The serious criticism by a distinguished media professor suggests that the BBC has compromised its impartiality by depending too heavily on sources from business, the media, law and order and politics.

Professor Justin Lewis, Dean of Research at Cardiff University and an experienced analyst of the BBC’s output, suggested that the BBC Trust had “played down” the findings, which were presented to the governing body last year.

So the BBC’s news agenda is skewed by powerful vested interests since the election in 2010?

Hmmmm…funny I thought it had been reshaped by a Marxist academic named Justin Lewis pre-2009:

Cardiff research recognised for reshaping the BBC’s post-devolution news agenda

22 May 2013

A Cardiff University research project that helped change the way the BBC reports on political issues has been recognised for its impact at the University’s prestigious Innovation and Impact Awards.

Professor Justin Lewis and Dr Stephen Cushion of the University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies were awarded the Regional Impact Prize for their work which helped reshape the BBC news agenda so that programming more accurately reflects post-devolution politics in the UK.

“As a result of our work, the BBC was able to significantly improve the quality and accuracy of their news coverage,” said Professor Lewis.

Guess not….must have been a different Professor Lewis.

But hang on…..this contorted theory that the Media is right wing…..and  is controlled by the Right…haven’t we heard that before …and from someone calling themselves Justin Lewis in 1997…..

In fact the belief that the Media is ‘Liberal’ is just a myth…for which there is NO evidence at all Lewis assures us:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZldKrInPE

Could it possibly be that Justin Lewis is a bit of a fraud as an academic….his ‘research’ merely confirming what he already wants to believe….the ‘facts’ are shaped to prove his theory?

After all who funded the research he bases his conclusions on?    Mike Berry, one of the report’s authors, and a confirmed  lefty, said this:

Along with a group of colleagues at Cardiff University, I recently completed a major content analysis of BBC coverage. This research was funded by the BBC Trust as part of an ongoing series of studies examining the impartiality of its reporting in areas such as regional news, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Arab Spring, business and science.

And :

This is Berry’s final conclusion:

So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.

Bonkers….I’ll bet he never has to buy a drink when in the company of any BBC journo!

We’ve already looked at him and Cardiff…..

They seem to be flogging this bit of research to death…getting as much mileage out of it as possible…astonishing that the ‘right wing media’ fall for it again and again and keep publishing this story….is it in their interests, either commercial or political,  if ‘right wing’, to propagate the idea that their big rival, the BBC, is in fact right wing?

Of course the Media is right wing….there’s the Guardian, Observer, Independent, the Mirror, the Telegraph moved decidedly more leftward and the Daily Mail goes its own way……it happily attacks anyone of any political persuasion if it makes a good headline.

Then there’s the BBC…massively dominant in broadcasting and on the web.

Yep…the Media landscape is controlled by the Right.

The BBC is ‘depending too heavily on sources from business, the media, law and order and politics.‘?

Really?  This is the BBC which is desperate to give voice to the IRA, to Muslim terrorists, to Occupy and environmentalists, rioters and turbulent priests…lefty Giles Fraser getting a job….along with Richard Coles…..there’s hardly a rightwing journo at the BBC….who’s out of the closet and admits to it anyway.

The same BBC that trashes Big Business, that trashes the Banks, that has supported Labour’s Plan B, that has consistently attacked welfare reforms and has relentlessly undermined the economy and the recovery….only a couple of days ago Ken Livingstone’s stunt double, Micky Clark, on Wake up to Money, told us there were statistics and there were lies…and government unemployment figures….meaning of course that you couldn’t believe a word of it….employment increasing?….all a big lie fed to us by the right wing media no doubt.

It does seem that Justin Lewis is not speaking from any actual knowledge or experience but purely spews forth a stream of consciousness, a tide of wishful thinking.

The problem with Lewis is that he is too closely tied to the BBC and of course is ‘of the left’ himself’.

Perhaps so far left that the BBC might look right wing to him.

He, and the equally closely tied to the BBC, Cardiff University, does seem to come up with ‘research’ that conveniently supports the BBC against its critics:

Alastair Campbell made the following assertion:

“In the run-up to conflict there was an agenda in large parts of the BBC—and I think the BBC is different from the rest of the media and should be viewed as different from the rest of the media because it is a different organisation in terms of its reputation, in terms of its global reach and all the rest of it—and there was a disproportionate focus upon, if you like, the dissent, the opposition, to our position. I think that in the conflict itself the prism that many were creating within the BBC was, one, it is all going wrong.”

Lewis refutes that:

Study on Iraq coverage shows

BBC was most pro-war of British networks

“Indeed, far from revealing an anti-war BBC, our findings tend to give credence to those who criticised the BBC for being too sympathetic to the government in its war coverage. Either way, it is clear that the accusation of BBC anti-war bias fails to stand up to any serious or sustained analysis.”

This is a BBC that produced an extremely negative documentary about the Iraq War called ‘Fighting the War’.   ‘        ‘Fighting the War’….geddit?

The documentary’s timing will fuel the debate over the legitimacy of the conflict as the hunt continues for any evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

It comes after the BBC clashed with the government over an edition of its Correspondent programme, which will include a clip of the bodies of two dead British soldiers first shown on Arab station al-Jazeera.

…..and a BBC that has spent 10 years trying to discredit politicians, motives and outcomes, not from journalistic principles but purely because they lost ‘Hutton’ and were proved to have misled the Public by broadcasting lies.

One of the reasons I started looking at the BBC’s coverage of events more closely was because of their anti-war stance…not from the Iraq War but from the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001…the BBC is innately anti-war as you can see in the way it reacts to any sabre rattling….over Iran for example….suddenly we have lots of programmes about Iranian artistic and culture achievements and little warmhearted chats with Iranians in the UK….all designed to show us how warm and human Iranian people are….and they don’t deserve to be bombed….not to mention they didn’t broadcast the film of a school in Syria that had been bombed just before the vote on military action in Parliament….the likely hood was that the horrors on the film would have influenced the vote…so the BBC hid it…..which is why we have the same bombing of women and children now.

The BBC right wing, pro-war?

The drugs do work.

What we have is a BBC reliant on a band of Marxist academic activists and ex-BBC employees to produce pro-BBC propaganda to cover up  the corruption, professional, political and financial, that lies at the heart of the Corporation.

A BBC that refuses to accept the truth about its failure as a news organisation…a failure that is not just one of political bias but of a ‘journalism’ that is all too often slow to pick up on stories and is all too evidently reliant on press releases (or lifting other’s exclusives) rather than investigative journalism.

A BBC that is all too evidently left wing…except to those who have their own agenda to work to.

Whilst doing a little D-I-Y armed with my trusty drill, I decided to listen to The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 earlier today. This programme was an extenuated sneer against the Conservatives and with “regular” Jeremy Hardy, Phil Jupitus and Sandi Toksvig herself, all we got was cheap political ad hominem dressed up as “satire” It’s hard to imagine that once upon a time this programme was funny. A glutton for punishment, I then caught most of Any Questions. The panelists were  Keith Vaz MP, Pauline Black of the ska band The Selecter, George Eustice MP, and UKIP’s Lisa Duffy.  This audience bayed when Eustice spoke but warmed to the student grant politics of Ms Black. What a biased hour of BBC trash.

The BBC has a long record of being hostile to religious spokesmen if they dare to speak up for what we can call “orthodox values” If a Bishop somewhere chirps up expressing disagreement with gay marriage, he can be assured a rough ride (whoops) however if a Cardinal attacks Welfare Reform, he can be certain that the BBC will smile upon him!

Did you read that the BBC has been accused of yielding to political pressure since the last election and allowing a right-wing bias to emerge in its journalism? Now WHO would say something like that? Yes, that’s right – an academic!

The serious criticism by a distinguished media professor suggests that the BBC has compromised its impartiality by depending too heavily on sources from business, the media, law and order and politics. By contrast, ITV and Channel 4 make much greater use of sources from academia, medicine, science and non-governmental organisations. Professor Justin Lewis, Dean of Research at Cardiff University and an experienced analyst of the BBC’s output, suggested that the BBC Trust had “played down” the findings, which were presented to the governing body last year. In an essay to be published next month, Professor Lewis states: “The available evidence on the BBC centre of gravity does not suggest a leftist tilt. On the contrary, its dependence on certain dominant institutions notably in the business world and the national print media – would appear to push it the other way.”

Makes you wonder how far to the left Professor Lewis tilts?

I see the BBC faithfully reports the foot stomping by Alex Salmond after he has been told that IF Scotland leaves the UK, it leaves the £ zone. It’s interesting to watch the BBC coverage on this. They seem to be sympathetic to the SNP delusions – Salmond and Sturgeon do get an easy ride in most BBC interviews – but on the other hand an Independent Scotland would be bad for Labour so mixed emotions I guess. Thoughts?

So, Labour has held on to one of its most safe seats. The BBC seem thrilled. UKIP came second with “only” 20% of the vote and the LibDems lost their deposit.

The BBC appears to have overlooked what the MET OFFICE told us the weather was going to be like but for your information here is what they said…

SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION:

Confidence in the forecast for precipitation across the UK over the next three months is relatively low. For the December-January-February period as a whole there is a slight signal for below-average precipitation. The probability that UK precipitation for December-January-February will fall into the driest of our five categories is around 25% and the probability that it will fall into the wettest category is around 15% (the 1981-2010 probability for each of these categories is 20%).

Perhaps the BBC could investigate why the Met Office is allowed to pontificate on “climate change” when by its own words it has NO IDEA as to what our weather will do?

Welcome to a sodden Friday. I see the BBC continues to do ALL it can to link the floods to man made climate change. If it rains it is AGW, if it doesn’t, it is AGW. An agenda is pursued at all costs and with scant regard to facts. Here is an Open Thread for the weekend!

This from Bishop HIll:

The Environment Agency Chair, Lord Smith, has lied twice when talking about flooding and his agency’s reaction to events.

Once when he claimed the Agency had no policy to deliberately flood the Somerset Levels, and again when he claimed Eric Pickles was wrong when he said the Agency had advised the government wrongly about dredging.

The BBC has ignored the huge inconsistencies in his story and continues to report and support Smith’s line unchallenged.

Today the BBC, in the shape of Chris Mason, has decided to look at the ‘politics’ of the floods….But the last paragraph is the most interesting….it seems not only has history actually been forgotten but has been rewritten.

Hilariously he starts with:

‘….the last few days have been an insight into the raw politics of crisis management.’

The ‘raw politics’ has seen a Labour peer lying and getting away with it…possibly with the collusion of  ‘Labour’ supporting BBC journalists….and a distinct lack of interest in Smith’s own ‘raw politics’.

Mason goes on…..

‘The political rewards of getting it right can be huge – as shown when Gordon Brown was judged to have had a good flood in 2007, confounding sceptics with a popularity boom in his first few weeks as prime minister.’

So Gordon Brown had a ‘good flood’ did he?  And Labour can stand tall now and criticise the Government for causing the floods because of their budget cuts?

Strange how history hasn’t provided the journalists of the BBC with any perspective at all, perhaps this article from 2007 can help whent here is talk of ‘cuts’ and ‘having a good flood’:

Brown axe cuts flood fight fund

GORDON Brown ordered a freeze in Britain’s flood defence budgets just weeks before the deluge that left huge swathes of the country under water.

Documents shown to the Sunday Express reveal the Environment Agency has been told not to expect any more money for its floods budget the next three years. With the impact of inflation that means the budget is effectively being cut.

The news comes after last year’s flood defence budget was slashed by £15million as the Government tried to claw back £200million in cost overruns elsewhere.

Sources at the Environment Agency, responsible for Britain’s crumbling flood defences, said the Treasury was demanding further budget cuts as recently as a few weeks ago.

Or perhaps this from the Socialist Worker in 2007:

Flood warnings that were ignored by the government

Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, said earlier this month, “It is vital that we learn lessons now about how to manage and respond to this type of disaster in the future.”

But this is not the first time the New Labour government has promised to learn lessons. After severe flooding in 2000 the government said the devastation was “a wake up call” and Hull MP John Prescott, then the environment secretary, told parliament, “We must take practical action now.”

There have been 25 reports since then from parliamentary committees and official bodies on how to reduce risks. They have all talked about the need for funding and planning ahead to deal with floods.

But money for flood defences has been systematically cut and vital infrastructure such as transport and water maintenance have been allowed to suffer at the hands of the market.

Last year then chancellor Gordon Brown cut the Environment Agency budget by £14 million, prompting cuts in flood defence plans.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS general secretary, said, “There is a real fear that cuts will hamper the ability of Defra to coordinate future responses to floods and extreme weather conditions.

“We urge Gordon Brown, as part of the promised review into the flooding crisis, to halt the cuts in Defra and ensure that department has the capacity and resources to respond to future floods.”

In Mason’s article you’re led to believe that any criticism of the Environment Agency and Smith was the result of pure spin from his political enemies……

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles apologised for the flooding and caustically observed: “We thought we were dealing with experts.”

While Mr Pickles went further than any other minister in his criticisms of the agency, plenty of others refused to endorse Lord Smith, who is due to stand down in a few months anyway.

But in fact the most anger came from the flood victims themselves who were highly critical of the Environment Agency:

Anger at environment chief in flood-hit Somerset

Residents of the flood-hit Somerset Levels have accused Environment Agency chairman Lord Smith of “letting everyone down”, as he visited the area.

Lord Smith said he had “no intention” of resigning in the face of criticism for not doing more to help but resident Jim Winkworth said he was “bloody mad” not to get an apology from the peer.

Farmer Julian Green confronted Lord Smith during his visit and claimed he should resign, telling him: “We’ve had this for too long now. We’ve had this for five weeks.”

And speaking to reporters after meeting Lord Smith, Mr Winkworth said: “He is letting himself down, he is letting his organisation down and he is letting us down.

“He hasn’t come down here to apologise, which is what he should be here for.”

And the discussion on the floods and their causes, apart from climate change, has led onto where houses are built…..such as on flood plains.

Not heard any comment from any BBC presenter that the pressure to build houses is due mainly to the vast increase in population due to immigration…just one more ‘benefit’ to add to the BBC’s list.

What also doesn’t get mentioned now is this from 2007:

Flood crisis test for Brown 

There have already been fears that might see incursions into the green belt – now there are more pressing fears that such a massive programme will see homes built in areas liable to flooding.

Take control

Meanwhile, minister Yvette Cooper, in charge of the house building plans, suggested that opponents of the building programme were “playing politics” with the floods.

That article was from 2007…interesting to compare it to Mason’s one from today…the 2007 article defends Brown and explains his actions whilst subtly suggesting the opposition are playing politics:

He wants to reassure the public that he has a grip of the issue. But with more flooding expected, and opposition parties questioning the emergency preparations, this crisis seems far from over.

….Whilst Mason’s is critical of the Government’s 2012 approach and their ‘political spin’  he defends the Labour peer Lord smith.

As for climate change…the floods in 2012 in the Somerset Levels…what caused them?  The rainfall for November 2012 was heavy but nothing out of the ordinary…there have been 18 years when the rain in November exceeded the 2012 total in the South West…..so what caused the floods?

Was it the Environment Agency’s actions?

The BBC are not investigating too hard….they just accept the ‘climate change’ line and roll from there.