More bias by labelling

Nina Warhurst

Talking of biased political labelling, and continuing with ITBB's much-loved Rorywatch series, this morning's Breakfast saw the BBC's sofa surfers discussing the Tory leadership contenders with Professor Jon Tonge of Liverpool University, one of their regular paper reviewers (and always worth watching). They went through them all, one by one, but when it came to Rory Stewart's turn, out came the biased political labelling from our BBC presenters:

Nina Warhurst, BBC: Let's move on to Rory Stewart, currently International Development Secretary, pretty moderate on Brexit.
Jon Tonge: The most moderate candidate of all.

However it's intended, the word 'moderate' is invariably a positive and always implies a contrasting negative - usually 'extreme'. Choosing to use it to describe the most hardline opponent of No Deal of all the Conservative leadership contenders (see what I did there, BBC?) betrays an opinion. It strongly suggests that Nina prefers Rory Stewart to the others because of his position on Brexit, doesn't it?

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Ah, and here's the BBC political correspondent Jonathan Blake on the BBC News Channel a couple of days ago:

So [Boris Johnson] is setting out his stall quite early in this campaign...and it's not quite the gung-ho, No-Deal-or-nothing message that you might have expected him to come out with. So maybe he's trying now to appeal to more moderate members of the Conservative Party, and he does need their support. 

And what about the equally loaded language of "gung-ho, No-Deal-or-nothing message"?