David Dimbleby at 23:12 on Question Time last night:
Fine, let's leave that and see what happens if he's [Gareth Snell] elected [in Stoke], which we think he has been. We also already hear that Copeland has been held by Labour. The Tories haven't taken Copeland. This is purely surmise at this moment. It's people at the count looking at people's faces, I suspect, and seeing whether they're disappointed or not.
#wefiles And hearing what 'we' want to hear, and then speak unto the nation.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think they would have learnt to wait after the last election and the Brexit vote.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't bias
ReplyDeleteYou're not wrong. (It falls under the blog's "...and any other matters that take our fancy" remit).
DeleteSo it's just plain nit-picking then?
DeleteThat the BBC (or any other media outlet for that matter) broadcasts opinion, prediction or supposition from time to time is nothing new.
I've always wondered what the first 'B' of BBC was supposed to stand for too.
DeleteTo be fair, there are an awful lot of large nits to pick.
DeleteAnonAnon do stay I'm liking the added debate.
DeleteThis is the same David Dimbleby who last week was encouraging us to 'join the debate' by tweeting - when the programme was already in the can. There could be no clearer demonstration of the political bias of the QT programme-makers' ranks than to suppose the outcome of this by-election, and then the sheer arrogance of the script-writers to put these words into Dimbleby's mouth.
ReplyDeleteIt also raises the question of David Dimbleby's integrity when he repeated this misinformation. Perhaps it was fed the wrongly through his earpiece, and he hadn't the presence of mind to realise how ridiculous he would look if the prediction was incorrect as proved to be the case.
I have never really understood that encouragement to 'join the debate'. They never read any tweets out or have any live interaction with anyone outside the studio audience. I suppose it's just part of the deal ever since management decided to grade show quality on 'audience engagement', of which social media is a primary component.
DeleteAside from that, Dimbleby seems to be caught in some weird limbo between being too close to the establishment (friendly and first-name terms with all the major figures in all parties, even having dinner with Labour luvvies after the show) and the remnant of what I think is an intelligent right-of-center, old-school journalist. So he can both do Harriet Harman's bidding and shut down her critic (the infamous video of him reacting to her touching his hand) as well as seriously challenge Ed Miliband at a key campaign moment (that Leaders' Question Time).
It's people at the count looking at people's faces, I suspect, and seeing whether they're disappointed or not.
ReplyDeleteWTH? This is how they do exit polls, by having a BBC runner standing over the counters checking the reactions of partisans as they count ballots? I thought their excuse for not having an exit poll for the EU referendum was that these things are based on historic voting patterns and so wasn't possible as the last relevant vote was 40 years ago.
I'm certainly not going to speculate that they actually did do something along those lines for the EU referendum but didn't like the result and so refused to call it early like they did at the last general election.
I think it does imply bias that they keep calling it another way, or least a lack of talking to anyone different to themselves.
ReplyDelete