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16 June 2022

Newspapers in glass houses throw stones at the BBC

Trust has fallen in the state broadcaster, but it’s down more somewhere else.

By The Chatterer

Say what you like about the UK media, it never misses a chance to give the BBC or left-wing snowflakes a good bashing. 

“Left-wingers avoid reading ‘negative’ news stories because it could leave them feeling ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘carrying feelings of powerlessness’,” ran the headline on the Mail Online, reporting on a study by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism on the state of the industry in 2022.

One major finding the Mail conveniently chose to leave out of its coverage of the report was the fact that it cited the Mail itself as one of the least trustworthy news brands in the UK. Just 23 per cent of people trusted the Mail’s news output, compared with 51 per cent who didn’t.

The omissions were even more glaring over at the Times, which only covered the fact the report found trust in BBC coverage had dropped to 55 per cent, from 62 per cent last year, allegedly as a result of its “liberal bias”.

While that drop certainly sounds like a lot, there was actually one news brand in the UK that saw an even steeper dive in public trust this year: the Times. Just 43 per cent of people reported trusting its news, a fall from 52 per cent the year before and putting it a solid seven places behind the BBC, one of the most dramatic declines in all of UK journalism.

You can only speculate what people have found untrustworthy about Times coverage in recent years, or why the outlet chose to omit the rest of the report’s findings. But Chatterer readers may be interested to know the newspaper has run just short of 100 articles discussing bias at the BBC in the last year. Maybe Times subscribers are just getting bored.

[See also: Andrew Marr: What the 6 January US Capitol riot hearings teach us]

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