Last November, “The Tories” (as the BBC almost always calls Conservatives – one ‘T’ word that’s not a problem for the Beeboids) complained officially, along with many viewers, about a particularly dodgy item on Newsnight. Peter Barron, Editor of Newsnight, wrote a rebuttal article on NewsWatch, headlined:
Howard special ‘not staged’
Moving forward to August 2005, having investigated itself (no conflict of interest there then), the BBC decided that it was mostly blameless on the main points of the complaint, and, to celebrate, published two articles, one in their main Politics section:
BBC dismisses Howard complaints
…complete with a specially selected photo of Michael Howard (again!) and a typically smug Paxman, and another in NewsWatch, with the spectacularly objective headline:
Tory Newsnight gripe rejected
Although there’s plenty of scope for giving the above articles a thorough fisking in their own right, let us press on with comparing and contrasting the BBC’s scrupulously impartial coverage of itself.
Last week, having investigated itself again following a complaint from a listener, the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit upheld the complaint about coverage of the Conservatives, finding that “the significance of the survey had been exaggerated in the bulletin”.
Newswatch reported this decision last Friday, though, strangely enough, with much less gusto than they covered the earlier Newsnight complaint:
Complaints upheld
How bland and unimaginative! It gets worse though, not only did they tack on another upheld complaint (about coverage of landless Brazilians) to the same story, they immediately pushed the Complaints upheld story down the running order by filling the top position with a rather spurious article, A question of sports, about the BBC’s coverage of sport in news bulletins, which could have been published at any other time, and is hardly a lead story anyway.
Finally, just to make sure the upholding of a complaint about coverage of the Conservatives was properly buried, they illustrated the story headline on the NewsWatch page with a picture of a toothless Brazilian (either that or it was another BBC photoshop special of Howard!). The same stunt was pulled in the even more off-the-beaten-track Notes section of NewsWatch – with a picture of more Brazilians, though the spurious A question of sports story was placed second at least.
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It’s reassuring to know that the BBC is as impartial in covering itself as it is when covering everything else!