And there's even more...

David's latest piece also notes that Ofcom has carried out an expensive, year-long review of the BBC's news and current affairs output, and guess what the recommendations of the Ofcom report were?

News and current affairs is largely tickety-boo – with one major caveat, the ‘D’ word. Wait for it: not enough diversity!

And the contents analysis done for the Ofcom review comes from...drum roll...the same people the BBC used for their own output reviews - our old friends at the School of Media, Journalism and Culture at Cardiff University, a department headed by Richard Sambrook, ex-BBC Director of Global News. 

So not only is the Ofcom content board stuffed with ex-BBC people and the Ofcom main and advisory boards stuffed with ex-BBC people, Ofcom uses the same Cardiff University as the BBC uses to carry out their output reviews. 

Circles within circles.

David writes: 

So how did the wise people of Ofcom decide that output was impartial? A main plank was that they had considered 300 complaints about BBC bias in 2018-19 and upheld none of them. Well, that’s okay then. Or maybe – more likely – it confirms the need for an urgent external investigation of Ofcom itself into confirmation bias – the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that affirms one’s prior beliefs or hypotheses. 

That's as bad as the BBC making a favourable opinion poll its main proof of impartiality.

As for bias and Brexit, well, this sounds very odd:

The second main plank of their approach was the PwC report mentioned above. A key element of this was based on 13 interviews and workshops around the country, each attended by a dozen consumers of BBC output. How precisely these were framed is not disclosed – it is assumed by Ofcom that PwC knew what they were doing. But a striking feature of the exercise, at a time when the news agenda was dominated by Brexit, was that those with strong views about the topic were deliberately excluded.

I find none of this remotely reassuring.