It gets worse for the BBC and for Newsnight. Scotland’s Sunday Herald

reports that BBC apologises in row over ‘mistake’ in SNP survey:

THE BBC has suffered another credibility blow after admitting that it made up a Newsnight survey suggesting that most of Britain and Scotland’s leading businesses were not in favour of independence.

Presenter Jeremy Paxman had told SNP leader Alex Salmond that ‘not one’ of 50 firms, made up of 25 in Britain and 25 north of the border, supported the party’s independence policy on a TV special shown before the Holyrood elections in May.

The Sunday Herald has discovered the BBC has since apologised after a viewer complained the ‘straw poll’ was mis-represented by Paxman because only a handful of companies replied to the survey.
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Details of the latest mistake emerged only days after a number of corporation staff were told to ‘step back’ from their duties over their involvement in a fake phone-in scandal affecting six programmes, including BBC Scotland’s Children In Need Appeal.

The BBC’s head of editorial complaints, Fraser Steel, responding to the complaint by viewer Chris Hegarty conceded that only seven of the 50 firms approached for their views on independence had replied.

He added that contrary to Paxman’s claims, a majority had declined to express a view ‘one way or the other, two had declared ‘neutrality’ and one leading business said ‘it didn’t care.’ Steel added that as a result of the mistake, the programme’s editor and ‘senior management’ were spoken to about ‘the importance of clarity and transparency’ when reporting the outcome of so-called ‘snapshots’ and straw polls.

Quite a bit of a ‘mistake’. These sorts of ring-round snap-polls are wide open to abuse, with questions framed, participants selected and results interpreted, to support the story that the broadcaster wants to tell or believes to be true, if the producers of the program are less than scrupulous in their methods and approach.

Another popular news trick that is also wide open to abuse are so-called vox-pop pieces where two or three ‘random’ people are interviewed in the street. These vox-pops never state how many people were approached (to then have two or three selected from them), but worse than that, they are cut down to sound-bite size, giving more scope for ‘editorial creativeness’ and they very often don’t state the names of those interviewed, so it is impossible to know whether or not the people interviewed are activists with their own agenda or even if they really are randomly selected.

We really need to get back to a state of affairs where we can trust the news – where we are given just the straight facts, without any editorialising or dumbed-down presentational pap – away from the Fiona Bruce and Natasha Kaplinsky style presentation that characterise so much BBC news, and back to the style and substance of the likes of Richard Baker, Kenneth Kendall and Angela Rippon.

Thanks to commenters Richy & Max and fellow blogger Mr. Eugenides for the link.