The home page of the BBC News website features a 'primer' on the Democratic Unionist Party for those outside Northern Ireland who don't know much about it.
It's all very informative but it isn't very impartial.
You can tell that, for starters, because of the choice of social media reactions the piece chooses to spotlight - just two: Jon Snow and a Guardian writer, both slagging off the DUP as an extreme party.
Now, it's fine (of course) for a Guardian writer to tweet insults like "climate deniers" but for the BBC reporter responsible for writing this article to use the same term too is surely not alright:
That whole phrase, "a devout climate change denier", absolutely reeks of bias to me.
Quite a bit of the article reads like one of those pieces on UKIP which the BBC kept on writing until fairly recently, listing every 'loon' and 'fruitcake' in the party they could find and trying to make them - and their party - sound as 'loony' and 'fruitcakey' as humanly possible.
It's an attempted hatchet job in my view.
Just imagine if a BBC journalist had written such a piece about Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party highlighting every damning thing they could find - every piece of grotesquerie from Mr Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott, etc - and laid them all out as a 'guide' to the Labour Party, just imagine the storm that would have raised. All hell would have broken loose, with people on Newswatch or Feedback accusing the BBC of acting 'like the Daily Mail'.
Well, the BBC has certainly acted 'like the Daily Mail' here. It even tries at one point to insinuate that the DUP has links to terrorists:
Just imagine if that hypothetical BBC 'primer' about the Labour Party had included something like that about Jeremy Corbyn! His "historical links" to republic paramilitaries are at least as questionable. BBC editors would be apologising on Newswatch and Feedback faster than you can say "friends from Hamas".
Now, the DUP hold views on certain things with which I very strongly disagree with and others that I warmly agree with. From reading this BBC report, however, I suspect that the BBC journalist responsible dislikes pretty much everything that the DUP stands for.
Please read it for yourselves though and see if you agree.
