We asked why the BBC totally ignored a caller to LBC who castigated Labour and Miliband for having failed to provide a good NHS service…..On Monday Nicky Campbell may have provided a reason as to why the BBC cannot bring itself to publicise such criticism of Miliband and Labour……Campbell told us that another member of the Public had given a Labour politician a severe ear bashing but he couldn’t tell us what that person had said because of course the BBC is politically neutral.….work that out if you can.
Later Victoria Derbyshire had a bit of ‘brain fade’ telling us that we had had a Conservative-Labour Coalition government for the last 5 years……or was it Conservative -West Ham? Will the BBC be ‘laughing’ endlessly at such a foolish mistake for days on end? Perhaps they could bring in a psychologist as they did to discuss Cameron’s little faux pas?
It did seem like the BBC was pushing Labour’s agenda on Monday…with quite a bit of SNP thrown into the mix…..the BBC frequently seems to assume we will have a Labour government and discusses an SNP pact with Labour as if that was the most likely scenario…and as so often we had a look at the ‘puzzle’ of productivity, or the lack of….a Labour theme now that employment is always going up and they need to find another angle to attack the Coalition somehow.
Then we had the aforementioned Campbell who was talking about housing….yet again a Labour theme. Then Victoria Derbyshire talking about mental health…again a subject Labour, and the LibDems (for some reason) thinks it has the Tories up against the ropes on.
Then we had the Evan Davis ‘Leaders’ Interview’, this time with Nicola Sturgeon. I was going to watch it but Craig at Is the BBC biased? has done sterling work and provided us with a run down of how it went…..not bad at all from Sturgeon’s point of view….all that was missing was a glass of wine and some candlelight….a completely different ‘tone’ to the aggressive and sanctimoniously disapproving lecture Nigel Farage received.
Have to say the BBC’s coverage of the SNP gets ever more like a glorification….Wednesday seemed to be a coronation of Sturgeon by the BBC with much trumpeting if her as a ‘breath of fresh air’ and a ‘straight talker’…..both of which are complete nonsense…she’s a politician the same as all the rest…..in private she says she thinks Miliband is unfit to be PM and she’d prefer a Tory government but says something different in public and no comment from the BBC about her repeated claim to really respect ‘democracy’…the woman who wants to keep having referendums until she gets the answer she wants on independence.
Then we have Cardiff University’s run down of news coverage of the election…apparently, again h/t Craig, the Tories are way out in front in receiving airtime from the various news broadcasters….though that doesn’t say whether it is positive or negative coverage…so hardly an informative study….here is how they went about that study…
The Cardiff University study examined bulletins on Channel 5 at 5pm, Channel 4 at 7pm and at 10pm on BBC, ITV and Sky News.
Not exactly comprehensive….but they have noticed that the BBC gives more time to Miliband…
The BBC was an outlier, giving more time to Miliband, who made up 24.3% of time leaders were speaking on screen, compared to 21.9% of time for Cameron.
Now anyone who has listened to the BBC radio output or read the website will know that Labour has the lion’s share of the headlines…hardly a day goes by when ‘Labour announces……’ doesn’t get top billing and as on Monday the latest Labour policy ‘discussed’ repeatedly on the BBC. The BBC takes the risk that the policy will get mauled but keeping Labour in the headlines and the Tories out seems to be the BBC modus operandi….unless it is unmistakeably bad news for Labour, such as callers on the NHS blasting Miliband, which is completely absent from the BBC, or bad news for Cameron such as the ridiculous story about ‘brain fade’ which will be discussed endlessly. If a Tory policy does make it to the headline it is not long before it is replaced with the Labour response rubbishing it.
It is as we have always suspected with these ‘studies’ that they are extremely limited in scope and only examine a very small part of any broadcaster’s output…far less than you and I can hear as we go though the day listening to various BBC programmes and getting a real feel for the output as whole over the day.

