Say I just want the news. Just say. What do I get from this headline that’s been sitting on BBC world news website all night, and remains at the time of this posting?
I’m not going to regale you with the various forms that the BBC article on the local elections has taken through the night. After a long period of doing Labour’s damage limitation exercise for them (…not as bad as expected, holding up against the “Toriess” and the “Plaid”…) it’s taken a shape of more realism. But honestly, at no point was there not the situation that both Labour and the Lib Dems were losing numerically, while the Conservative Party were winning consistently. How we read the results is one thing. To turn them back to front a negation of the news.
Update 5.45 GMT
There’s a remarkable slant now to the BBC’s coverage. The main report now has as its first paragraph this:
“Tony Blair has insisted Labour has a “good springboard” to win the next general election, despite suffering big losses in Scotland, England and Wales.”
When the results show this:
“CON 839 4843 37 155
LAB -460 1736 -8 31
LD -246 1973 -5 22
OTH -129 1039 0 5
NOC – – -24 80″
Something amiss in the BBC’s intro (and headline, still)? Well, how about a wee mention for the only party listed in positive figures, whose figures are very positive? Why the focus on lame duck Blair? (clearing the decks for Gordon, perhaps, using the available scapegoat).
The first mention of the Conservatives is also unbelievably offhand and almost oblique:
“Mr Blair said the predicted “rout” had not happened, but Tory David Cameron called their results “stunning”.”
So, not even dignified by the term “leader”.
This has all the hallmarks of a mourning newsroom.
And that’s not bias, is it now?
Meanwhile, Iain Dale (and friends) reacts to the Beeb’s bias.
Anon
True story –
Once was the time when I listened to the Today programme every day.
Their bias got so bad I threw one of my radios across the room and broke it.
I have not listened to the Toady programme since.
Exactly my point, bilingual does not mean it is only a welsh language party.
I didn’t say it was. One would think however that Plaid’s members would share one of their basic declared aims.
For the record I do not support plaid cymru, I live in England and I am from mixed welsh and english blood.
From my annual trips to Wales I know people born and bred there who don’t speak Welsh and have no interest in doing so. I also know people, some quite young, who speak Welsh as a first language.
We do not have this type of misconception re scottish or even irish nationalists.
BaggieJonathan | 05.05.07 – 10:51 am
But is it a misconception? Do Scottish or Irish nationalist parties have a policy on promoting Gaelic such as the Welsh do? I really don’t know and haven’t given it a thought until now.
Front page of Super Soaraway Times, Saturday 5th May:
LABOUR’S ELECTION CALAMITY
Obviously a different election to the one that Al-BBC have been covering.
Matthew Parris shows his irritation with the BBC (despite being one of their favourites).
Super Thursday – Labour’s springboard to calamity
It is always possible for party spin-doctors to spread the idea that they were braced for something even worse; that old trick should fool nobody, though elements within the BBC appear to have been taken in. To register some 27 per cent support nationally, when your principal challengers are registering around 40 per cent, to hear your First Minister in once-impregnable Wales declare that “we haven’t won but we haven’t exactly lost”, to be chased out of councils across those swaths of England that Ms Blears would no doubt write off as “middle class” • to be chased even out of Birmingham • is dismal.
…
Across those parts of northern England where they want to conquer new territory their advance has been patchy, with some disappointments and some encouraging successes; but if I hear one more BBC voice announcing that the Conservative Party “haven’t got a single seat in Manchester or Liverpool” I shall scream. If “Manchester” means the city • a small area with quite a small population • then it’s true there are no Tory seats, but citadels like that would only tumble in a landslide. All around “Manchester” the Conservative Party is on the advance. And Liverpool is by no means an example of “the kind of place where the Tories need to make inroads”. It isn’t; they won’t; and that doesn’t really matter.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article1749999.ece
Iain Dale spots BBC ‘sloppy’ mistake – strange how this sloppiness reveals the beeboid mindset/wish fulfilment.
Ten O’Clock News Gives Incorrect Welsh Result
The Ten O’Clock News on the BBC just carried the results of the elections today. It had some graphics which purported to show us that the Conservatives won twelve seats in the Welsh Assembly elections, which was billed as NO CHANGE. Incorrect. It was an increase of one. Sloppy.
Someone on an earlier thread said that you know when JR’s rattled when he attempts to strike back with a long list of irrelevant BBC webstories. That’s not strictly true. He does that on the minor, hair-splitting points (single/lone parent springs to mind). It’s usually when he fails to make any comment that you know he’s rolled over…
bob
Very true. JR seems to comment at length sometimes but always with so much use of smoke and mirrors that we are unable to work out sometimes what point he is trying to make.
Currently studying Animal Farm to teach my S4 class next term and I think JR is the equivalent of Squealer…. to the BBCs Napoleon!
When I went to bed on the 3rd the council in my area comprised of 27 Dim Libs, 26 Conservatives and 4 Independent.
When I woke up on the 4th the council comprised of 3 Dim Libs, 51 Conservatives and 3 Independent. (We don’t do labour in this area)
Listening to the BBC it’s obvious that the Conservatives will have to do a lot better next time.
We’ll be waking up one sunny May morning in 2010 to a landslide Tory victory with BBC headlines – Tories fail to seize Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. The widely predicted Labour meltdown didn’t materialise.
If we do get that landslide then I would hope that Cameron opts for some real tory policies rather than his usual green’n’tax-em twaddle. I’m living in the hope that it’s all a smokescreen to get the BBC off his back and that he’s secretly a free-market, small state tory.
Everyone has fantasies… 🙂
Onward and upward.
Anyone noticed the following oddity on the BBC News website.
On the Wales and Scotland pages the election results are still on the frontpage in their nice big box, etc.
On the England page they are nowhere to be seen? No box, no link, no nothing.
And all this while the English results are not finished yet and the Welsh and Scottish ones are.
The first act of the next Tory government should be to privatise the BBC, and without prior notice.
This would be the broadcasting equivalent of Gordon Brown handing over to the Bank of England the power to set interest rates. That wasn’t specifically in Labour’s 1997 election manifesto, and so the same would apply in this case.
Nice idea sandown, shame that boy dave has his nose up the beeb’s a*se though!
He’s not up the BBC’s are you idiot, but they are the most powerful media organisation in Britian and they look for any exuse to kick the shit out of the Tories why the hell make it any worse for yourself?
He’s been a very elusive target so far, unlike Hague. IDS and Howard, who were chewed up and spat out by the NuLab media machine(led by he BBC)
I wish it was practical to privatise the Beeb, but the problem with the £3bn licence fee, is that the whole of broadcasting is reliant on it in some way or another, not just the Beeb.
If the alternative was a commercialised broadcaster with advertising and subscriptions, that would pose too much of a threat to existing commercial TV and radio. The Beeb would be competing for ever dwindling advertising revenues with the likes of ITV/C4/C5 (who are struggling as it is). If the BBC was to be affected in isolation, then scrapping the Licence fee would have to be carefully considered by a future Conservative government, But if commercialisation is the alternative, they would be effectively causing massive change in the whole of broadcasting and would damage existing commercial interests. I would argue that TV and radio need to be re-structured, in that case and that the £3bn public subsidy of the licence fee, has been propping up an inefficient bloated industry for too long. The trouble is that, no government would risk upsetting the entire broadcasting establishment and get a load of grief from the News Int. press as well.
A future Conservative government my think that they got elected therefore, the anti-Tory bias of the Beeb isn’t that important, so why rock the boat and risk the anger of nearly all the mass media? And looking at ITV and Sky, NuLab sympathisers still dominate in commercial broadcast news output so commercialisation is no guarantee of less anti-Conservative propaganda.
But, there may be an alternative, What would be more feasible is that the licence fee could be cut drastically but no commercialisation of the BBC’s interests, instead they would be forced to contract and therefore lessen their influence and become more of a minority public service broadcaster, still run by a bunch of pinkos, but with a lot less influence and public money, and allow the existing commercial channels to pick up anything that the BBC cannot afford anymore. The BBC could be gradually wound-down. They will have fit and try to destroy the Tory party, but what’s new!
To make sure that the British public have an alternative to the liberal/left-wing consensus in Broadcast news, relax the control of the Gardianistas of Ofcom and allow for a new national news channel dedicated to a more representative agenda i.e. Not run by socialists and Labour-party sympathisers. Let people have a genuine choice, the way they do with newspapers. I suspect that type of channel would prove very popular and attract the middle-class. non-Guardian reading viewers that still watch BBC news.
Thanks for the warm response Geezer.
I was refering to this item:
Cameron “Another institution we can all be proud of is the BBC. The British Broadcasting Corporation was founded by a Scotsman and is the most prestigious broadcaster on earth. People around the world tune into the BBC for news they can trust. The BBC also reminds us of our common culture. Programmes like Doctor Who and Mastermind aren’t English or Scottish – they’re British.”
Cameron certainly has his finger on the pulse of the right in the UK 🙁
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2007/04/cameron_bbc_and.html
You know it has just stuck me that the advent of digital broadcasting is the ideal opportunity to turn the BBC over to a subscription only sevice, using a paid for card in the settop decoders, thus replacing the licence fee over the next two or three years.
What would be the objections to this?
Little Bulldogs | Homepage | 06.05.07 – 1:02 pm |
Another example is the animated graphic they used on the election programs on Thursday/Friday. This was a set of concentric circles split to represent the various parties by colour. The amount of colour changes with time.
Which colour was always in the majority – red.
XLR: That was a piece of nonsense by Cameron. The BBC know that they have dug themselves in a very deep hole with Tories in this country and have been alienating many people with their blatant left-wing/anti-English/pro Islam propaganda, not to mention falling quality of their programming in general. Multi-channel TV and radio are taking their audiences away and more and more people would support or wouldn’t care less if the Licence fee was abolished.
Perhaps Cameron thinks that if they don’t feel threatened, as an organisation, by a Conservative Government, then they’ll be less hostile to him if they think he supports the BBC. It won’t make any difference though, the BBC news department is left-wing pro-Labour and anti-Conservative Party. Cameron’s right not to deliberatley antagonise the BBC, it can only be counter productive at this stage. But statements like that are truly shit!
Geezer; very well put.
Its not up to Cameron to antagonise anyone, never mind the whole nation of Scotland or the most powerfull news organisation in the world. He unlike some on this site is not stupid. He is trying to get elected, get it yet?
Frisking the BBC is our job.
Still, feel free some of you lot to carry on, claiming DC is somekind of closet socialist, because his PR team must be loving every bit of it.
The more you lot moan the more elections David Cameron will carry on winning.
The BBC is just like any other huge organisation.Run by people worried about their futures and desperate to keep the pay cheques coming.Nulabour is seen as non threatening and a pushover for money.Cameron is an unknown quantity for them.he is quite sensibly keeping them from outright hostility perhaps flattering to deceive?I have no idea.The BBC is still very powerful and listened to by middle England.Only a fool would risk alienating it.It will probably change it’s tune and move away from Nulabour if it thinks Cameron will keep the gravy train on the rails.
For some months regular commenters here have been banging on about how the BNP and UKIP would both be taking council seats by storm up and down the country come May 3rd.
Not a peep about that on this thread since polling day.
Useless bunch of tipsters.
Better off with these guys
http://www.politicalbetting.com/
Shock horror, Mr Reith, you’ve actually got something right. But… um… weren’t you and your friends at the BBC predicting more seats for the lib dems and labour? And a terrible performance for the tory party?
So half right, really…
Not a peep about that on this thread since polling day.
John Reith – There hasn’t been a peep out of you to answer the substantial charges on this thread about BBC bias on the local elections – spinning for Labour and doing everything possible to underplay/ignore the Tory result. Changing the subject like this is such a cheap shot – unworthy of you.
Newsnight on Thursday evening (election night) saw Gavin Esler all over the Labour and Lib Dem spokesman, with the SNP represented in his panel as well of course. But, erm, wasn’t there another party involved in the Scottish election? Oh I know, the Tories – and didn’t they come third overall, ahead of the Lib Dems? Heaven forbid they should get a spot on Newsnight Scotland!
archonix 07.05.07 – 4:30 pm
weren’t you and your friends at the BBC predicting more seats for the lib dems and labour? And a terrible performance for the tory party?
No.
Oscar | 07.05.07 – 5:17 pm
The BBC seem to be reporting it pretty much like this:
Conservatives: share of vote around 40% – same as last year. No big surprise or improvement there. Need to up it a few points for the general election • otherwise, if the distribution is too much South-loaded, it’ll be a hung parliament.
Labour: Lost control of 8 councils in England. Down 4 seats in the Welsh Assembly • same in Scottish Parliament. Bad • but not as bad as many predicted.
Lib Dems: squeezed. As expected.
SNP: Big news. BUT – not quite as good a result as they were getting ready to celebrate.
Seems fair enough.
its not just the BBC.
SKY News were as bad.
The other favorite perennial waqs that the Tories still did not have any seats in manchester. This ignores that they control Trafford and that Manchester is a place from where intelligent thinking people fled long ago to escape the gun and drug running criminal low lifes.
Conservatives: share of vote around 40% – same as last year. No big surprise or improvement there. Need to up it a few points for the general election • otherwise, if the distribution is too much South-loaded, it’ll be a hung parliament.
John Reith
You obviously haven’t been cross-referencing your figures with the Sunday Times report baseed on an analysis by two of Britain’s leading academics on elections and vote share – Rallings and Thrasher. The figures you quote were BBC spin – contradicted by these highly respected independent researchers. The BBC’s manipulation of the vote share is a very good example of how the BBC went out of it’s way to distort attitudes to the election result.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1752283.ece
Headline in the Sunday Times‘Cameron ‘on course’ for No 10′
Thursday’s voting shares – 40% for the Cosnervatives and 26% for Labour – would be enough to give Cameron 352 Commosn seats. 54 more than all other parties in a general election. The study is by Professors Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher directors of Plymouth University’s elections centre. Figures by Rallings and Thrasher – two of the country’s leading experts whose vote share model has accurately predicted recent election results show Labour’s share of the vote at 26% remained at last year’s depressed levels, while the Tories in gaining nearly 900 council seats, advancted from 39% to 40%
The BBC skewed the figures – upping the Tories share last year from 39% to 40% to make it look as if there had been no increase. At the same time they made out Labour had gone up a point from 26 to 27% when they didn’t. The BBC also over-rated the LibDem performance making it 26% instead of 24%. I can verify from other sources that the Tories final estimated share last year was 39% – and you probably know there was a dispute with the Conservative party who believed that this year their share was actually 41%. But the BBC went to some lengths to make out that the Tories share had not improved – despite the nearly 900 seats they gained. It is a clear case of the BBC fiddling the stats to suit the story and their agenda. In other words a clear case of bias.
Good god JR, still defending the indefensible, eh?
Consider yourselves fortunate indeed that election campaigns in the UK don’t last anywhere near as long as the ridiculous marathons in the States. The BBC editors don’t have enough time to really embed their truths into voters’ minds.
The BBC skewed the figures – upping the Tories share last year from 39% to 40%
Pull the other one.
What are you saying • that they sneaked in and stealth-edited all the old web pages from 2006?
Or presciently anticipated this year’s result a year ago?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4974850.stm
I haven’t read the Rallings/Thrasher number crunch yet, but you could hardly expect the BBC to take account of it before it was actually done, could you?
Rallings & Thrasher are frequently used by the BBC as advisers on psephology.
Pull the other one.
What are you saying • that they sneaked in and stealth-edited all the old web pages from 2006?
Or presciently anticipated this year’s result a year ago?
John Reith – um I don’t understand this at all. I’m saying that the BBC should have used the final estimate of Tory vote share for the 2006 local elections (39%) when presenting their figures in 2007. I don’t think this needs to involve ‘stealth editing’ or prescience. It just needs some accurate reading and representation of last year’s result. Easy I should have thought. But maybe not convenient when you’re trying to massage the figures to give a misleading impression to the public. It didn’t work anyway – people aren’t fooled that easily and gaining nearly 900 seats speaks for itself.
The always witty and wise Daniel Finkelstein gets it right in the Times. Take note JR – the BBC, which mirrored the Labour party’s stupid response to the local elections – are being just as delusional as the party they support. And I noticed that somehow BBC cameras did not show us old Macavity speeding away in his limo behind tinted glass on the morning after the night before. Now if that had been Bush – it would have been blazoned everywhere.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article1763806.ece
The obsession the BBC has about Manchester, and Liverpool having no Tory councillers was oddly not matched by one regarding the large swathes of England that are now Labour free.
At least the BBC didn’t liken old Tory leaders to apemen this time.
Oscar | 08.05.07 – 8:49 pm
I’m saying that the BBC should have used the final estimate of Tory vote share for the 2006 local elections (39%) when presenting their figures in 2007. I don’t think this needs to involve ‘stealth editing’ or prescience. It just needs some accurate reading and representation of last year’s result. Easy I should have thought.
No. You don’t fully understand this.
The BBC does its estimate of the share of the vote, Rallings & Thrasher do theirs.
The BBC’s estimate is based on 950 key wards and its 2006 figures were published here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/vote2006/locals/html/region_99999.stm
As you will see, the BBC’s figure for the Conservative share in 2006 was 40%.
Rallings & Thrasher, as you say, made it 39%.
The discrepancy can be accounted for in a number of ways.
Both are estimates. Rallings and Thrasher have used a slightly different methodology.
Why estimates?
Because the voting system used in local elections is different to that used in a General Election. Usually a voter will have multiple votes in a council election. Not all voters cast all 3 …or even 6….votes for the same party • they may give a friend or neighbour or well respected local figure a ‘personal vote’, thereby splitting the ticket.
Also, there are still some voters who are confused by the ballot and only mark one cross where they could mark more.
And quite a lot of wards remain uncontested by one or more of the main parties.
Allowances have to be made for all of this • and there are many more factors (e.g. differences between local authorities in spoilt ballot reporting), which further complicate matters.
When making comparisons between various years, it is important to compare like with like. Comparing estimates calculated under different systems would be meaningless.
That’s why the BBC compares its 2007 figures with its own 2006 figures and does not, as you suggest, use the ‘final estimate’ produced by Rallings & Thrasher.
In any case, Rawlings & Thrasher are not infallible. As UKPollingReport note:
Rallings and Thrasher predicted notional national shares of the vote of CON 39%, LAB 24%, LDEM 29%. In the event, the notional shares have been calculated as being around CON 40%, LAB 26%, LDEM 26%. Rallings and Thrasher projected that the Conservatives would gain around 330 seats, Labour lose around 500 and the Lib Dems gain around 110, the Labour prediction was almost bang on, but the Conservatives ended up gaining almost 900 and the Lib Dems losing almost 250. Rallings and Thrasher’s projections based on local by-elections have been wrong for two years in a row now, and this time there was no foreign prisoner release scandal to explain it.
http://www.ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/975
This, of course, relates to their projections • not to outturn • but it makes the point that the underlying methodology doesn’t guarantee absolute accuracy.
Turning to alleged ‘bias’:
When the BBC reported in 2006 that the Conservatives had won 40% of the vote, this was taken up enthusiastically by Conservatives and their supporters as proof that in David Cameron’s first big electoral test the party had broken the ‘psychologically important’ or ‘electorally significant’ 40% barrier.
When, subsequently, Rallings & Thrasher came out with their 39% figure, it was Labour supporters who were accusing the BBC of hyping the Conservative performance.
It wasn’t bias then. And it isn’t now. It is just a matter of methodology.
Both the BBC’s and the R&T figures are close enough to be within the accepted margin of error. Both can be reliably used as guides for trends.
The important thing is not to mix them up.
To give John Reith his due, I think he is correct on this one. If you take one estimate from a year ago and infer a trend based on a differently-derived one today, then you would in effect have manufactured a third dataset, which neither of the source authors would recognise or support. I do project economics for part of my living, and it is for this reason that when we do cash flow models for capital projects, we don’t combine forecasts. If I want to know the prospects for a widget factory, I will buy forecasts of widget sales from however many reputable forecasters I have budget for, and consider each forecaster’s suppositions as a separate scenario. The client then has to decide which scenario he thinks is most likely. If he wants to average all of them, to form a brand-new forecast all his own, and to proceed accordingly, that’s fine. If it all goes horribly wrong later, though, he can’t sue anyone for shoddy work, because the forecast he actually used was nobody’s but his own.
I think it’s important we avoid assuming bias where there is a plausible case for the way things have been presented. Likewise we should also note where al-BBC’s approach has been visibly biased towards the Conservative point of view, but of course such examples are non-existent. It is this in particular, along with the attempts to associate the word “conservatism” with everything nasty al-BBC can think of and for which it can find a wikipedia cite, on which my own suspicions of al-BBC primarily rest.
I would particularly welcome Mr Reith’s views on the other charges made in this thread, which in my reading he has not yet addressed. The peculiar lack of prominence given to English results is particularly odd.
I should also mention that although the methodology should be consistent, so too should the points of comparison.
It does not follow that, because the Toried got 40% this year and 40% last year, that there has been no progress. They got 40% somewhere else. The relevant benchmark is how they did in the same seats last time they were contested. That would have been in 2003 and I have a feeling that the result then was Tories ~ 35%, Labour ~30%.
Simply put, the Tories scored 40% of the vote in Labour’s heartlands, which is a lot more encouraging than doing so in their own. If a Tory got 40% of the vote in Bliar’s own constituency, presumably the BBC would need to ring up the Labour Party to ask for advice on how to represent that as a defeat.
Camp Commandment
The fact that the BBC produces it’s own election stats (in a way that is far from consistent) is in itself highly questionable. The BBC is supposed to ‘report’ impartially and not directly engage in producing the data that justifies news headlines – this is yet another instance of the increasingly self-referential nature of BBC operations. Apart from the opportunity for manipulation, it is an entirely unnecessary expense when academic institutions exist to deliver exactly this type of analysis. What is clear to me (not an economic forecaster) is that the BBC uses both election forecast figures and election projections of voter share to promote a specific agenda in a highly politicised manner.
I agree that JR should answer the substantive arguments made on this thread rather than cherry pick this issue. I don’t agree, however, that he has a case.
The BBC are right to be sceptical about the Tory revival – as I report here.
And you concentrate exclusively on Manchester for your “evidence?”
You have to do a lot better than that if you want to be taken seriously on this site, Miles.
Given the BBC’s emotional and ideological bond with Labour
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/3253162701720140571/#348417
why would anyone trust BBC reporting on UK political parties?
JR
“For some months regular commenters here have been banging on about how the BNP and UKIP would both be taking council seats by storm up and down the country come May 3rd.”
I assume that was a little jab at me JR.
But come come let’s extend Al Beebs logic regarding ‘unpopular policies’ on a number of issues:
Let’s take Iraq
Explain if ‘the vast majority of the UK electorate’ was ‘against the war’ and Blair (now a non person) why to they now vote Tory who “got it wrong about Iraq” according to Al Beeb?
If Iraq was the “big issue” then extending the pre-election logic of IBC then the Fib Dems, Greens and Respect would all be drinking champers?
Explain that JR with your punditry skills?