Yeah it’s an opinion piece but some interesting stuff about how even conservative journalists when they don’t toe the line are pushed to the side.
Yeah it’s an opinion piece but some interesting stuff about how even conservative journalists when they don’t toe the line are pushed to the side.
There is a long history of objective journalism refraining from passing judgement. This is the distinction between news journalism and editorials. There is nothing wrong with partisan journalism, but the BBC is by and large not that. When I look over at the hellscape that is U.S. “journalism,” I don’t see a compelling role model. In fact, I think that is irrefutable evidence that the BBC is correct to remain impartial. Remember: impartiality is subjective. Making judgements - even ones which appear reasonable to you - open the author and publication up to endless accusations of editorialism. If the BBC were to ever switch to U.S.-style journalism, I believe they would be defunded almost immediately.
None of what I wrote was about passing judgement.
I agree that once you do you lose your objective foundation. However saying that something has never happened before, or it’s being justified under emergency powers, or that something is a factually incorrect statement is not opinion.
“Incorrectly” is a judgement. It is a judgement that the statement is false. To illustrate the issue, let’s use your example: “X incorrectly states that the sky is yellow”. Let’s imagine that the BBC writes, “Trump incorrectly states that the sky is yellow.” Trump and supporters reply, “but the sky is yellow during certain atmospheric events common in the morning and evening. Here is a picture of a yellow sky.” Now the BBC is caught defending a truism which is, in fact, not always true. Supporters of Trump can rightly point out the BBC’s inaccuracy, and would likely consider it a form of bias and partisanship. In order for the BBC to avoid this, they would need to append a long legal disclaimer at the bottom of every headline, every article, every video, and every news report, thoroughly detailing the various ways in which the judgement could be interpreted, how and why the BBC came to that judgement, their peer reviewed citations and statistics, the background of the analyst who made the judgement to ensure that they aren’t biased, etc. This still wouldn’t be enough, because Trump supporters would then ask, “but why didn’t you write an article about all those times Kamala Harris lied about Biden’s mental acuity? You didn’t use the word “lie” even though she clearly lied.” They’d be right. Now the BBC has opened themselves up for criticism of instances in which they didn’t editorialise.
Judgements, no matter how factually correct, are judgements. They lead to a race to the bottom. I don’t see how you could look at American media and argue that that is what the BBC should do.