Next week the BBC will announce major cuts – around £80m – to its news operation, of which the axing of the much-admired Victoria Derbyshire show is a mere foretaste. Given that a review of the BBC charter gets under way in 2022, none of this bodes well. For what quickly becomes clear is that in today’s US, there are Fox News facts and MSNBC facts; red-state facts and blue-state facts; facts from the right and facts from the left. And yet trust remains higher for the BBC than it does for the rest of journalism, including the upmarket papers. But it’s the BBC that established the norm, setting the pursuit of factual objectivity as the broadcasting standard.

Source: The Guardian January 24, 2020 17:45 UTC