The makings of a post-factual press: How the BBC’s obsession with “balance” abandoned evidence-based argument in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

“For me,” writes Professor John van Reenen, formerly of the LSE, now at MIT and one of the economists thus likened by Gove to an antisemitic, government-owned Nazi, “it simply capped off a frankly disgusting campaign, one where the Leave side simply impugned the motives of ‘the experts’ rather than seriously engaging with the substance of the economic debate.”

But the Leave side might not have got away with this ugliness, nor Remain with prattling about imminent apocalypse, had not the BBC, as well as enabling an often asinine level of argument, allowed its obsession with balance to dictate that any carefully argued observation on Brexit, deserving of analysis, be promptly followed by its formal opponent’s unsubstantiated bluster. [...]

As with climate change, implicit in extreme BBC impartiality is a distinctly un-BBC like, post-truth proposal that, since all opinions merit equal coverage, the public might as well give up on evidence-based argument. So much was plainly stated by Today’s Nick Robinson when he assured voters who were, in huge numbers, seeking information from the BBC that the debate was all “claims and counterclaims”, “guesswork”. “No journalist,” he declared, “no pundit, no expert can resolve these questions for you.”