This is such an important article I think it needs its own thread. It's by the wonderful Nick Cohen.
This article is about the BBCs reporting of Brexit. I know there are Leavers here, but urge you to read the article in the context of other issues and how the media is not challenging and questioning things properly. Take the bits about Brexit out if you wish, but read the rest of it. I can not stress just how important it is to current politics across the board - it will have particular resonance with women.
I have always been a defender of the BBC especially against the 'its too left wing/right wing', but right now it's difficult to argue it's not doing any journalism at all. The BBC is certainly not alone atm in this failing though.
www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/
How the BBC lost the plot on Brexit
Here are a few points to illustrate it. But as I say read it all
Late last year, BBC executives had the nerve to erect a bronze statue of George Orwell outside its headquarters in central London. The sculptor caught Orwell’s spikiness. He stands one hand on hip, the other pointing forward with a cigarette between his fingers, as if caught in mid-argument. Carved into the wall behind him is the journalistic motto that Orwell and the BBC wanted us to learn: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
And
Much of contemporary politics resembles the brainwashing techniques of religious sects, which discredit sources of information that might contradict the cult’s teachings. Political leaders cannot order their followers to cut off communications with their families and leave their partners if they are not fellow members of the sect, but they have found other ways to imitate L. Ron Hubbard. Their most effective technique is to take a half-truth—that all journalistic choices are ideological to some extent—and use it as a weapon to suppress the full truth.
It ought to be obvious that a left-wing reporter will have an urge to expose corporate misconduct, just as a right-wing reporter will be on the watch for the hypocrisies of the left. But since deeds, not motives, make the world go round, the intention of the reporter ought to be irrelevant. What matters is whether what they have found is true or important. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are masters of the tactic of saying that, regardless of the truth of the research or the importance of the story, the very fact of the story’s existence proves its illegitimacy. The term “whataboutism” does not begin to cover the new official campaigns to discredit journalism. The political cult leader does not merely claim his opponents are as bad as he is or that reporters are motivated by their opposition to him (which is true more often than not). He tells his followers that no honest person would have covered the story in the first place. Its truth and relevance are immaterial; it has no right to exist.
And
Trump’s victory in the US has emboldened the worst people in Britain, and the BBC faces constant attacks from his imitators. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, have formed a suitably Marxist cult of personality around their leader. Their propagandists have convinced them that bad news about Labour is fake news concocted by corrupt journalists. So aggressive did their anger become that the BBC had to hire bodyguards to protect its political editor at Labour’s last national conference.
I hope some of you will get what I'm driving at, and that the article's value isn't about Brexit at all but a systematic failure in journalism which is affecting many areas of journalism and in turn holding people properly to account.