"The BBC will have the backing of the people only if the people are sure their voices are being heard"

Also, as per David...

Former Head of News at the BBC Roger Mosey, now master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, has been sharply critical of the BBC's election coverage.

"I do believe it has a mostly liberal and metropolitan world view revolving around the chattering classes and the districts of London they inhabit", he writes. "If you add to that the Westminster bubble made up of the politicians and journalists who cover politics, there is a major gulf with life as it is lived in Burnley or Redcar."

Now, the BBC and its fellow broadcasters face questions about the way they covered the 2019 campaign, and how well they reflected the mood of the country outside London. Because the portrayal of the majority of British people and their concerns was frequently off-beam. 

We were told the Election would be very close. It was not. 

The broadcasters reported that both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn were big turn-offs for voters, yet Johnson won something close to a landslide. 

In the short space of time since taking over, the Prime Minister had brought about a remarkable change to the Conservative Party, increasing its share of the vote from 8.8 per cent in the European elections under Theresa May seven months ago to a steady rating of 40 per cent or more throughout this campaign. 

He was obviously getting something right. It was in plain sight. 

Yet none of the broadcasters chose to consider properly what this might mean. 

As polling day approached, millions of working-class people outside the capital were preparing to do the unthinkable and overturn years of tribal allegiance to vote Conservative. 

The broadcast media, meanwhile, spent 24 hours focusing on Boris Johnson's response to an ITV reporter brandishing a disturbing photograph of a four-year-old boy on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary.

******* 

We have had more of this metropolitan viewpoint in the past few weeks. It is true that there has been a great deal of reporting from outside London in the course of the Election campaign, but it didn't reveal enough of what was actually going on. 

People were interviewed grumbling, but this was translated as criticism of politicians in general. 

There was no comprehension that what the reporters witnessed might have been game-changing anger. There wasn't enough exploration of the possibility that the Labour vote in working-class communities could collapse. 

I suspect the editorial view would have been different had the decision-makers been based in Doncaster rather than in metropolitan, Labour-voting London.

******* 

The idea persisted that voters hadn't made up their minds between two unpopular candidates, Johnson and Corbyn – a claim which now seems implausible, to say the least. 

Too often, the broadcasters served up a diet of trivia, of politics reduced to soap opera. 

Yet the public didn't seem to care that Boris dodged being interviewed by Andrew Neil. It made no difference to them that he hid in a fridge, apparently to avoid questions from ITV's Good Morning Britain. 

Both these things were reported as major incidents. The voters seem to have decided otherwise. 

Was Boris Johnson's apparent lack of empathy towards the four-year-old boy as big an Election issue as the flagship news bulletins claimed? Apparently, it was not.

Etc.