It’s always interesting to make the news.

But the BBC man seems a little confused.

Interestingly, the Guardian report of Robinson’s comments – due to be made tonight at the first Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture – completely omits the ostensible point of the speech, but it is mentioned in the Press Gazette’s coverage:

Apparently he’ll tell attendees that “the BBC should respond by adopting a mission to engage with those who do not treat news bulletins as ‘appointments to view’, those who don’t trust what they’re told; and those who crave the tools to separate what is true and what is important from the torrent of half-facts and opinion, prejudice and propaganda, which risks overwhelming us all.”

And it’s hard to argue with that. The state broadcaster does indeed have a big trust problem amid large sections of the electorate – most notably Scottish nationalists and Jeremy Corbyn supporters – and for good reason. Some honest dialogue with its critics would be a constructive step.

The Gazette goes on to note that:

And that’s true too. Three of this site’s top 10 most-read articles of all time, including the #1 and #2, are about the BBC, and one of them concerns Robinson himself, over a broadcast which became the focus of great anger from Yes supporters and over which he eventually expressed “regret” almost a year later. (After first sneering about it on an episode of Have I Got News For You.)

What he categorically DIDN’T do was apologise to Salmond over telling a blatant lie about him, despite his claims to that effect earlier today.

His 2015 “apology” in fact saw him refuse to acknowledge the lie – shrugging it off as a mere poor choice of words and blaming TV viewers for misinterpreting them – and to accuse Salmond of “an utterly calculated attempt to put pressure on [the BBC] the week before the referendum” while likening a peaceful anti-BBC protest in Glasgow to “something out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia”. Doesn’t sound very sorry, does it?

But let’s put all that to one side for a moment. Because Robinson’s idea of “engaging” with those who don’t trust the BBC is to, in the next breath, dismiss them as sinister and paranoid conspiracy nutters trying to bully and discredit honest journalists.

Websites can only convince people to disbelieve the news when they can prove, on a regular basis, that it’s not telling the truth. Nobody listens to a ranting loony with no evidence. If we’d just claimed Nick Robinson lied about Alex Salmond not giving him an answer, the post wouldn’t have been read hundreds of thousands of times. It was because we incontrovertibly SHOWED them him doing it that it made people angry.

It’s precisely this sort of commitment to hard journalistic evidence that, in Robinson’s own words, gives readers “the tools to separate what is true and what is important from the torrent of half-facts and opinion“. We retain trust where the BBC has lost it because we don’t lie to people, and unlike them we link to the sources for all our claims.

This site wears the badge of “partisan” proudly. We’ve never pretended to be neutral, never claimed to be balanced in our view of our subject, and certainly no more so than newspapers are. Neither they nor we have any obligation to be so.

But we and others only exist because the organisation which IS bound by a charter to be impartial has repeatedly failed dismally in its legal and professional duty to present both sides of a debate fairly and equally, and thereby created a demand for someone else to provide balance by filling in the gap on one of the sides.

Nor do we “live in a social media bubble”. Would that we did. We live in a world where we’re assailed by a torrent of one-sided propaganda from our opponents every single day whenever we turn on the TV or the radio or walk into a newsagents, against which we’ve learned we can’t rely on the “impartial” national broadcaster to give us a voice.

The BBC instead devotes hours of TV and radio airtime every week to “reviewing the papers”, a practice which by its intrinsic nature and design attributes massively undue weight and prominence to a print media that’s right-wing and 97% anti-independence, while actively excluding the online arena where those with other views – and without the power and reach of billionaire media moguls – are forced to congregate.

(And it does so despite many of the newspapers it relentlessly promotes still having far smaller readerships than sites like this one, even with those advantages.)

But nevertheless, we welcome Nick Robinson’s call for “engagement”. We look forward to seeing some of the more popular websites appearing on “The Papers” on a nightly basis, and to their editors being asked, in the interests of genuine balance, to provide regular comment and analysis alongside those from equally-partisan newspapers like the Telegraph and Sun and Daily Record and Guardian.

(Because the idea that Wings, or The Canary or Skwawkbox or Evolve Politics, is any more biased than the Daily Mail or the Express or Times is self-evidently ludicrous.)

We’re just not going to hold our breath, that’s all.