‘Partnership reporting’ between BBC News and CBS News

A Guest Post by Arthur T

AllSides Media Bias Chart

Since July 2017, six months months after the inauguration of Donald Trump, there has been in place a quid pro quo partnership between BBC News and CBS News which covers news gathering and editorial exchanges.

 

A discrepancy in the reporting by the BBC of the fatal stabbing of Sir David Amess when compared with the murder of Jo Cox has been highlighted by ITBBCB?. It is interesting to see yesterday’s CBS News story regarding the funeral:

‘British lawmaker David Amess stabbed to death during meeting with constituents’

The CBS News report contained the following:

He is the second MP to be murdered in five years. In 2016, Labour MP Jo Cox was shot on the street in her constituency and died. The Jo Cox Foundation, a charity set up in her memory, said it was "horrified" by the stabbing.

There is nothing that might reveal the identity, ethnicity, motive or ideology of the perpetuator although those details were widely reported by reputable sources. Sounds familiar?

There are plenty of examples easily accessed that compare the often word for word content of UK stories used by CBS, and the vice versa. There seems to be little doubt that editorial control (biased, ITBBCB? readers might say) of UK stories for export to CBS and US stories to the UK is in operation as a part of the partnership. I searched items such as the Donald Trump ‘baby’ inflatable, the Coulson statue damage, the Liverpool taxi story and others. The correlation of editorial control is striking.

The most recent story, from CBS News: 

A man intentionally plowed an SUV into a crowd at a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Sunday night and was being charged with intentional homicide, police said.

has a similarly worded version on the BBC News website: 

Wisconsin officials will seek to charge a driver who ploughed into a Christmas parade on Sunday with five counts of intentional homicide.

Ploughed and plowed eh?

These stories, as they appear simultaneously in the US and UK must have a commonality of editorial control. The partnership raises the spectre of bias over the US political stories originating in the US being transferred to BBC reporting under the terms of a legal framework. We have always maintained that the BBC News coverage is actually more biased over US politics than it is in the UK. We have always pointed the finger at Sopel, Zurcher, Bryant and others, but the question is: Are they legally obliged to toe the CBS News line under the terms of the 2017 deal?