Pause For Thought (a post without links)

The BBC says that it's impartial, but large numbers of people simply don't believe it.

The BBC knows that it's impartial. Many people know that it's not. 

So who's to judge if the BBC is impartial or not? And how is the BBC's impartiality (or lack of it) to be judged?

In the past, the BBC was largely its own judge, but - after some strong challenges in the mid 2000s (over its Israel and EU coverage, among other things) - it very briefly instituted counting-style checks.

It then just-as-swiftly dropped such checks for being "unhelpful".

The BBC then stated that it trusted its own editors to maintain the BBC's due impartiality over time - which was, to put it bluntly, little more than the BBC going right back to itself being largely its own judge and knowing best. 

Nevertheless, in the late 2000s and very early 2010s, the BBC launched its own large-scale 'independent' impartiality reviews, which 'found' that the BBC was broadly impartial but needed to do better on some things (like stopping being impartial over climate change). 

Behind those 'independent' reports, ironically, laid largely helpful 'counting' from, above all, Cardiff University.

The main controversy over Cardiff Uni's finding arose over whether the mainly ex-BBC and far-left activist Cardiff researchers cherry-picked their results over miniscule timescales (on one survey, a couple of weeks or so at  years apart) at insufficiently randomly-chosen times (on the same survey, only half a chosen Radio 4 programme when particular, similar news stories were dominating, years apart) 

Other researchers (some ex-BBC, none of them far-left, most of them right-wing), conducted studies over far longer timescales armed with a completist's rejection of randomness (recording every example over days and days, months and months, and years and years) and came up with very different results.

(I was one of them with my comprehensive 2009-2010 '1000+ BBC interviews' ultra-completist interruptions study. News-watch was another, over a vastly longer timescale). 

Anyhow, the BBC has, over the past decade, continued to maintain its total rejection of 'mere counting'...

...except, of course, as regards its endlessly ongoing diversity projects - such as committing itself to counting the numbers of female and male guests on its programmes, etc, and ensuring 50-50 balance - a species of 'mere counting' that the BBC joyously flaunts like an over-exuberant, social-liberal, number-crunching, identity-politics-obsessed peacock/peahen/peawhatever.

(I feel a Rudyard Kipling short story coming on there). 

But the BBC has shifted its ground in the last couple of years or so. It is now (seriously) citing as its MAIN proof of impartiality a few opinion polls (the merest one or two or so) which tenuously appear to show that the public probably thinks the BBC is impartial.

But, as something of a connoisseur of opinion polls about BBC bias, I know that the ground that the BBC's shifted itself onto is brimming and boiling and bebogged with quicksand.

Some of their takes on the poll findings they cite have been questionable at best. And those apparent poll findings are countered by other major mainstream opinion polls, conducted by some of the best-known pollsters, which show (including 'don't knows') that full faith in BBC impartiality is now very much in the minority. 

The detail, however, is irrelevant. The Big BBC Question here is why on earth the BBC thinks that a scattering of dubiously 'helpful' opinion polls is in any way proof of the BBC's impartiality.

Are opinion polls seriously the hill the BBC is prepared to die on in defence of its impartiality claims?

An ever bigger Big BBC Question is: If not (open to question) opinion polls and your own BBC staff's (highly open to question) judgement, then what? 

So what, oh BBC?

Maybe a judicial review is needed to answer that. 

Ah, but, let's not forget, the BBC is now under the charge of Ofcom. The BBC is no longer its own supreme judge. And Ofcom's pack of like-minded, largely ex-BBC-affiliated judges will surely hold their friends to account, won't they?

I put that facetiously, but getting Ofcom to rule on BBC may very well be like getting Jeremy Corbyn's extreme-left, anti-Semitic allies to rule on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Their vision isn't exactly unclouded, is it?

Maybe something is needed to burst those clouds?

As they stay on the BBC News Channel, stay with us...(or stay tuned)...