15 Responses to If the BBC can have polls, so shall we. This is another bit of experimentation

  1. H says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:01 am

    I would like an option – all of the above!

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  2. Susan Franklin says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:08 am

    All of them.

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  3. Sutekh says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:08 am

    I’m not sure which section this would fall into. Bias by omission maybe?

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7969515.stm

    Pathetic. And the BBC are puffing up this non-event as you’d expect…

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  4. David Vance says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:13 am

    Look on this as a test poll! Next one will be better, I promise!

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  5. NotaSheep says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:30 am

    Unlike in elections, I would prefer an “all of the above” option in your poll.

    The BBC’s bias is characterised by all of the four options and they all have their place in the “master plan”.

    Bias by omission ensures that “the proles” are not informed about certain stories, so as to keep “the narrative” believable – this is how the BBC try to protect Barack Obama by not reporting his addiction to teleprompters, his many stupid mistakes (58 states, insulting the mentally disabled and not knowing who the President of France is). It is also one of the ways that “the proles” are kept following “the narrative” that Man Made Climate Change is decided science, by omitting any coverage of the many climate scientists who do not follow the set line to take.

    Bias by misrepresentation is used to create friction within opponents of “the Party” by exaggerating or misreporting the words of Tories so as to bring discord and dispute where there is “harmony”. Meanwhile any splits within “the Party” are either not reported (bias by omission) or are represented as other than splits.

    Bias through prejudice is widespread and of course completely counter to the BBC’s Charter and to what the BBC believe is the case. Their anti-racism agenda means that the BNP view becomes verbotten whilst the view of the extreme left is acceptable and worthy of positive coverage. Their pro-multiculturalism agenda means that they try not to report the misdeeds of “minority groups” because that would be racist, preferring to report the lesser misdeeds of the majority population. Their pro-non-selective education view means that a “failing” grammar school becomes headline news rather than the hundreds of failing Comprehensive schools (or indeed the whole failing UK education system). Their instinctive feeling that as George Bush declared war on terror then Islamic terrorists must be in the right, means that they have no parity in coverage between what Israel is claimed to have done in Gaza and what is happening in Darfur or Sri Lanka.

    Bias through manipulation may seem to encompass different strands of the above; maybe that is indeed the “all of the above” option although it could also be the more subtle way that the BBC report the news so that what is important is not the story but how “the proles” feel about the story. This could involve reporting unwelcome news as drily as possible to make it unmemorable, or reporting it with jokey captions or music to make it seem inane, or introducing undesirable views with negative back stories (John Redwood for example). Whilst reporting on message views in a manner more likely to make the views be seen positively, the interviewee be seen as reliable and the story be more memorable.

    The BBC’s bias is so multi layered and so omnipresent that to even try and separate it into different techniques is both difficult and pointless.

    What is important is to recognise, record and report the BBC’s bias; maybe that way the bias could be removed (not that that is likely).

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  6. NotaSheep says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:33 am

    In the time it took me to write my 10:35 post, four others managed to post their views. For early Saturday morning there are a lot of active participants on this blog. Thankfully there is no PB type competition to be “First”.

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  7. charlie buoy says:
    March 28, 2009 at 11:06 am

    NotaSheep

    Your posting of 10.35amm today is excellent and sums up my thoughts on the matter entirely.

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  8. Peter says:
    March 28, 2009 at 11:25 am

    I guess this might have to fall into ‘omission’?:

    Having tried to engage over the last few days over ‘l’affaire Hannan’, and been told to mind my own business and/or been moderated out for being ‘off topic’ on a blog I have to co-fund, I decided to complain officially, using their pointless system (which I also co-fund), at least to log something.

    Quelle surprise:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/complaints/multistageform3.pl

    Internal Server Error

    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
    Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@bbc.co.uk and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

    Overload? Gremlin? Or just one more bit of useless, over-priced, over-staffed box-ticking tat that £3B+ and rising can’t get right?

    I am tempted to write that what I have done is cc in BBBC, any any other blog or entity I can think of to show them up for the uniquely useless shower they are.

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  9. Daniel1979 says:
    March 28, 2009 at 11:50 am

    All of the above.

    Great idea for the Poll David.

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  10. PacificRising says:
    March 28, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    Love it.

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  11. Peter says:
    March 28, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    Newswatch is worth a gander…

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/

    I’ve popped in a thought:

    Any chance of addressing the Daniel Hannan speech phenomenon? Then I ‘could be making the news next week’. Or not.

    Especially as it seems so un-newsworthy as to merit either no coverage, grudging mention or sniffy dismissal, in that order, to date.

    Or, in the case of myself, being excised from approved moderated political blogs for being ‘off topic’… for simply asking if it will be mentioned.

    How Catch 22 is that?

    I would complain, but, funnily enough the site is down. Too many telling the BBC what it doesn’t want to know… or hear?

    But to quote this week’s surly ‘why drag me out of my bed’ Editor, who seems in some groupthink loop, I am sure ‘You don’t think there’s an issue here’. I am sure you don’t.

    Remind me, why may I NOT opt out of paying the licence fee to help fund such folk’s salaries?

    At least later on you acknowledge that, in the spirit of ‘enhancing the narrative’ and ‘interpreting events’, the corporation seems a wee bit more interested in what ‘might happen’, especially if it is influenced at its hands.

    Is that the new, intended role? If so, I think I’ll claim my refund now.

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  12. Bryan says:
    March 28, 2009 at 1:17 pm

    I would twin the Bias by omission with Bias by commission, a good example of which was the repetitive blaring out on every World Service newscast on the hour and half-hour for at least ten hours of the findings of a questionable poll by a far-left Israeli organisation that found that the majority of Israeli Jews are racist towards Arabs. It was also discussed on the same day on, I think, World Briefing and was on the BBC website.

    To give a minor, uncorroborated “news” item such major exposure was simply propagandist Israel-bashing.

    The Bias by omission side of that particular coin was the total absence of any World Service report on polls conducted by Palestinians that consistently find the majority support suicide bombing against Israeli civilians. It was argued many moons ago by deegee that these polls are inaccurate since in an oppressive Palestinian society people are likely to give the answers expected of them. This is no doubt true to an extent and one would therefore understand the BBC omitting news of all polls on both sides of the conflict, not concentrating only on the Israeli one.

    The Bias by Prejudice category is too broad and too vague, since practically everything the BBC does is steeped in prejudice. So I would drop that one.

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  13. The Omega Man says:
    March 28, 2009 at 2:41 pm

    Bias through manipulation: not sure if this is typical example, but during the Gaza offensive there was a rare interview with an Israeli spokesman, where the Israeli side could give their point of view. Naturally, the BBC split the screen, with him talking on one side and the other side of the screen showing a tank moving about, drowning out half his words.

    I don’t remember the Hamas spokesmen given the same “ironic” treatment. But this is a good type of bias to look out for.

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  14. Bryan says:
    March 28, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    Peter, it takes a great deal of grit to complain to the BBC, as I’m sure you know. Generally, they just ignore my complaints. In the rare cases that they reply, they send me on a wild goose chase. This could partly be because I don’t live in Britain and therefore don’t pay them.

    Here’s the BBC page describing the complaints process:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

    I had to laugh when I saw this at the bottom in bold:

    We aim to treat every complainant with respect and in return expect equal consideration to be shown to our staff who handle complaints.

    Right!

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  15. A Nanny Moose says:
    March 29, 2009 at 2:26 am

    whats so special about users in Buckinghamshire?

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