Of Francoists and illegal referendums

Q: Which side is this?

The BBC's Catalonia coverage has been quite controversial. 

I know that many of you, like lots of people I see on Twitter, think the BBC has been biased in favour of Spain against supporters of Catalan independence, but the BBC also came under attack last week from a couple of MPs - Labour's Chris Bryant and the Conservatives' Sir Greg Knight - who jointly accused it of 'pro-separatist bias'. 

Mr Bryant and Sir Greg, the Times reported,

...condemned the BBC for referring to Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, as a Francoist, “as if to suggest that he supports a totalitarian state”. They said: “The impression left by BBC reports is that this is a battle between noble-spirited Catalans and iron-fisted Franco-supporting right-wingers. This too is entirely misleading. 

As soon as I read that I wondered, "Did the BBC really call Mr Rajoy 'a Francoist'?" Because if they did that would be quite something, especially if they meant by it that the Spanish PM is a Francoist now, here in 2017. I've hunted and hunted and I can't find any evidence that the BBC actually did call him that, but who am I to doubt such honourable gentlemen (as Mark Antony might have said)? 

Anyhow, this week's Newswatch with Samira Ahmed saw more complaints of pro-independence bias from three viewers, and Samira said that most of the complaints about the BBC's Catalonia coverage had come from that direction too. The BBC's Andrew Roy came into the studio to answer the charges and, in the way of BBC editors on Newswatch, stood by every jot and tittle of the BBC's coverage.

(Incidentally, the conspiratorially-minded among you will notice that if you add the letters 'a' and 'j' - the German for 'yes' backwards - to Andrew Roy's surname you get 'Rajoy'. Can that really be a coincidence?)

Here's the inevitable transcript:

Andrew Roy

SAMIRA AHMED: I'm joined by Andrew Roy, who's World Editor for BBC News. Thank you for coming on Newswatch. Most of the viewers who did complain said the BBC had been too favourable to the pro-independence side. How do you respond? 

ANDREW ROY: We haven't been. We've been physically in both locations, in Madrid and Barcelona, so we can put both points of view. Our correspondents have always been careful to get pro and anti clips from protesters and politicians into their pieces. We've been trying throughout to be absolutely rigorous in being impartial and objective and putting both sides of the argument. 

SAMIRA AHMED: I think the concern is that the headline coverage, which is how most viewers encounter the story, they feel has given the impression that this has been primarily a violent state crackdown on a popular independence movement and that's not fair. 

ANDREW ROY: I think that's incorrect as well. There was violence at the very beginning around the illegal referendum. We reported that the referendum was illegal. We showed what was happening in the polling stations. We also reported afterwards the disparity in figures about the numbers arrested and the people injured by both sides. Since then, there hasn't been much violence. There has only been a series of rallies in Madrid and Barcelona, both pro and anti independence, and we've been reporting that, reporting what the politicians have been saying, and giving both sides air time. 

SAMIRA AHMED: Do you think you did enough to explain why the referendum was illegal? 

ANDREW ROY: We've put online an awful lot of explainers. We've got pieces about the constitution of Spain. We have got pieces about the devolved powers of Catalonia. We have the history of the two sides in this dispute. If your audiences are saying they still don't understand it then maybe we need to do more, but we've certainly gone out of our way to try to explain what is a complex situation and anyone who wants more depth, that's all available online. 

SAMIRA AHMED: The trouble is, audiences, I think reasonably, can say we can't be expected to go hunting for every piece of background online. The bulletins are what a lot of people watch and that is what they are complaining about. And perhaps in reports that tend to be two or three minutes long, it becomes simplified as a tale of right and wrong. 

ANDREW ROY: We haven't been doing just two or three minutes on this story. We've been doing much, much more than that throughout the whole dispute, and like I say, we have also been pointing out here is a correspondent in Madrid, here is a correspondent in Barcelona, we're giving you both sides of the story. We've done historical explainers on air. We've also brought in the issues about the economics around this independence movement and whether it would or wouldn't work. So we've tried as hard as we can to get across to the audience the complexities of it in a reduced television bulletin, but this issue has had an awful lot of air time. 

SAMIRA AHMED: I think there's a particular challenge for television when you get passionate, colourful demonstrations wanting change, compared to what can seem a relatively grey argument, with a government that wants to keep things the same. Does that leave viewers inevitably with an unbalanced impression? 

ANDREW ROY: You saw from those clips, that the people who are in favour of unity are just as passionate and waving just as many flags, confusingly similarly coloured to the Catalan flags, but they are as passionate in putting their views across. We covered those rallies. We covered them when they are in Barcelona and when they are in Madrid. And we also go out into the crowd and get the voices supporting the rallies and also the voices down the sides of the rallies, who are possibly not supporting that point of view. So we do try to get the balance across, but also within the bulletins pieces we do. 

SAMIRA AHMED: Andrew Roy, thank you. 

Andrew Roy on 'Newswatch'

This week's Newswatch covered the BBC's reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Samira Ahmed's began:

It's the topic which attracts the most intense controversy and criticism of BBC news output: how the corporation covers conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The past week has seen another upsurge in violence with seven Israelis killed in a spate of near-daily stabbings and at least 30 Palestinians.

A clip of Orla Guerin reporting on one of the grisliest of the attacks on Israelis was then played.

Samira continued:

Whenever the BBC reports on escalations of violence such as this hundreds of viewers do get in touch, often alleging bias in one direction or another.

A couple of examples were read out: one saying that Israel is always shown in a bad light, as the aggressor and that "always you put the Palestinians' point of view first", the other saying the BBC is biased towards Israel, highlighting Israeli deaths from stabbings and shooting and downplaying the deaths of "innocent Palestinians".

This, of course, is classic "complaints from both sides" territory, which the BBC invariably deploys to counter criticisms of bias.

"If both sides are complaining we must be getting it about right", they say, ignoring the possibility that one side may the right (and have plenty of credible evidence) and the other wrong (and have little credible evidence).

Having so framed the discussion, Samira asked:

So how does the BBC attempt to main objectivity and balance in the face of such criticism, and does it succeed?

She then interviewed Andrew Roy, foreign editor of BBC News - a transcription of which now follows.

I'm posting it as Andrew Roy gives a clear statement of the BBC's official policy here. 

Whether the BBC lives up to it and whether there's a lot missing from Mr Roy's account are questions that naturally arise, of course (and to which we know the answers)...

Samira Ahmed: Andrew, this is such a hugely divisive issue. It has been for years. How do you deal with the pressure from both sides?

Andrew Roy: Our reports come under incredibly close scrutiny, minute scrutiny. We're minuted by some organisations about the amount of airtime we give to one side or the other. The tone of our reports, the words we use, everything is looked at in microscopic detail. We're used to that. What we try to do is focus on what's important, which is reporting from the scene with our reporters. with our editors, to try and give context and analysis, to keep it balanced. to keep it objective and independent.

Samira Ahmed: People who've been watching the escalation of violence in the past week might be saying, 'Well, how do I know that the BBC's devoting absolutely impartial coverage to this?' So how would you spell out the approach you've taken?

Andrew Roy: Well, Friday afternoon there were pretty big protests in the area, so we had team on both sides. We had one sequence where we had one reporter on the Israeli side organising a two-way between Tzipi Livni on the Israeli side, Mustapha Bargouti on the Palestinian side and brought in our own reporter from the Palestinian side. So we're live on both sides of the conflict bringing in guests from both sides of the conflict and giving everybody an equal opportunity to put their viewpoint and giving our audience an insight into what was happening on both sides of the conflict. That's the sort of thing we're doing day in and day out on this story, on television, on radio and online.

Samira Ahmed: Obviously viewers don't necessarily watch all the coverage that there is, but some viewers get in touch because they feel they turn on BBC News and they see BBC reporters on the ground, Palestinians throwing stones, expressing their frustrations, and feel that we're seeing clashes mainly from that side.

Andrew Roy: No, that's not the case. If you look at the broad sweep of our coverage we don't report things from one direction or one side in any particular pattern, There is pre-formed BBC idea about how we report this conflict. We don't just say, 'We will always do it that way or we will always do it this way'. So once you look at the spread of our coverage you will see that we're giving both sides equal weight and equal balance in our reports.

Samira Ahmed: Want to ask a question about footage. In recent days with these terrible knife attacks we've sometimes seen mobile phone footage used in breaking news. Is there a danger that the drama of the pictures might take precedence over the reporting of the event in a calm, balanced way?

Andrew Roy: Well, you need to balance, as you describe it, the drama of footage like that with what you're saying in the piece, what you've got around the piece, around those reports, around that video. so that you're not giving extreme weight to one thing just because of the happenstance of the images and where they've come from. So we try to make sure the reports have a context around them that helps the audience get over that, that we're not just doing things for high impact around particular images that might have come in.

Samira Ahmed: The attacks that we've been seeing in the past few days, particularly...there have been stabbings. It feels very different to the kind of violence that might have been reported over the last decade. Is that true from the BBC's point of view?

Andrew Roy: This does feel like a new style of conflict. In the past there have been very large protests and that's been the focus for uprisings and conflicts from both sides. This seems to be based around individuals. We're trying as much as we can to explain this new style of conflict to our audiences, to look at what might be behind it, what might be sustaining it, to look at responses to it and things like that.

Samira Ahmed: One of the big dilemmas, of course, is when you decide to report the specifics of the news incident that's just happened and how far can you contextualise it in the history of the region - which, of course, takes up a lot more time on a news report, doesn't it?

Andrew Roy: And we're constrained by time. You know, there's a 60-second report on the radio, it's very difficult to sum up decades of conflict in there. We try to do it as often as we can/ We also refer our audience to other areas of the BBC where we have that historical context, to help them understand....

Samira Ahmed: What, the website?

Andrew Roy: Exactly...to offer them longer analysis that some of our other correspondents are filing there to put the conflict into its perspective. But we can't always get it in every single report. simply because there isn't the airtime to do that.