Saturday 4 March 2017

Fact-checking the BBC


It much be one of those inevitable (and possibly bad) habits that people appear to fall into once they've spent a lot of time looking at the BBC critically: Not trusting BBC News to accurately report simple facts. 

Thus, on reading one of the latest Trump-bating pieces on the BBC News website, Echoes of Watergate resurface as Trump-Russia links probed, I thought I'd better Google around after the piece ended:


Fact-checking reveals that this "belief" is wrong. Harry S. Truman dismissed his attorney general, J. Howard McGrath, in 1952 for refusing to cooperate with his own department's corruption investigation. 

2 comments:

  1. The BBC, especially ECU directors and Trust grandees, fall back on 'belief' a bit too much. And if pressed for something more tangible, can go quite coy, or turn nasty.

    Basically it is a flag that for them absolves all that follows, but for the discerning audience a very good reason to ignore what follows or head elsewhere, as you did.

    One suspects a lot gets loaded in the 'about' part of 'right' they claim to get.

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  2. Nixon fired a special prosecutor, not an attorney general. The attorney general resigned. The know this they said this, but they still end saying Nixon dismissed him. But that's not the biggest problem with this 'Echo of Watergate'. The big problem is Sally Yates was fired for a matter entirely unrelated to the Trump-Russia nonsense. And she was only an acting attorney general - she would have been replaced in short order anyway.

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