gove and Stanley Johnson (who has no formal position in the party, he's just Johnson's father and now a minor celebrity) turned up to protest outside, they should have been challenged instead

(also, "someone who already edits a partisan political magazine" should be disqualified from senior BBC positions if you're pretending to be impartial)

I am not in the UK Conservative Party but I actually know a few people who are and I hear enough of what going on in the party. I don't particularly like the conservative party however I signed up for account because of egregiously wrong you are.

a) Various leaders agreed to go on a show. Boris Johnson doesn't have to go on the BBC and the BBC can interview who they wish. Andrew Neil likes to make fools of people on his show. He has done it to many politicians of all colours. It is really just a higher brow version of "Ben Shapiro defeats Liberals with facts and logic". Jeremy Corbyn was stupid enough to go on there and get himself shafted by Neil.

b and c) Gove and Stanley Johnson was sent by their party to the debate. Channel 4 (which is mostly publicly funded which most people don't know) did the whole ice sculpture as a stunt. They already bought the sculpture. The

As for the BBC having a "right wing bias". Nothing can be further from the truth. You can go on the website yourself and there are thousands of stories talking about typically left wing talking points.

I am actually building daily news site analysis tool by cobbling together some sources. I am using some fairly simple word analysis techniques (most of the effort is scraping the data from these sites and deciding what constitutes a real news story) and most of the language on the BBC and the Guardian are similar. I suspect that most of them just copy and paste stories tbh.

> I am using some fairly simple word analysis techniques (most of the effort is scraping the data from these sites and deciding what constitutes a real news story) and most of the language on the BBC and the Guardian are similar. I suspect that most of them just copy and paste stories tbh.

There is a more serious underlying problem you've spotted, which is "jounalism as stenography". Lots of people can put out press releases, which then really do get copy-pasted into articles. Same with "wire copy" sourced from AP or Reuters. This can be abused by bad actors to get obvious or difficult-to-refute falsehoods into the public memetic consciousness by repeating them.

> This can be abused by bad actors to get obvious or difficult-to-refute falsehoods into the public memetic consciousness by repeating them.

This is exactly why I started the project also I know there are hit pieces that are coordinated between the news-sites. I wonder how much other news that is reported is also coordinated reporting. However I have no direct proof of this and I cannot start from trying to prove something that I suspect. First I need to collect and analyse data fairly.

So far I've just used newspaper to do the hard work of scraping for me (https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper) some basic filtering techniques e.g. I discard everything that has a question mark at the end of it (Betteridge's law of headlines and an MySQL to store articles etc. Then I run the second script to do some basic string analysis. I am going to be building a small web app to display the results.

So far it is early days (It about 4 or 5 python files and a config file) and I have got two other projects I am working on that probably need completing first.

Perhaps it was more the lack of scrutiny offered to his opponents.

This just doesn’t seem to add up to me. You think that the BBC, based in London, the absolute epitome of the middle-class metropolitan liberal media Oxbridge elite, founded on a socialist principle of media provided by the state, an organisation that helped to pioneer left-wing satire, home of the News Quiz, a broadcaster that commissions programmes for Mark Steel, Marcus Brigstocke, the late Jeremy Hardy, is actually right-wing?

It indeed does not add up, it's an absurd statement.

The BBC is pro government. It was pro Labour for many years recently. It’s still fairly unbiased compared to most sources.

That's a trend reflected in voting patterns. What is the BBC supposed to do, ignore the fact that a massive number of voters rejected the Labour Party's platform, fail to note that Labour had their most dismal outing since 1935 while losing seats for the first time in many places in the north of England, and fail to comment that the UK Left is a dumpster fire and a hotbed of anti-Semitism?

> There's been a clear pro-right trend for a number of years

Then why has there been more complaints from the right than the left this year about the BBC?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/31/bbc-election-c...

It's the Boaty McBoatface of metrics. The narrow demographic of those who write letters of complaint and organised efforts to complain will dominate.

> ...from the right than the left this year about the BBC?

You do realize that the single claim that you're citing as evidence for the BBC being biased towards the right is from a publisher that is left-leaning?

That's like asking Trump if CNN is "fake news" and citing his only opinion as evidence that CNN is biased against him which is hardly credible.

Interesting.

To my (American) eyes, the BBC has a liberal bias. YMMV, of course.

The BBC received far more complaints on coverage on the recent election from Conservative (right) supporters than any other group:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/31/bbc-election-c...

The right wing in the UK is usually the group most critical of the BBC (AKA "Brussels Broadcasting Corporation").

I would agree that the coverage during the Scottish referendum in 2014 was biased but I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.

Any organisation that can produce The Thick of It being critical of politicians and W1A about its own antics can't be all bad....

Complaints are, like any "flagging" system, being weaponized to move the Overton window. There's plenty of people willing to write in and complain any time the BBC says that global warming is happening, that shouldn't be taken as a need to "correct" that.

> I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.

Yes. And fearful of losing funding.

It's worth noting that the linked article does offer selection bias as an explanation – suggesting that conservative supporters were more likely to write letters, supporters of other parties less likely to.

Number of complaints seems a pretty poor measure of bias, but it is one that is often used to reinforce the idea of the BBC's impartiality.

Well, as someone who doesn't support any of the UK major national parties I'd say that the BBC was fairly good at making pretty much all of them look equally unappealing!

In the post-trump era, right wing complaints against an organisation aren't necessarily a sign that that organisation is doing a good thing. Complaints from the factions in power in the UK at the moment are usually just a sign that their actions 'arent right enough' rather than not being right wing full stop.

Also, the BBC News wing has separate management, some of whom were appointed during Cameron's time in office. So the drama and comedy produced by the BBC can be independent of its news editing.

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