Going viral

Here's a post for Twitterphobes like Sue...

Unusually this week, the #bbcbias hashtag on Twitter - usually, these days, largely the preserve of untold quadrillions of aggrieved Scots Nats - has been surprisingly heavy with Twitter-savvy UKIP supporters. 

That audience at that BBC debate stirred them up, but today has seen another 'viral' incident...

...the BBC's informal 'candidates debate', spread across the News Channel, with the main candidates from the hotly-contested constituency of Great Grimsby - the seat of retiring, immensely likeable Labour MP Austin Mitchell - and starring UKIP's Victoria Ayling...

Please watch the whole thing (posted by a UKIP supporter) and decide for yourselves how biased it really was.

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My own view is that the BBC interviewer tried hard to put appropriately unhelpful questions to all four candidates (from Labour, the Conservatives, UKIP and the Lib Dems) and, mostly, stood back from the resultant answers.

He did, however, immediately begin his questioning of UKIP's Victoria Ayling by asking her about the Mail on Sunday's latest 'scandalous revelations' about her and her family. When challenged, very vigorously by Victoria, he argued that it was justified to ask such questions because she was the only one of the four candidates to be featured as headline news in a major (Tory-supporting) national newspaper this week.

Fair enough, perhaps, but I can see that starting with that line of questioning was harsh. 

Plus, the BBC interviewer's mild, impartial bitch-slapping of each party's candidate never flared up into an interviewer-interviewer scrap with any of the candidates (after that initial scrap with Victoria Ayling)...except, near the end of the YouTube collection, with...er...UKIP's Victoria Ayling. 

It's as if the BBC interviewer couldn't help himself. 

So, I think, that really is more evidence that BBC reporters/interviewers, generally-speaking, have a particular problem with UKIP.