''Since when is this their remit?''

This might be of interest from British-American blogger Sam Hooper. It begins with the BBC's US partner CBS News:

I feel like for every 100 words published by news outlets, at least 20 are now unnecessarily wasted trying to shape public sentiment to whatever is being reported (even when I happen to agree with it). It's in this sense of constant manipulation that distrust of media is born. 

Here, it's clear that CBS News was so eager to head off any notion that the Omicron variant originated in South Africa that they published a triumphant "Ha! See, it was in Europe first!" article, as if it matters. No real harm done here, but we see it in many contexts. Fox News deciding to use the less-informative term "homicide bomber" a decade ago. The BBC at pains to say "so-called Islamic State". And most recently the selective, inconsistent & sometimes downright misleading use of "fact-checking" articles. 

This paternalistic behavior shows a media elite who look down on their fellow citizens, viewing them as impressionable halfwits lacking agency, at constant risk of adopting "wrong" opinions unless continually medicated with ideological additives to their news consumption. 

However, many media elites are pompous, deeply mediocre individuals, and their clumsy, transparent efforts to shape or "correct" public opinion through skewed reporting only drives audiences elsewhere - some to independent journalists, others towards sensationalist fake news. 

The decline and collapse of corrupted news institutions like the NY Times, WaPo, CNN et al might be welcomed but for the fact that the primary information gathering power of a big newsroom seems hard to replicate - though remote working seems ripe with possibilities there. 

I’ll close with this: it is particularly galling that many of the media elites destroying trust in journalism as they clumsily try to prevent us from falling into wrongthink are themselves so deeply under the spell of the successor ideology that they don’t even realize it.

‘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?