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Comment by 2color | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what view does BBC generally express on the matter?

The BBC is supposed to be neutral but, personally, I believe there is resonable evidence to suggest the majority of the UK media is bias towards the status quo.

That said, since accusations of bias have arisen there has seen some fairly cutting questions pointed at the UK Govs lies on the matter from the BBC and others, and we've started to see a much more interesting and closer debate.

I don't live in Scotland anymore though, so I can't say I know what things look like from within the country at the moment.

The BBC's charter states that it is not allowed to express a view on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News#Political_and_commerc.... Of course, an organisation is made of people and so individuals will occasionally stray from that line (and get called out for it). But they do strive to be balanced on the matter. Here's a link to their "Scotland Decides" pages to give you an idea of how they're trying to balance it out: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/events/scotland-decides

While that should prevent their reporters / news readers (for example) from voicing a certain opinion, it doesn't however limit them in doing one-sided reporting (for example doing more coverage on the 'no' campaign or politicians leaning in that direction).

BBC is a British institution and as such support for Britain is ingrained (imagine US TV stations providing unbiased objective coverage of an 'independence for California' referendum). In Scotland, the BBC is a cash-starved token organisation with close familial and friendship ties to Labour, the erstwhile establishment party of Scotland.

So, in my entirely biased view, the Beeb is very much on one side of this argument. Not as a result of some silly straw-man conspiracy theory, but just because the views of its people are bound to seep into coverage.

There's a lot of license fee money on the line for the BBC.

BBC cannot express any view on that matter. It's bipartisan and will only report facts.

Actually it is not bipartisan; it is required to be neutral, regardless how how many political parties (or political / economic ideologies) there are.

Alright, that's what I actually meant when I said bipartisan - that it does not support any parties by definition. I know, wrong word.

That may be your belief but there are plenty of people who think otherwise. http://biasedbbc.org/

You can look at the tags to see the bias of biasedbbc. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would argue that if not pro-conservative, the BBC neglects many of the issues that would be detrimental to current government - the BBC completely ignored phone hacking, the privatisation of the NHS, among others. It's still probably significantly more neutral than almost any corporate controlled broadcaster though.

The "bias" in the BBC is primarily to "favor" the current government of the time by not running highly controversial stories until they have become mainstream. They also avoid running purely political stories outside their politics section, like "the privatisation of the NHS" (which is a Labour party press release, not a thing that has happened to report on).

What they don't do is run directly biased stories; they're "neutral" in the content they put out, and any perceived bias is the result of their tendency to hold off on running boat-rocking stories. You could easily argue that this is a bias in itself, but it's not a partisan bias and it's hard to see how they could do this differently; it comes from their entirely legitimate fear that if they annoy any current government too much then they might lose the license fee advantage.

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