Sunday, 27 May 2018

Bias on demand?


Yesterday's Irish referendum result (after voting on Friday) backing liberalisation of Ireland's abortion laws has still been the story for the BBC today. The politically-focused programmes on Radio 4 - Sunday, Broadcasting House and The World This Weekend - all majored on it; indeed, BH was a 'Special' broadcast from Dublin. 

The World This Weekend was the one where the focus, signalled in the news bulletins earlier, shifted most emphatically to the calls for Northern Ireland to hold a referendum, against the wishes of Mrs May's proper-uppers in the DUP. 

And the most-viewed news bulletins - those on BBC One - have been leading with those calls all day. The BBC's new Ireland correspondent Emma Vardy was talking on tonight's BBC Weekend News about Northern Ireland being seen as "drastically out of step". 

The BBC decided to make those calls their main story. They could have chosen otherwise.