The offense is pretty egregious and serious. This was a huge issue w dire consequences, and BBC wilfully spread doctored evidence. Watch the clip yourself
Dan Rather, a leading anchor for 60 Minutes, tried to shame George W Bush by airing forged documents. When revealed, Rather was fired.
When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it. A shared letter signed by 50 ‘experts’ called it ‘Russian disinformation’. Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true. This was especially egregious given the proximity to the 2020 elections.
Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
Those are direct political hits. They’re worse than examples like the Covington High vs Native American hoax, Katie Courics second amendment edit, Anderson Cooper standing in a flooded hole, etc.
Please give me a single example of a news source telling such outrageous lies against a Democrat. Note that the above examples are not second hand lies repeated— they are lies coming straight from the news source.
> When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it [...] Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true
To be clear, it turned out to be true that it was Hunter Biden's laptop. It did not turn out to be true that it contained anything damning concerning Joe Biden.
> Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
To be clear, the problem wasn't that Stephanopolous said that Trump was a rapist. It was that he said that Trump had been found liable for the rape E Jean Carroll in her lawsuit against him. In fact Trump was found by the jury to be liable for sexually abusing her but not for raping her.
However, in Trump's counterclaim against Carroll for defamation because she repeatedly claimed he raped her the judge dismissed the claim saying that her words were "substantially true". He said "The only issue on which the jury did not find in Ms Carroll’s favor was whether she proved that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of that term in the New York penal law".
The jury had been instructed that it could only find the Trump "raped" her if he forcibly penetrated her vagina with his penis. Forcible penetration by fingers is not rape under the New York penal code.
The judge noted that in contexts outside of New York penal law that would commonly be called "rape". BTW, that's also the case in the law of most other US states.
> Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
The overwhelming majority of legal experts considered that to be a frivolous lawsuit. Paramount (CBS' parent company) settled because they needed government approval for a merger they were involved in. The government approved the merger 3 weeks after the settlement.
BBC is government funded and running misinformation and fraudulent editing to affect a foreign regime
There is no pretense that fox news is somehow objective. At best people say it balances out the bias of nearly every other mainstream publication. For instance check 2016 newspaper endorsements Trump had 28 compared to over 600 for not trump
Newspaper endorsements in the 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia https://share.google/jOTQxKDCycI7bm04i
While the BBC does receive government money, that money is used exclusively for the BBC World Service. It is misleading to say the BBC is "government funded", when the majority of their output is funded by the license fee.
Don't newspapers have to at-least pretend to be neutral in a democracy i.e. on the side of people. Is there some dynamic here due to America being effectively a two party democracy that I'm missing.
I feel like endorsing one candidate over the other is a public declaration/acknowledgement that their future reporting on failures of their endorsed candidate will be soft and reporting on the other party will be aggressive.
Someone who regularly follows news on both sides may be able to tell whether this has been true so far or not.
Now I'm quite willing to accept that that particular Panaroma episode had a slant - they are not 'news' per se but an in depth perspective type programme - and so they reflect the views of the authors.
But that's just one episode by one set of programme makers - it's not such evidence of clear and consistent bias - it's just evidence that some programmes take a view - whether that balances out over time requires you to look at the output at a whole, not just a single clip of a single programme.
What dire consequences?
The documentary went out about a year ago with no direct airing in the US ( and to watch via iplayer you'd need to circumvent geographic controls ). I don't believe the documentary was an issue in the US at the time and I note Trump still won.
So this is really about what he wants with the lawsuit.