Sunday 21 October 2018

Moving on


Here are some statistics that I think are very revealing, which I've found courtesy of the search function on TV Eyes

The question: Since the break of day yesterday (Saturday) morning, starting at 6 o'clock, how many times has the word 'Huddersfield' been mentioned respectively on the BBC News Channel and the Sky News Channel in connection to predominantly Muslim grooming gangs? 

(All results mentioning Huddersfield Football Club are ignored).

Well, the results for the BBC News Channel are just 1 mention - at 7:13 am on Saturday morning, and nothing since. 

And the results for Sky News are 33 mentions, all across Saturday and continuing today. 

So the obvious conclusion here is that one UK broadcaster's rolling news channel - the BBC's - has dropped the story like a stone while the other - Sky - has continued to focus on it. 

(And digging into the TV Eyes results, that's exactly the case.)

There's no way that's not a very clear example of editorial decision making on the part of the two broadcasters. The BBC has evidently decided to very, very firmly - and quickly -  'move on'. 

6 comments:

  1. I'm not surprised at all by your findings Craig. I made the same point yesterday:

    ... I don't expect the BBC to revisit the story, though. It has been archived as a series of half-truths, and that's that from the BBC. On a story like this, news management is the name of the game. - updates and corrections are avoided at all costs...

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    Replies
    1. Yes. This is a clear case of BBC news management. Senior editors must have been involved in deciding to drop it, given how comprehensively it's been dropped.

      Delete
  2. They're not moving on from stories about yesterday Soros-backed Anti-Brexit "Take Back Your Vote" Demo. That's still up there. Very positive account of the demo...

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  3. There's a Twitter tool https://twitter.com/mottv
    "Mentioning things I've been asked to look out for."
    i've never tested it before.
    Lets tweet Huddersfield to it and see if it works

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah Craig : synchronicity, I check the Liz Kershaw text, and I find that archive.org is now archiving BBCNews transcripts
    https://archive.org/details/TV-BBCNEWS
    You move the timeline slider to see each part of the prog
    ..but I have to use a hack trick to copy the text off the page
    ..cos scripts within the page disable the Ctrl-C button

    This is how you run a search in GOOGLE
    .. site:https://archive.org/details/ huddersfield TV-BBCNEWS
    Then use the time limits in google eg last 24hours , or 7 days

    The last mention of Huddersfeld rapes in the archive is EARLY Saturday breakfast before 8am
    Breakfast : BBCNEWS : October 20, 2018 7:00am-8:01am BST :
    "in the morning to get a lift back to huddersfield. we're joined now by nazir afzal, ..."

    After then the search only pulls up mentions of Huddersfield Football

    ReplyDelete

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