Though being (fairly) characterised by BBC types as being 'critics' of the BBC, we are a blog that's called 'Is the BBC biased?', and that leads me, from time to time, to highlight and criticise charges of BBC bias which I find to be wrong or silly or downright perverse.
I've already posted one such piece tonight, and all of my 'Rob Burley Fan Club' pieces derive from the same impulse.
Raising my eyes nobly to the stars and placing my hand on my blogging medals, I do think that it's my blogging duty to do so because there's wheat and there's chaff out there when it comes to allegations of BBC bias, and the chaff is becoming ever more plentiful and it's blowing across the wheat and starting to choke it. And we wheat growers really do need to resist its spread lest it cross-contaminate us all.
And, before I extend that metaphor across the entire breadth of the US prairies, let me confess that, yes, I do tend to focus on the examples of chaff which strike me as the wrongest, the silliest and most perverse and that, by a truly remarkable and fortuitous coincidence, those examples tend to be those that are least in tune with my own way of thinking on things in general.
Yes, I post quite a few pieces slamming right-wing newspapers for misrepresenting the BBC (whenever they do) but, otherwise, especially as regards social media (particularly other like-minded blogs), I really do tend, more often than not, to merely tut or groan at examples from 'my own side' and move on without posting tut-tutting blogs about them.
And that's really not right. It's a failing. It's a bias. And chaff of every variety is worth burning for the wheat's sake.
In that spirit, I read a comment at a blog somewhere else tonight which read, "I notice that today a Gay man has been found guilty of murdering a baby girl he and his ‘husband’ have adopted. Yet the BBC doesn’t want you to know he is a Gay man, and in ever (sic) news report they have neglected to mention the fact. When the liberal agenda gets in the way of the news then omitting the facts make it fake news. Just more bias".
This is pure chaff. It's the actual fake news here. The BBC has not hidden the fact that the male murderer in this horrible case has a husband - i.e. is "Gay". They simply haven't - see here and here and here and here and here and here and here for starters.
Therefore, with hand on blogging heart, I pledge from hereon in that I will be as merciless towards any 'chaffery' from 'my own side' as I am towards the 'chaffery' from 'the other side'.
Long live wheat!
