[dofm]

The cheapest? You’re not British are you! ;-)

The BBC’s arts coverage outright humbles the Times and has for decades. (Also better obituary writers IMO, but YMMV). It’s absolutely the BBC I would come to, to read about Hockney, not a Murdoch newspaper.

But inexpensive they are not.

Sam Woodhouse is a senior BBC journalist and that article includes footage from an outstanding BBC arts programme interview by another senior journalist, Katie Razzall.

Hopefully the BBC will interview one of their own greats, Melvyn Bragg, about him. Bragg and Hockney were friends for half a century.

[cf100clunk]

> The BBC’s arts coverage outright humbles the Times

The Guardian's coverage of music and arts culture is also worthy of top billing:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/12/artist-...

[reaperducer]

The BBC’s arts coverage

The link you provided was not to the BBC's arts coverage. It was to a BBC News article, again written by a generalist. The BBC does great things with the arts. I have been listening to BBC on shortwave since before you were born, and know it very often excels in that area. But this is not that. You are comparing two different things.

not a Murdoch newspaper.

The New York Times is not a Murdoch paper. That you believe this shows you know very little about the New York Times.

But inexpensive they are not.

Reading the article you linked to costs precisely $0.00 (£0). Reading the article from the Times costs money. Again, you are conflating the BBC as a whole with the BBC News web site.

Hopefully

Yes, hopefully. But that's not what we're discussing here. We're discussing the merits of the link you posted versus the link that was submitted.

In the eight days you have been on HN, your comment history shows that you have very strong opinions about the press. Opinions that are often equally wrong. That topic has been almost your entire comment history. I recommend you read and listen to other people more.

[dofm]

Oh, I made a tiredness error re: the NY Times, yes, sorry. (I have some memory issues, rather than being an idiot; the Times of London is Murdoch). In what was otherwise a simple and good-natured defence of the BBC on a topic they are quite good at.

For reference, I did not post the BBC link. That was someone else, wasn't it?

What the heck is the rest of this personal character demolition you are doing?

(Absolutely certain I haven't mostly been talking about the press, as it goes.)

Thanks for, er, the invasively rude "welcome". I am actually not that new to HN at all, so much as restarting after a long break from it. But you have fully reminded me why I put an old account beyond my own use so I couldn't continue to use it.

So maybe I will go again.

[beedeebeedee]

Stick around. The forum has some problems (like the confidently wrong commenter above), and needs curious, good faith folk to enliven the discussion.

[dofm]

Thank you.

The reason I finally decided to come back was because I saw enough good discussions about local LLMs, that I am using to teach myself some AI stuff, that is the best place to quickly ask and to find people who can explain things without me bothering developers unnecessarily.

HN has always been a good place to ask the side questions you know it's impolite to ask on a Github issue!

[bookofjoe]

"... Murdoch newspaper." ?

Perhaps you're referencing the New York Post rather than the Times.

[dofm]

This was a tiredness/bad short term memory error because I am British and the comment I referred to just said “the Times”. I do in fact know that the NYT is not Murdoch; the Times (of London) is.

My declining brain jumped the tracks.

FWIW my comment still seems pretty accurate even applied to the NYT. The NYT is without a doubt the better publication to share the short moniker, don’t get me wrong. For all its many contemporary faults, it’s the world’s greatest newspaper. But the BBC’s arts coverage puts it in the shade.

[Angostura]

Or perhaps they know it has been owned by News Corp since 1981 - Murdoch owned

[beedeebeedee]

The Times of London