One way or the other, everyone’s biased on this one: BBC Worldwide wants an ad-supported BBC.com site, so will twist the user surveys the way it wants to; meanwhile, public-funding apologists (including some journalists covering the story) will report on it to set the commercial moves in a negative light. This Guardian story tries to expose the former, while hinting at its bent at the latter.

The story says that BBC did research in late 2005 and 2006 in various U.S. cities and found that BBC.com users “unequivocally” believed advertising would reduce their trust in the BBC brand…but it chose to ignore these and did more research later whose results were more positive about the likely response to ads on the international version of its website. Or so the story says. And BBC’s own resistance about releasing these results doesn’t help. BBC said a wider study that concluded that advertising on BBC.com would not damage the BBC brand.