"BBC News itself is impartial and does not offer opinions"

As noted both here and at Biased-BBC (and, probably like you, I've also been spotting examples of it all over the BBC website in the past couple of weeks or so), the BBC is now attaching to numerous BBC News website articles a link to a piece called Why you can trust BBC News.

Please read it for yourselves. Hamlet's famous phrase 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks' springs to mind.

As Monkey Brains points out in the latest Open Thread, this linked-to piece includes the following: 

That worthy claim, as MB writes, "could be shown to be false by any number of examples".

And indeed it could, from innumerable pieces from Katty Kay to Anthony Zurcher, from Mark Mardell to Mark Easton, etc...

....but Exhibit A against the BBC here might just as well be BBC News North America Correspondent James Cook's BBC much-tweeted website piece Giving succour to the far right, Trump breaks with American ideals (about which we've written before) - an out-and-out opinion piece by a so-called impartial BBC reporter which made no bones whatsoever about not being impartial as far as Donald Trump is concerned; indeed instead raises its lack of impartiality proudly like a banner of truth: 

But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.

....and, yes, James Cook was explicit in that piece about blaming President Trump for that 'promotion of fascism and racism'. 

Now, however much you might (or might not) think that James's piece is bang on the mark and right on, if you read that piece in full and are being honest you surely can't deny that James - a fairly high-profile BBC reporter - is forcefully expressing his opinion on the matter. (He even says so himself!)

Thus, the claim that BBC News "is impartial" and "does not offer opinions" - at least in this case - is baloney. That piece certainly offered a 'personal view' - and a very passionate one too. 

The reason why blogs like this exist is that this is so far from being an isolated example that it makes the BBC's claim laughable (or worse).