We don’t normally scrutinise the BBC’s essayists. We haven’t tried a survey of how many we consider right versus how many left. As a matter of fact I’ve never read any in-house commentary on the BBC that showed any strong right orientation, but I thought I’d look at this piece from Iain Watson. It’s about the Labour party launching its election campaign for the Euros with the expenses row echoing around it. The bottom line is the most interesting:
“the party will have to hope that their core voters will be thinking more about the economy than expenses. “
Objection, your honour! Only a true Labour hack laden with assumptions of “it started in America” and “it’s all about deregulation” so “what would the Tories have done differently?” would come up with this marvellous summation of wrong-headedness. It’s the economy, stupid, that Gordon Brown has taken from boom to bust.
There’s also a sly aspect to this: the journalist ignoring the base reality that the “core” vote don’t judge the Labour party on their handling of the economy- they judge them by their benefits cheques and their cushy state incomes and pensions. Anyone who were to judge the Labour party on their handling of the economy would vote against them. Simple as. To suggest that the economy might be a selling point for the Labour party is Goebbelesque.
In addition, if you look closely at the article you will see it has a certain wry affectionateness towards Labour, and deals with the expenses scandals humorously, pointing out just a few individuals who have apparently failed their genial and public spirited leader. Ok so Gordon’s a little old school and a bit stuffy, but y’know, basically it’s all about schools n’ stuff and good folk.
Can you imagine- is it possible to conceive of such a situation even- of how the BBC would be covering matters had the Conservatives been presiding over the economic meltdown?
John A/Craig/Ed T
Another measurable index of BBC bias might be the proportion of questions from right field/left field.
For example – if a minister is on to boast that he is increasing spending on some problem X, a ‘left field’ question would be But is the increase really enough to solve X? while a ‘right field’ question would be But why are you throwing good money after bad, you have already tripled spending on X and it has got worse?My experience is that the BBC always questions both Conservative and Labour politicians from left field.
Ed T
I just read the Watson article you linked to. It is possible that the ‘thinking about the economy’ line at the end was ironic. It is labeled ‘sketch’ and sketches are supposed to end with a gag.
Tom
Unfortunately the problem with the approach you suggest is that it gets us back to subjective definitions of what is left field and right field. And this gives the BBC an easy cop-out – it can say that the measurements are not objective.
Mr Vance, we’re on the same page politically, but should this site be a *Conservative anti BBC Bias site? It will alienate otherwise sincere democrats on the Left and Centre of British politics who would otherwise put democracy before politics and support this site. If they’re to do this, this site needs to put democracy before politics.
JohnA
`yes, I see what you mean. But maybe there is a way to do it without using left-right terminology.
I think most people here share the view that the BBC mostly shows its biases in the assumptions that underlie its questions and general approach.
It is the assumptions that lead to other forms of bias – such as bias by omission.
Maybe we could give names to some of those assumptions, and then provide quantitative evidence of bias.
One of the assumptions the BBC makes is that increases in state spending = good; cuts in state spending=bad.
There is a clear objective difference. We could count questions clearly predicated on the assumption that more spending is needed; contrasted with questions (if any) predicated on the assumption that extra spending is undesirable.
hippiepooter said…
11:25 AM, May 18, 2009Amen to much of that.
More objectivity on clear bias rather than promoting any other agendas instead would get my vote, for all that deluded and denuded tool of democracy is now worth.
But then I have always felt the site name to be rather unfortunate (appreciating it is a long established brand and never going to change) and place an unfortunate barrier to those who also abhor highly-funded, but still simply rubbish reporting and/or editorial.
thoughtfulape @ 7:13 AM
Measuring the length of the interview times would be useful, but a plausible sounding BBC counter to this would be that the Labour party are currently in government and the opinions and perspectives held by members of the government are naturally more newsworthy than those held by the opposition.Okay, but that only holds for domestic political issues.
Interruption coeffiecients? Jesus. Why don’t you people just stop paying your licence and encourage others to do so. Or maybe get some placards and arrange the occasional protest outside broadcasting house.
It seems most of you are forever trying to find new and imaginative ways to find bias at the BBC, to impress this point upon nobody but yourselves.
Exactly what do you think this armchair crusading will achieve?
How can “Biased BBC” – the name of a site about BBC bias – be unfortunate?
David Preiser
Even if this is true I think that too much hairsplitting on this issue will dilute the interruption coefficient idea and make it less not more powerful.
I am willing to wager that even ignoring the issue of softball questions to labourites, unequal interview times, condescending or confrontational body language and all the other many ways in which their left-wing bias manifests itself we will STILL find a pro labour bias, just in the raw data on the number of interruptions.
thoughtfulape,
I agree that we would find evidence of bias just by counting interruptions, but there are way too many variables for anyone in media to take it seriously. Not all interruptions are created equally, and it won’t hold up without more data from different angles.
In any case, whatever approach we take ought to be able to reveal the BBC’s bias on all sorts of issues, not just supporting Labour. So if we agree to leave it at the number of interruptions, full stop, other aspects of interviews can still be counted as well, as I’ve already mentioned. There are many different ways beyond interruptions to count the bias in interviews, and I still think the more data we have the better.
While it is true that not all variables are created equally that hardly matters, provided we have a sufficient large sample size to eliminate the noise and leave the signal.
I am hardly saying that the IC should be the only tool in the armory when it comes to highlighting BBC bias.
But I think it is an exceptionally powerful tool although necessarily limited in scope.
What would be desirable would be the development of other such metrics we can use to measure bias.
I completely agree that the pro labour slant isn’t the only or most extreme example of bias at the BBC but I think it would make an excellent start.
thoughtfulape,
Works for me. If it turns out that the IC needs tweaking, it can be dealt with later. I was only pointing out one potential issue which could be raised by defenders of the indefensible. The next step is, as you say, to develop other metrics. I’d bet anything we come up with could be applied to nearly any topic.