The editor of Scotland's brand new BBC news programme has dramatically insisted that she will defend the BBC from claims of anti-independence bias "until my dying day".
Hayley Valentine, who spent the last year working on BBC Scotland's The Nine ahead of the new channel launch tonight, previously worked on programmes like Question Time ahead of the independence referendum.
She claims she doesn't know “a single journalist who brought any bias to work with them”, though she did accept that the BBC has "trust issues" following its coverage of the 2014 poll, even though she believes they have been "overplayed" by critics.
Valentine said: “I was involved in our referendum programming. I will defend it to accusations of bias until my dying day.
“I’m not saying the BBC or any other broadcaster was perfect. It was a tricky time, but we were all doing the best we could."
Opionion polling after the No vote in 2014 found that a third of audiences in Scotland believed the BBC's output had had a bias against independence. It also revealed that Scots were more unhappy about the broadcaster's output than anywhere else in the UK.
Since the beginning of devolution in 1999, news and politics output broadcast in Scotland has often covered issues such as health and education that had no bearing to Scottish policy, instead focusing on events in England.
The former head of news at BBC Radio 5 Live said that despite criticism, the BBC is "still trusted".
She said: “The public looks at lot more sceptically at journalism than it potentially did ten years ago.
“To be trusted, you have to give people things that they want and have a need for, and stories that they wouldn’t otherwise be told. Our remit is to serve the audience better, ask questions that people want asked, explore bits of Scottish life that aren’t currently being explored and reflect their lives back at that them. That will get people to like and trust our programme. It can do a lot to make people feel that we are for them and of them.”
Prior to being appointed as editor of The Nine, Valentine was the executive editor and producer of Question Time.
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