At the Cheltenham Book Festival, Robert Peston has been discussing why the BBC was biased in favour of Leave.
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He was asked whether the BBC could be blamed for Brexit. He laughed at the suggestion but went on to criticise its coverage. “The problem with the BBC, during the campaign, it put people on with diametrically opposed views and didn’t give their viewers and listeners any help in assessing which one was the loony and which one was the genius,” he said.
“I do think that they went through a period of just not being confident enough. Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people one of whom says the world is flat and the other one says the world is round. That is not balanced, impartial journalism.”...
He said impartial journalism was about “weighing the evidence and saying on the balance of probabilities … this is the truth. It is the role of a journalist to say, ‘we’ve got these two contradictory arguments, I’m now going to advise all of you which is likely to be closer to the truth.’”
Peston said he consistently said on ITV News that leaving the EU would make the UK poorer. “Not massively poorer. I thought the Project Fear bit of the government’s campaign was overdone. But poorer.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...endum-campaign