I’ve developed a small domestic ritual when it comes to UK news. If something is breaking, I go to Sky News. If I want to know whether it’s actually true, I wait for BBC.
That is not a moral judgement. It is a workflow.
Sky is like the bloke who shouts “Fire!” the moment he smells smoke. The BBC is the chap who checks whether it’s the toaster before ringing the brigade. One is fast, the other cautious. Both have a role. The mistake is thinking speed and accuracy are the same thing.
We live in an age where “breaking” has become theatre. Red banners. Urgent tones. Instant outrage. Within minutes, half the country has decided who is villain and who is victim. The difficulty is that in the first hour of any big story, facts are fluid. Context is missing. Motives are guessed at.
Even something like the current lawsuit from Donald Trump against the BBC over a Panorama edit is a neat illustration. It arrives with a ten billion dollar headline and predictable outrage. The slower reality is procedural: jurisdictional arguments, motions to dismiss, and the possibility that it may be thrown out for a number of reasons. Not least because claiming reputational and commercial harm opens the door to financial disclosure, something Mr Trump has historically treated as a guarded state secret. The bang is immediate. The substance is incremental.
Sky will tell you what is being reported. The BBC will tell you what it is prepared to stand behind.
And here is the uncomfortable truth. Caution now looks like bias to people who have already chosen their conclusion. If the BBC does not instantly frame a story in the way someone prefers, it must, in their eyes, be suppressing something. If it waits for confirmation, it must be dragging its feet.
No comments:
Post a Comment