[ArchieLeach]

The BBC is quite subtle. It's not fake news and what they report is factual, but the choice of what facts to report makes it crystal clear that they do have an agenda.

A current example: Hongkong. They have headline reporting every time there is a protest while other protests in other countries, and arguably much more significant protests, barely get a mention. This is not a coincidence.

Edit: A lot of the replies to this comment try to rationalise. This is being willfully blind.

Noam Chomsky has written a lot about the issue of raltive importance of reporting in order to manipulate public opinion. This is exactly what is happening because it should be obvious to everyone that there is a campaign against China ongoing.

[have_faith]

Hong Kong is a very recent former British colony, the nature of the protests are unique and there's a large public interest in the Hong Kong protests specifically. This doesn't mean the BBC isn't biased, but the number of articles isn't an indication of bias in the way that people would normally use the term I think. How are you measuring the significance of protests against each other to figure out which deserve more or less attention?

[blaser-waffle]

Bingo. HK was a colony and there are a lot of British citizens who became that way via that colonial dominion. It's more relevant to the UK than, say, protests in Peru.

[Zenst]

Hasn't the HongKong protests been going on for a while and with changing dynamics in protests and response. BBC reported many protests, is there one in particular that should of been more reported upon that springs to mind - for me, nope.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=protests

Sure choice of facts and style can and does show a middle-left bias, but as for agenda. If it is that crystal clear, then what is it!

I will say though, the trend of media outlets to report opinions of interviewers as news and for the populus to take those avenues of news and run with them as facts, has been something that plays out upon social media. This then as we have seen, is used by news outlets as sources of news (ala Tweets have becomes news sources now). This does create the potential for massive feedback loops. But then, no media outlet seems immune to that.

[mschuster91]

> A current example: Hongkong. They have headline reporting every time there is a protest while other protests in other countries, and arguably much more significant protests, barely get a mention. This is not a coincidence.

Hong Kong is a former British colony with international importance, Chile is not.

[ivankolev]

Everyone has an agenda, news and comments are product of people and people are inherently subjective. Moreover, much of written history, as the adage go, is documented by the victors. And even if you try to take it on you to read from broader sources and rank them by some kind of elusive objective reputation, you are still biased in trying to reconsile them with your prior system of belief about how world works.

I think it is still better to have access to the other point of view, and as one frenchman once said, even if you don't agree with a point of view, you should defend the right to be able to say it.

[pomeabroad]

Are any of the other countries with significant protests also colonies of the UK until recent decades? The HK-UK history clearly influences the significance of that event for the BBC’s audience.

Do you have other examples?

[joosters]

Can you give a recent example of a significant protest that lacks a BBC news story?

[ArchieLeach]

I haven't said that they are not reported. It's the relative importance given that is obvious.

150+ people have died in Iraq over the last month during wide scale protests. There is an article on this on the BBC's website.

On the other hand, there is almost live coverage with embedded journalists as headline news every time a protester throws something at the HK police, or every time the HK police throws a teargas canister at protesters.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Iraq is not a former British colony, so unfortunately it's of limited interest to British people.

[selimthegrim]

You must be joking. Who ran things there before 1936-41? Who built the airbase at Habbaniyah and was gassing people way before Saddam?

[GoblinSlayer]

>raltive importance of reporting in order to manipulate public opinion.

Well, state your bias? Why did you formulate it as "against China" and not "for people of Hongkong"?