Battling bias on the BBC is much more difficult than in the corporate press because the corporation portrays itself as providing balance.

Coverage of economics and business is subject to more spin than any other area - and the BBC seems to fall for it all the time.

So there can be little surprise that BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders is off to work for the US's largest bank JP Morgan.

Is this by any chance the same JP Morgan managed by Jamie Dimon, who met US regulators following investigations into whether it had misled investors?

Is the the same JP Morgan that agreed to pay $920 million to settle charges relating to the "London Whale" trading scandal?

And in 2011, did it not settle similar charges relating to misleading investors about mortgage-backed securities with the securities and exchange commission?

Buying up Flanders's "balance" and PR skills may be a good move.

I also see that after his stroke Andrew Marr is back to butter up politicians. His bias is even more difficult to combat as his history films and books are promoted by the entire BBC machine, with its incredible reach as a broadcaster and publisher giving them tremendous authority.

I rarely agree with Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph, but when he wrote that Marr's History of Modern Britain was "ignorant and patronising," I had to let out a little cheer.

The book's publishers had to pay out a "significant sum" in damages to Erin Pizzey after the book mistakenly linked her to the 1970s terror group the Angry Brigade. Macmillan pulped thousands of copies and issued an "urgent" stock recall notice, citing legal reasons.

The recent BBC television documentary on the history of shopping, presented by business editor Robert Peston, was scarcely better. This is what Time Out calls history "written by the winners."

There was little or no analysis of the consequences of some of the changes we have seen on the high street with Peston.

Let me just give you a few examples of how, by getting the facts wrong, he distorts the true history of the period he describes.

First his assertion that Marks and Spencer was the first large-scale retailer to launch its own brand.

The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) was making own-brand products in 1876, Crumpsall Biscuits being the first. Marks and Spencer's was not formed until 1894.

He suggested that M&S was the first to introduce own-branded goods to escape retail price maintenance.

The CWS did this far earlier using its Pelaw's Pharmaceutical Works. In 1906 a group of patent medicine manufacturers decided to boycott co-op stores for paying a dividend on their products, which they saw as a price cut rather than the return of profits to members.

The CWS responded by expanding the output from their Pelaw Drug and Dry Saltery Works, founded in 1902, thereby producing their own medicines to fight the boycott. This process was repeated with the famous Defiant Radios in 1933.

Dixons was featured in Peston's show for its innovation as a photographic retailer in the 1960s.

The CWS had been selling cameras and photographic supplies to co-operatives through its Manchester, Newcastle, and London operations in the 1920s, and on a national basis from 1931.

By 1933 the CWS was producing and marketing its own brand of photographic film.

He also claimed that Sainsbury's opened Britain's first self-service store in Croydon in 1950.

This can only be true if you ignore the first purpose built Co-op Self-Service store opened by Portsea Island Society in 1948 and that there had been self-service departments within London Society stores even earlier.

The point is that you do not need competition and free markets to generate retail innovation.

But this does not fit the story, so it gets ignored.

These may appear to be minor errors.

But this is part of systematic blind spot on the role of co-operatives in our history.

The systematic ignoring of the positive role of trade unions and co-operatives in our past helps to deny us a possible role in the future. It can't go unchallenged.