Issue May-1
 

Who has a lease on the truth?

Let's be clear right from the start.

We are biased. We have an agenda. Our aim to promote anything and everything that could bring our beloved England back to its Anglo-Saxon values. Our hero is Alfred the great who kicked the last remnants of foreigners whom wanted to rule us out and created the Kingdom of Wessex which became England.

Complete opposite to Starmer, who will never be great, who would like to hand over the keys to the white cliffs of Dover to unelected and equally treacherous lawyers and civil servants on the other side of "our" channel.

To hell with the French who still insist on calling it La Manche (Sleeve) and the Germans plagiarists who call "Ärmelkanal" which also means sleeve. it is and will remain the "English Channel".

Back to the story.

It appears that a great many media outlets are now trying to claim they have a lease on the truth. Take the BBC. They now have "In Depth" suggesting that their take on the world is more truthful and unbiased than the rest. Lets take the article "Can tUK afford to save British Steel and can it afford not to? Author is well known and famously biased Laura Kuenssberg. Does she have a deeper "in depth" knowledge of steel making, a physics expert, a brilliant economist? We will leave it to our readers to answer that one.

Faisal Islam's report "Trump has turned his back on the foundation of US economic might - the fallout will be messy" does at least come from someone with a degree of economics knowledge, but on reading the article it is just another journalistic opinion. Why not be honest and call it an opinion column?

But it is not just the BBC that is riding the wave of "we are giving you the truth".

There is an organisation which calls itself "freedom" house. Sounds absolutely terrific. Must be somebody defending our basic rights. According to one study, Freedom House's rankings "overemphasise the more formal aspects of democracy while failing to capture the informal but real power relations and pathways of influence ... and frequently lead to de facto deviations from democracy." States can therefore "look formally liberal-democratic but might be rather illiberal in their actual workings. This incredible monster even has the audacity to give individual countries scores. To be fair they have severely downrated the UK Civil Liberties score from "Free" to 53 out of 60.

FactCheck.org takes the biscuit for using its name to boost its self opinionated unbiased value. On the other hand the mediaBias website does show them as politically unattached and that they publish the names of anybody that donates more than $1000 to their cause. Fortunately for us is that their major bias is that they seem to be uninterested in any issues outside the United States.

Back to the UK take a look at the BBC series called "Verify".

If there was ever a self opinionated fact checker you need to look no further. The title alone is narcissistic.

Sky news is now linked to the "Trust Project". They publish a list of trust features in an effort to display their neutrality. One needs to go deeper into the "Trust Project" to see what is behind it and more important who funds it. The Trust Project was formed by a journalist: Sally Lehrman who according to her CV has a solid journalistic background. What put us off is the continuing list "award winning" entries in her details.

Always something to be sceptical of although in many cases the list does say where the accolades came from. For example Robert Wood Johnson Award. Robert who?

To be fair it does seem that Sally has made an attempt to prove an unbiased interest in the news and reporting but then the list of sponsors:

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark's Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Markkula Foundation and Facebook.

You need to be more than deluded to believe that google and facebook are more interested in the truth than maintaining a clean sheet image.

Fairly new to the "I am holier than though" crowd is Ground News. They started up in 2018, founded by Harleen Kaur, and "award-winning" app developer Sukh Singh. "Award winning" is always a term to make you cautious. Who were the awards from?

Harleen Kaur is according to her own words an ex-Nasa engineer but we have not been able to confirm this. Being a Nasa Engineer is probably not the proven way into journalism but it sounds good.

According to en.everybodywiki.com Ground News is a news aggregator created and owned by Snapwise Inc. Note the term aggregator which has absolutely nothing to do with selection by validity.

They make it look as though they are unbiased by publishing multiple headlines from various sources on the same issue. What you as a reader won't see is which reports they don't include and the algorithm which decides on the rankings.

Very much like the BBC, we reported on this some time ago, which we referred to as "lying by omission". Also their left, centre, right evaluation seems mainly to be copied from the Media Bias website but not quite as detailed. Which is probably why they position BBC News as centre which is about as far from the truth as you can get.

More serious though: Quoting from another source with acknowledgment is fair, reprinting entire articles is not. Looks like there may be serious copyright issues here.
London: 20. April 2025: -pw-
Source: WessexTimes
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect WessexTimes editorial stance.

 
   
 
 
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