There is a thing readers sometimes say to comfort journalists who come under fire in this angry new digital age. “Don’t worry,” they tell us. “If you are annoying everybody you must be doing your jobs right.”

I wish this was true. It is not. The reality? News media outlets are going to get it in the neck from all sides whether they are good, bad or, as is often the case, indifferent.

Just take BBC News. This is one of the biggest newsgathering machines in the world with something like 2000 journalists filling five times as much airtime as there are hours in a day.

Now I think there is a problem giving a snap judgment on anything quite so big as the BBC. You’re bound to be wrong. Why? Because it makes no sense to generalise about the output of a news organisation with more foreign correspondents than there are countries.

And yet generalise is what so many critics do. I would like to give you a full list of groups who have a gripe with “BBC bias”. I am no going to, though. That is because the editor needs the rest of today’s Herald for other news.

The BBC is currently “biased” against the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, Leave, Remain, Israel, Muslims, Russia, America, India, China, Iran, gays, Rangers, and Catholics. In the interests of balance (about which more later), I had better report that the same organisation is also accused of being biased for many of the very same groups.

The BBC like the rest of the news media is flooded with routine allegations that news judgments are based on one prejudice or another. All that means is that editors waste time batting away groundless partisan claims while their very many real problems - and mistakes - go unaddressed or even unnoticed.

Bias. This funny wee word is often fired at newspapers which are partisan, such as The Herald’s pro-independence sister paper The National or the staunchly pro-unionist Daily Mail. But I think some people have forgotten what “bias” means. Having a position does not make you “biased”; having a prejudice does. The Oxford Dictionary clarifies further: a bias is a prejudice against a group “especially in a way considered to be unfair”.

A free press means newspapers are free to be partisan - or not to be. Yet we should never be biased - or “unfair”. And we should definitely not be inaccurate (even if, being human, we sometimes are)

But the BBC is not allowed to be partisan, it has to provide “balance” while still trying to be accurate. And this is where things really have got tricky of late.

Let’s say a BBC flagship morning radio show is covering climate change. Does it need to balance the essentially undisputed science that global warming is human-made? Sometimes it appears to think so.

David Cameron has not helped. The former prime minister called two referendums, one on Scottish independence and another on Brexit. Does all of Britain’s politics or news neatly fit in to two crude binary choices of Yes and No, Leave and Remain? Of course not.

But balance meant the BBC had to pigeonhole so much of its output in to these boxes. That , I think, gave a leg up to the underdogs in both votes. The SNP, for example, used to get one bum on a sofa filled with four or five party representatives. But for the 2014 referendum Yes and No voices got equal say, by law. That did not mean every newspaper review on rolling news or UK-wide show was able to achieve real balance on Scottish-only constitutional debate. Far from it.

Such 180-degree polarisation might sound great for a balance-based broadcaster. But is it? The whole concept of balance depends on everyone agreeing on a set of rules, on some oh-so-British-sounding sense of “fair play”. But what if one side just will not play by the book? What about a Donald Trump?