Of all the examples in the comments yesterday of the different treatment given to Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Conference to Brown’s at Labour’s, perhaps the most simple and compelling for me was the running order on Radio 4’s flagship, Today*. Following Brown’s speech, the programme led with it as their first item and revisited it again in the prime 8.10am spot. And again just before 9am. Following Cameron’s they ignored it entirely. It was a similar story with the web coverage, where Gordon’s speech lingered prominently for an age to be followed by a pointless puff piece to keep it in the headlines. Cameron’s quickly disappeared to the bottom of the politics page. On the bright side, the bias is being noted. As Guido Fawkes points out, the UK’s best-selling paper, the Sun, at one point had a pop at “the Labour-supporting BBC”, before evidently thinking better of picking a fight with the country’s most powerful and best resourced new group. And that possibly answers a question posed in the comment a fair bit yesterday: Why don’t the Conservatives do anything about it?
*Thanks to Snooze 24
David – I’m glad you pointed this out. As I’ve been posting here since last Saturday BBBC would do well to run some proper monitoring of BBC coverage of the conference season. It’s one of the few times like for like comparisons can be made.
As for yesterday’s Today programme, if they wanted to excuse the way they marginalised the Conservative conference with an “events dear boy” argument, no such pretext could be made yesterday. Indeed Today filled the programme with trivia and non-political stories. If the newespaper coverage of Cameron’s speech had been damning instead of glowing, I’m sure they would have covered it. Newsnight even pulled their usual news headlines in the morning papers slot because they couldn’t bear to show the Sun’s “Yes he Cam” front page splurge.
The BBC is absolutely consistent – if there’s good news for the Conservatives they won’t cover it. But any chance to stir up negative stories they are out in force with their big spoon. This needs to be nailed.
The phrase “biased scum” comes to mind when I consider the BBC’s coverage of politics.
Come on David – accede to Oscar’s suggestion!
The consistency and degree of BBC bias in its conference reporting has been so manifest it beggars belief • and the quality of the observations of the bias has been outstanding.
If we had conducted a proper, organised monitoring and encapsulated our observations in a report we would have produced something of great value to the BBC’s many critics.
JBH – you are so right. The Conservative blogsites are overflowing with outrage at the BBCs coverage of the Conservative conference. This is an opportunity for BBBC to make a difference.
Compare the difference with Ian Blair’s departure that gets almost constant exposure on bbc accusing the Conservatives and Boris (who they hate)of political interference – and the total lack of exposure of Keith Vaz being (again) investigated.
Both the Conservative Party and the so called bbc trustees need to be taken to task. Exposure and recrimination on its blatent bias is something the bbc will NOT WANT on the airwaves.