Paddy's Broadcasting House has, quite rightly, stood down its long-serving election generals, Lord Peter Hennessy and John Sargeant. Their openly-expressed strong contempt for Boris Johnson would have made them difficult to justify, impartiality-wise.
So a new trio of election generals have been promoted: One's a former advisor to Boris Johnson, the second a fotmer advisor to Jeremy Corbyn and the third a former advisor to Nick Clegg - i.e. a Conservative, a Labour supporter and a Liberal Democrat supporter.
And they'll be reappearing each week throughout the election.
Now, the question - as per the broadcasters' difficulties over the leadership debates shows - is: how impartial is this?
Should the Lib Dems be on every week? Why give them such a priveleged platform? How about a Green, or an SNP, or a Brexit Party major every so often instead?
I bet they've closely debated that behind the scenes. They've certainly reached a decision.
I think the time allocations for debates and for this sort of thing should be based on a poll of polls. So if the POP shows 35% support for the Conservatives, that's their time allocation and if it shows 4% for Greens that's what they get. The time allocations could then be spread across debates and programmes.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought, given the BBC's way of spreading editorial decisions across their multitude of platforms, that something like this should now be in place. It does make sense.
DeleteThe problem with the time allocation idea is that after the question there would only be time to say "yes" or "no" before the weather forecast.
DeleteBBC question duration is frequently veeery long as it has to pack in all sorts of factors - historical context, narrative, barely hidden opinion, dismissive contempt, built in resistance to social media criticism etc.
And that's leaving out the time for post interview punditry AKA editorial analysis.