Media Bias

The snap election campaign is but a day or two old and already the Corbynites are pre-emptively calling out media bias. I can see this getting as tedious as listening to the Special One whingeing about alleged unfair treatment from referees; often before the match has even been played. .

Readers from outside the UK might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Even before we were all formally walled off inside our social media silos, bias was pretty much what the media was supposed to be about. But in over in Blighty we have a national broadcaster tasked with a state-sponsored mission to at least appear impartial: Aunty, aka the BBC.

This provides both sides with a perennial opportunity to act out their inner Mourinho. Naturally, they never accuse the Beeb of being absurdly partisan AGAINST their political opponents.

In the good old days when the polarities of British politics primarily involved progressive vs conservative sensibilities, the BBC could make a decent enough show of balance. But cripes, nowadays it’s all urban vs rural, educated vs unlettered, cosmopolitan vs nationalist, expert vs fuckwit etc. So an organisation such as the BBC — at its core urban, educated, cosmopolitan and (usually) expert — is basically up a gum tree. Even if we were only talking about inclusive vs narrow, it would surely be hard to be balanced and narrow at the same time.

Anyway, bias as used by the Left is in some ways the equivalent of division as employed by the Right — revealing how they would all prefer it if their messages could, if at all possible, arrive unfiltered at the trough where the cattle are to imbibe them.