BBC Bias

I am surprised that this paper (in pdf) has not received  more coverage since its publication in 2016. Even though lead authors were Cardiff University academics, BBC Wales did not publicise it much at the time.

It tends to confirm my feeling that the corporation is biased towards the big battalions, not prepared to treat news sources on their merits. It took more stuff from Labour than the Conservatives in 2007, a ratio that was reversed in 2012. It took far less from Liberal Democrats than either in both years, though rather more in 2007 when the Lib Dems were on an upswing. There is also sadly support for my contention that the BBC did not keep the average viewer and listener informed about EU matters, which led to the ignorance which Banks, Farage and co. played on in the 2016 referendum campaign.

Thanks to Simon Wren-Lewis for the link, who writes in his blog today:

those ruling us in the UK do not really know what they are doing [but they] are not fools without any purpose. Brexit is a triumph of the heart over the head. They know what they want, and just do not care too much about the damage it will do. But the ‘misunderstanding’ by Brexiters over what they signed up to in December 2017 that persisted for weeks shows how dangerous not paying much attention to facts (in this case the words of an agreement) can be. Theresa May wasted at least a year completely misunderstanding the EU, and firing those in government that did. Perhaps her biggest act of ignoring the obvious was embarking on the Article 50 process without any prior discussion of what was possible and what was not, which as many people noted at the time was a sure way of ensuring the EU got pretty well what it wanted. If you do not believe all this, read Chris Grey here.