85%

Before my latest disappearing act, I posted about a Sky News/YouGov poll which suggests massive and growing distrust of broadcast journalists.

I think it's fair to say that this particular poll didn't go down too well with many in the media, with lots of leading lights - from Sky's Adam Boulton to ITV's Mark Austin and the BBC's John Simpson - pouncing on other polls that suggest far higher levels of public trust.

They also promoted dismissive comments from other pollsters and commentators in response to it. 

Other media defenders pointed to multiple polls suggesting that distrust in the media has been around for a while and long preceded the coronavirus crisis (though how helpful that is for the media I rather doubt!). 

In the first flurry of reaction and counter-reaction I noted that Cardiff University's Professor Stephen Cushion was prominent among the media defenders being cited by the likes of John Simpson, and this week Prof. Cushion was being cited again by John Simpson for a new Cardiff University study which finds - surprise, surprise - that the public do still trust the media.

Here's John Simpson's tweet about it:

Note to Culture Sec Oliver Dowden, who claims that the BBC risks losing public confidence: a study in today’s Independent finds that BBC News has a trust rating of 85%, while ITV & Ch4 have 73% & Sky has 69%. And people want more scrutiny of govt policy, not less.

My cynicism about Cardiff University's reports remains strong: Previous studies, you will recall, found the BBC to be right-wing and anti-EU. Their key researchers are a mix of hardcore left-wing media conspiracy theorists, far-left-activists, pro-EU people, centre-left folk and ex-BBC staff. And their hand-in-glove relationship with/dependency on the BBC, which uses them to reinforce all their major impartiality reviews, appears deeply unhealthy to me. 

But that's a bit too ad hominem. What actually troubles me about their latest study of less than 200 people is the mirror image of Prof. Cushion's concerns about the Sky/YouGov poll. 

He suggests that this Sky/YouGov poll asked its questions in a way that wasn't ideal  - even though it was commissioned by Sky News. But I'm far happier with the transparent questions put by YouGov (which anyone can read) than I am with Cardiff University's opaque in-depth one-on-one discussions with voters. 

What did the Cardiff University researchers ask the people being studied? Were their questions in any way leading questions? Did they comment throughout the discussions in such a way as to influence their subjects? Was there hidden bias in their questions?

Obviously, we'd need to see transcripts of the in-depth one-on-one discussions the Cardiff University researchers conducted and we'd need to inspect the wording of every question put by the researchers...

...especially if they bring about the truly fantastical-sounding result of 85% trust for BBC News, which I simply don't believe.

Still, I can see why the likes of John Simpson would enjoy reading Stephen Cushion in The Independent telling him that the public loves the BBC. 

But, John, what if it's not true that 85% of the public trust the BBC's journalists? What if Sky/You Gov were actually nearer the truth? What price your well-Cushioned comfort blankets then?

Move over Cardiff University!

The political editor of The Sunday Times is far from the only one astonished at a new, left-wing academic study of BBC bias:

This is hilarious. Lefty academics bemoan the way the wicked media framed the election to determine that the winner was the party with the most seats, rather than the one that had heroically lost by 10 points https://t.co/FpIJpancua

— Tim Shipman (@ShippersUnbound) December 23, 2019

Here are a couple of others:

Martin Wardle: LSE stuff is normally a decent read but I really can’t get what they’re on about here. Apparently the BBC was biased in the way it presented the exit poll using only “seats”. The single thing that decides who wins elections?! 

Dan Barker: This is quite strange. The LSE reports that the BBC's reporting of the (correct) exit poll on election night was 'systemic media bias', and that they should instead have spent more time reporting that Labour 'only' lost by 3.6 million votes.

Looking up the authors of the report, I see that the one whose name comes first - Pippa Norris - is director of the Electoral Integrity Project. That led me onto Wikipedia's entry on the Electoral Integrity Project. In the light of this new study, the entry makes for fascinating (and rather entertaining) reading: 

The Electoral Integrity Project is an academic project based at Harvard University and the University of Sydney which seeks to quantify the integrity of elections worldwide. The project freely publishes its Perceptions of Electoral Integrity dataset for scholarly use. The most recent data release (PEI 6.0) covers 285 elections in 164 countries from mid 2012 to the end of 2017. The founding Director is Pippa Norris.

The project received media attention in 2016 when it ranked the United States last among western nations. One of the project's International Advisory Board, Andrew Reynolds, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted in the Raleigh-based News and Observer that his home state's election integrity score was similar to Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. The study ranked integrity of the state's congressional districts lowest in the nation just below similar outlier Wisconsin. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal ridiculed the study, noting that "Democracy in New York (which scored a 61) and Virginia (60) is supposedly more imperiled than in Rwanda (64), though Rwanda is controlled by an autocrat. The worst-performing state, Arizona (53), is outranked by Kuwait (55), Ivory Coast (59) and Kyrgyzstan (54)."^] Dylan Matthews writing in Vox agreed that "it seems foolish to infer from that that the US is less of a democracy than Rwanda" but felt that the EIP had highlighted important issues such as gerrymandering and voter registration laws.^[ 

Statistician Andrew Gelman had a negative view of the PEI Index, commenting that "[it] all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence", noting among other things that the EIP's 2014 data release has previously given the North Korean parliamentary election an 'electoral integrity' score of 65.3 and Cuba 65.6, higher than elections in EU members Romania and Bulgaria.Norris addressed the controversy in two long replies to Gelman, noting that her team had subsequently dropped the North Korean election from the dataset. Gelman, however, questioned her justification for this removal and continued to question the EIP's methodology more generally.

You couldn't make it up.

Quelle Surprise!

This comment merits a post of its own:

stewgreen8 December 2019 at 12:26  

Every time we point out the hourly lefty bias of the BBC the leftmob shout "Look the Berry Report from the Cardiff School of Journalism shows that there is no lefty bias in the BBC".

So Berry who finds no left bias in the BBC now tweets: 

"There is no antisemitism crisis in Labour. There is a small number of people who hold antisemitic viewsand Labour has robust system to deal with them." 

Strangely he's been ratioed. 46 people clicked like vs 99 who clicked reply to disagree with him. 

Cue a reprise of this from 2013:

I come with my own biases, of course - but then so does the report author tasked with promoting the report to the world - Dr Mike Berry.  

He's associated with the Glasgow Media Group - a  40-year old left-wing campaign which, according to Wikipedia, "claimed that television news was biased in favour of powerful forces and actors in society and against less powerful groups such as the organised working class". He's co-authored several books with hardcore anti-Israel activist Greg Philo, head of the Glasgow Media Group, alleging pro-Israel bias on the part of the BBC. 

Someone who co-writes book after book attacking Israel and the "pro-Israel" BBC seems to come from a not dissimilar mindset to that of the leftist Media Lens website (which naturally approves of Dr Berry's work).  

And with that of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

The people who hold the BBC to account have a chat

Richard Sambrook, Director of the Centre of Journalism at Cardiff University, was, as regular readers will know, previously Head of Newsgathering for the BBC. 

He now heads a media department which, as regular readers will also know, both the BBC and Ofcom rely on to analyse the BBC's output for things like bias, and which produces reports that often seem to perform somersaults and loop-the-loops in the face of reality. 

Well, here's the great man engaging in a Twitter chat today with Samira Ahmed's predecessor as host of the BBC's 'hold-us-to-account' Newswatch, Raymond Snoddy:

Dick Sambrook: The fake factcheck, dodgy video edits, false opposition websites - The Tories are taking deceiving the public and active disinformation to new lows in this campaign. At some stage they will pay a price. 

Ray Snotty: Sooner rather than later I hope. 

Dick Sambrook: Its [sic] the most cynical campaign I've seen - and we've weeks to go! 

Ray Snotty: The only thing journalists can do is to continue to call out the lies - but as with Trump this natural optimist is pessimistic that the public is listening. 

Dick Sambrook: Agree Ray. The question for those fuelling the collapse of trust and mushrooming of cynicism is - after the entire house has burned to the ground, what do you do the next day? 

Ray Snotty: That's deep the only "solution" is to continue to engage however long it takes. BBC chairman slightly started at VoL&V [the pro-BBC Voice of the Listener and Viewer] yesterday that normal "friends of the BBC" are concerned at where the current line is drawn. Enemies from the centre for first time.

The people traditionally presented by the BBC are those worthy of holding them to account aren't exactly reassuring me here about their own impartiality. 

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.

Circles within circles within circles

Long-term readers will recall that the BBC, for its landmark impartiality reports, called on Cardiff University to do its contents analyses. 

The various far-lefties and ex-BBC types in the mighty Media department there duly declared the BBC to be broadly impartial but too pro-EU, too pro-business, too pro-Conservative etc. 

We slammed Cardiff's surveys for sampling far too little output, and for limiting that even further to just parts of the Today programme over a single week - one-and-a-half-hours of the programme rather than the entire three hours.

Ah, well, we've got Ofcom now. 

They're looking into the BBC with fresh eyes. 

But, just as most of the Ofcom folk have had links to the BBC, so we now learn, Ofcom's own reports are drawing on content analyses from....

yes...

...Cardiff University. 

Yes, I know. You couldn't make it up. 

And, yes, though they covered three weeks this time (still far from enough), they's still continuing to sample just parts of the Today programme rather than whole editions. 

And this time it's even worse, because rather than examinng half of each edition they're they're looking at just one hour now of each three hour edition (and no Saturdays). 

Why? Because it was "beyond their resources" to to do more! (I kid you not.)

Yes, I know. You still couldn't make it up.

I wouldn't ever automatically trust any findings they come up with. 

Are e-petition debates useless?

Since I brought this matter to your attention I felt duty bound to watch the debate at Westminster Hall yesterday. It was billed as an e-petitiion debate on BBC bias, but the entire caboodle was hijacked by the over 75s licence fee debacle. 

The proposed withdrawal of the existing BBC tax exemption or the over 75s is certainly a worthy cause, and the majority of the near-identical speeches on that topic put the blame on the government for passing the buck to the poor cash-strapped BBC, which apparently was left with little choice. I mean how else are they going to maintain Gary Lineker? 

In total, throughout the whole repetitive process, in total, I’d say about two and a half references to the BBC’s actual bias could be detected. If one managed to stay awake.

One speaker made a fleeting observation that the BBC was virtually the mouthpiece of the Guardian. 

There was a lengthy complaint from Clive Lewis. You may be able to guess the type of bias he was worried about. For added emphasis, he cited that dog-eared study by that bastion of impartiality and rigorous academic integrity, Cardiff University. 

There was one other speech that focused on the issue of bias. Graham Stringer MP went into considerable detail about the scandal surrounding a ‘set-up’.

“The BBC procured and presented on BBC Three, when it was a channel, a series of programmes called “People Like Us”. That was based in the ward that I used to represent as a councillor and that is still in the constituency I represent. Frankly, it was poverty porn. It gave the most distorted view of one of the poorest wards in the country. 

Depending on how we count these things—it is not a competition that any ward or constituency wants to win—Harpurhey is the poorest or the third poorest ward in the country. Cameras went along and the people making the programme pretended—it was a pretence—that they were following how people in Harpurhey lived. They were not; they were distorting it. They paid girls to fight each other. They opened a pub and created a most peculiar party of transvestites. I ​have nothing against transvestites, but that kind of situation had never happened in that particular public house, which was being closed for a couple of years. They got a pretend landlord in to talk about how he was very happy for his tenants to take drugs. It was clearly a put-up job. And some of the people who said outrageous things were taken on holiday by the company doing this. 

It was a shocking and terrible thing, and I do not believe that if people from that kind of background had been part of the BBC, that programme would ever have been made. Fortunately, there was not a second series. The head of BBC Three was good enough to see me and Councillor Karney, who represented the ward. I do not know whether it was down to our lobbying, but there was not a second series.”

He also touched briefly on other issues - climate change and Brexit, but that was it.

Many of the speakers were wildly complimentary about the BBC, some inadvertently damning it with faint praise with their emotional pleas that elderly people rely on it 'for company'.  

It was almost as if they hadn’t watched it since 1970. They say MPs are out of touch. I know we at ITBB are a bit geeky about it, but this was a demo of 'Westminster bubble gawn mad'.

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)...

Small world

Cardiff University

Here's something you might not have known - and I certainly didn't until a few days back - but a former regular on Radio 4's The Moral Maze is now the chairman of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, the board responsible for developing and ensuring compliance with the BBC’s editorial guidelines. 

No, it's not David Starkey or Roger Scruton and still less Melanie Phillips. It's Prof. Ian Hargreaves, one of the programme's old left-leaning regulars. 

Now, of course, him being an "old left-leaning regular" on The Moral Maze doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to be biased in his BBC role. To believe that would be to fall for the ad hominem fallacy. So we could just leave it there...

...however, as I was reading his Wikipedia entry to make sure it really was the same Ian Hargreaves I spotted another name - that of Justin Lewis. 

I thought, "No, it can't be that Justin Lewis, surely?". But it was, and it is. 

Justin Lewis, regulars may recall, is the head of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, which the BBC relies on for the data for its major impartiality reports. 

Past Cardiff studies have helpfully 'proved' the BBC to be basically impartial but not entirely free from pro-Right, pro-EU bias.

Prof. Lewis himself participates in these surveys, including (most recently) that fatally flawed attempt to re-'prove' that the BBC has a bit of a right-wing bias problem by assessing the corporation's coverage of think tanks that missed (probably forgot) one the UK's main (left-leaning) think tanks! 

And what, pray, is Justin Lewis's connection to Ian Hargreaves? Well, besides both of them being Cardiff University professors, Wikpedia says of Prof. Hargreaves: 

So the man whose media department produces the main impartiality findings for the BBC is the co-founder of Creative Cardiff with the current chairman of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board - the man who presumably receives and reviews such findings for the BBC.

And they both still work together at Cardiff University and Creative Cardiff. 

It's a small world, isn't it (for some)?

Have you forgotten something, Cardiff Uni?

Two of Cardiff University's academics, Justin Lewis and Stephen Cushion, have produced yet another report 'proving' that the BBC has a right-wing bias 

As regular readers will know, these researchers are from the same stable that the BBC relies on for its major impartiality reviews and they've previously produced reports 'finding' that the BBC, though broadly impartial, has a right-wing and anti-EU bias. (Hmm).

This latest one is a study of the BBC's use of think tanks and 'finds' that the BBC cites more right-wing than left-wing think tanks. QED.

The detail looks fascinating but within just one minute of looking in earnest at its data and hunting for its figures on the Resolution Foundation - the think tank I most associate with the BBC because I hear it mentioned a lot on the BBC (especially Today) and have written about the BBC's coverage of it before - guess what? I couldn't find any mention of the Resolution Foundation among the large list of think tanks they've monitored. 

Yes, it's not there. They've forgotten it!

So within a minute of digging deeper my initial impressions that their study looked impressive melted into air, into thin air.

How on earth could they forget the Resolution Foundation? As I say, it gets a lot of mentions on the BBC. (Check that link for yourselves if you fancy trying to doubt it). 

Though it has David Willetts as its executive chairman, the think tank is generally characterised as 'left-leaning', even by the BBC, as well as by the FT, Buzzfeed, The Times, etc, and if Justin and Stephen had remembered them then, using their own criterion, they would have to have included them in their 'Left or left-leaning' column, and that might have had a very significant impact on their results.

Professors Lewis and Cushion have surely made a fatal blunder in forgetting to include the Resolution Foundation. It's like conducting a study of bias based on the questions of Radio 4 current affairs presenters and forgetting, say, Mark Mardell. 

Please take a look at the report for yourselves, especially TABLE 2: Political classification of think tanks mentioned on BBC news, and see what you make of it.

Feathers flying and ad homs

News-watch has two new reports out today, and the Sunday Telegraph has reported their findings...

...and, my goodness, the BBC is not happy (to put it mildly).

News-watch's main findings are:

• that the BBC invited a third more pro-EU than Eurosceptic speakers to appear during the election campaign.
• that the BBC, during this period, has placed a heavy one-sided emphasis on the difficulties of withdrawing from the EU.
• that left-wing voices in favour of withdrawal from the EU were ignored for years by the BBC (of the 5,037 guests speakers on EU matters on Today between 2002 and 2015, only five were left-wing advocates of Brexit - 0.1% of the total speakers on the subject).

The BBC's response has been aggressive (to put it just as mildly): 

We do not recognise the allegations made by News-watch and to describe this as a 'report' would be a gross overstatement for what is a defective and loaded piece of work which wouldn't pass basic academic scrutiny.   

Across the election campaign we heard from a range of voices, provided our audiences with clear and balanced analysis and rigorously scrutinised the issues and this is quite simply as an obvious attempt by a lobby group to discredit the BBC when all we are doing is holding all politicians, no matter their view, to account.

I see that response as a ratcheting-up of the BBC's usual stonewalling whenever reports of this (unwelcome) kind come out - a ratcheting-up made all the easier by that absolutely dreadful Sun 'analysis' of 'BBC bias' on the Marr show and The Sunday Politics. As I wrote at the time:

The 'tally-ho' that went up from the BBC after that Sun survey also went up today. BBC types have been piling in on Twitter to rubbish the findings, despite not having read the reports in full - reports which News-watch will doubtless post in the coming days (as they always do). 

If you want to get the full flavour of the BBC's response today please explore the following Twitter thread, launched by blog favourite Rob Burley:

The "evidence" Rob has for asserting that News-watch's research is "unreliable" comes from one chap on Twitter who attempts to give it an impromptu fisking.

Peter the Would-Be Fisker initially goes for the ad hom approach (as did the BBC spokesman quoted above), checking out News-watch's website, putting two and two together and claiming it's partisan. 

Peter then picks one report and claims it lacks a methodology - even though the said report did have a clear methodology (on page 5) which Peter clearly failed to spot, probably in his headlong eagerness to quickly debunk News-watch.

Peter then says, "As far as I can see, none of these reports have methods section" - even though they actually all have clearly outlined methodologies. (Please check them for yourselves and you'll doubtless  all manage to "see" a good deal further than Peter here!).

Others, like the BBC's business reporter Joe Lynam, took a different ad hom route in trying to debunk News-watch today:

The snag with this one is that it's a very clever ad hom approach. It 'works'. 

As many BBC defenders on Twitter have said today, people who commission polls tend to get the results they want, or why commission the poll in the first place? The mere fact that pro-Leave, BBC-bashing MPs have commissioned this and got a result which proves them to be completely right about the BBC must mean that there's no smoke without fire. Monitoring groups can't be unbiased if they are commissioned. It stands to reason, surely?

Well, the obvious answer to that is that, no, it doesn't stand to reason at all. Not at all. 

The 'ad hominem' fallacy is, well, precisely that: a fallacy. The fact that a monitoring organisation (a pollster, an academic group, an independent monitoring unit) carries out a study on someone's behalf doesn't in itself invalidate anything. All that matters is the the quality and robustness of the evidence. If the evidence is offered transparently and holds up to scrutiny then all the 'ad homs' in the world will fail to refute it because the evidence is (or ought to be) independently verifiable (or refutable). 

Moreover, Joe Lynam & Co. invite another obvious riposte: The BBC's recent landmark impartiality studies, which largely 'proved' the BBC to be impartial, were commissioned by....guess who?...yes, by the BBC.

Aha! Does that invalidate the findings of all of those major BBC impartiality studies which found the BBC to be broadly impartial? By Joe's logic, yes, yes it does. 

And when the BBC commissions a bunch of ex-BBC types and pro-EU leftists and far-left activists at Cardiff University to review its entire output for impartiality and when they 'find' that the BBC has a bit of a right-wing, anti-EU bias but is basically sound and impartial, what's to stop people from 'the other side' playing exactly the same 'ad hom' card and rubbishing their findings on the 'no smoke without fire' principle that no-one-but-no-one puts aside their biases when publishing studies like this - least of all pro-BBC, pro-EU leftists commissioned by the BBC?

What's good for the pro-BBC goose is good for the anti-BBC gander, isn't it?

Now at this point a bit of necessary self-reflection is urgently needed because people on 'this side' are as guilty as anyone else of playing precisely the same game that Joe Lynam and the BBC spokesman quoted by the Telegraph have been playing here. We do it again and again.

And by that I also mean me. I partly rubbished that Cardiff University report (and others from Cardiff Uni) on exactly the same lines, so I'm no better than anyone else in that respect - except for the (blessed!) caveat mentioned below. (But, worse, that's far from the only time I've done it too).

So we all do it, and I don't blame Joe Lynam for trying it on here. We don't like or trust some statistic findings so we busily dig around and find 'Gotcha!' evidence that those responsible for those figures strongly hold a particular point of view and claim, abracadabra!, that their statistics must therefore be unreliable. 

It's so much easier to do that than to drill into the statistics themselves and, with an open mind, try to verify or refute them. 

Now in fairness to myself, I did also criticise the Cardiff survey on its merits too, condemning the extreme narrowness and randomness of its focus on just one week's output from two different years,  and comparing it to much better kinds of analysis, so my doubts about that Cardiff report remain. 

And that's what the BBC defenders ought to do here too, if they can. Do News-watch's findings stand up to scrutiny?

The fact that it's so much easier to take the 'ad hom' approach and try and find out who the researchers are, what their politics are, who backs them, who funds them, etc, and thus 'discredit' them, means, alas, that the 'ad hom' approach will always remain the first port of call for most people.

It's just the way it is (as Bruce Hornsby might put it).

...from both sides

In the interests of ITBB impartiality, I must note that all the 'BBC bias' hashtags on Twitter today are absolutely chock-a-block with links to an article on a left-wing site called Evolve Politics ('Truly Independent News and Media for the Awakened Generation') headlined Report reveals biased BBC has “high dependency” on the Conservatives for statistics.

When you click on it and look into the report, it turns out to be one from last October (so nothing new) from the BBC itself - the BBC Trust's impartiality report into the BBC's use of statistics, and the figure which is provoking such feverish twittering comes from Cardiff University's media department (the one stuffed with far-left activists and ex-BBC bigwigs) - the very people who 'found', statistically, that the BBC is right-wing and anti-EU a few years back on a very small sample.

The statistical point is that nearly three quarters (73%) of the BBC's use of statistical references from party politicians come from the Conservatives, which Cardiff University concludes “shows a high dependence on the governing party”.

The phrase "high dependency on the Conservatives" is being tweeted far and wide (often with an accompanying photo of a sour-looking Laura Kuenssberg).  

Of course, it would be good to know (and I can't find it anywhere) what percentage of statistical references from party politicians came from the Labour Party when they were in power. Would it have been similar, or less, or more? That would put this statistic into context. Is that just something that happens regardless of who's in power, simply because they're the government? Or is the BBC Tory-biased?


P.S. According to Merriam-Webster:

Chockablock started out as a nautical term. A block is a metal or wooden case with one or more pulleys inside. Sometimes, two or more blocks are used (as part of a rope and pulley system called a "block and tackle") to provide a mechanical advantage - as, for example, when hoisting a sail on a traditional sailing ship. When the rope is pulled as far as it will go, the blocks are tight together and are said to be "chockablock." Non-nautical types associated the "chock" in "chockablock" with "chock-full," which goes back to Middle English chokkefull, meaning "full to the limit (a figurative use of "full to choking"). We thus gave "chockablock" the additional meaning "filled up." "Chockablock" can also be an adverb meaning "as close or as completely as possible," as in "families living chockablock" or the seemingly redundant "chockablock full."

That was then. This is now

We received an interesting comment the other day on a very old thread concerning how to monitor BBC party political bias. 

Part of the comment struck me as worth expanding on because it contained an assertion which I'm seeing more and more often (from the Left) on Twitter:

The overwhelming objective evidence found from analysing political coverage showed that even during a Labour government the amount of Conservative voices aired remained consistently higher than those on the left and under a Conservative government this increased significantly in disproportionate bias. 

I'm guessing that "the overwhelming objective evidence" in question is that (in)famous Cardiff University study (by various far-leftists and ex-BBC high-ups) which used a ridiculously small sample - just five day's worth of various flagship BBC programmes in 2007 and 2012 respectively (including, bizarrely, only half (7.00-8.30) of the Today programme) -  and 'found' that not only was the BBC pro-Tory-biased and anti-EU-biased but also 'found' that Jon Snow's Channel 4 News was pretty right-wing-biased too!!! (Well, Owen Jones, the Corbynista multitude and, intriguingly, various BBC types on Twitter liked it!!)

As I may just have mentioned before, my own intensive period of research from June 2009-April 2010 covered some of the topics in the Cardiff report and examined every interview with a party politician (some 2,200 of them) on all of the main BBC current affairs programmes over this period (including Today, Newsnight, The World at One, PM, Today, The Daily Politics, The Andrew Marr Show, Broadcasting House, The World This Weekend, Westminster Hour, among others!) - all the results of which can be seen at my old blog. There was nothing 'ridiculously small' about that sample!

Between July 2009 and January 2010 (inclusive), I laboriously counted up all the lengths of all the interviews involving those party politicians and, by further laborious counting, derived a monthly 'airtime' total for each political party.

It's the most precise thing I've ever done in the blogosphere, and what it shows is that there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to the claim that "even during a Labour government the amount of Conservative voices aired remained consistently higher than those on the left". 

In fact, the exact opposite is the the case. Except for the month when the BBC covered the Conservative Party conference, the then-Labour government got more airtime than the Tories every month - usually massively more. 

Strikingly, in 5 out of the 7 months survey the Labour government got more airtime than all the opposition parties combined. 

And, looking back at these figures again, isn't it striking just how little interview time UKIP got back then? 

July 2009

Labour - 60.92%

Conservatives - 24.08%

Lib Dems - 10.82%

SNP - 2.08%

Greens - 0.82%

BNP - 0.76%

UKIP - 0.32%

Plaid Cymru - 0.22%

August 2009

Labour - 6 hours 5 minutes 33 seconds, 52.3%

Conservatives - 2 hours 37 minutes 57 seconds, 22.6%

Liberal Democrats - 1 hour 32 minutes 15 seconds, 13.2%

SNP - 1 hour 7 minutes 6 seconds, 9.6%

Greens - 7 minutes 11 seconds, 1%

Independents - 3 minutes 47 seconds, 0.5%

UKIP - 3 minutes 33 seconds, 0.5%

Plaid Cymru - 2 minutes 42 seconds, 0.3%

September 2009

Labour - 12 hours 25 minutes 26 seconds, 61.51%

Liberal Democrats - 4 hours 5 minutes 10 seconds, 19.98%

Conservatives - 2 hours 52 minutes 1 second, 14.03%

SNP - 19 minutes 35 seconds, 1.58%

UKIP - 10 minutes 52 seconds, 0.86%

Plaid Cymru - 7 minutes 34 seconds, 0.62%

Independent - 5 minutes 16 seconds, 0.43%

Greens - 2 minutes 51 seconds, 0.23%

English Democrats - 2 minutes 47 seconds, 0.23%

UUP - 2 minutes 27 seconds, 0.21%

DUP - 2 minutes 15 seconds, 0.19%

SDLP - 1 minute 56 seconds, 0.13%

October 2009

Conservatives - 10 hours 51 minutes 29 seconds, 43.20%

Labour - 10 hours 42 minutes 41 seconds, 42.61%

Liberal Democrats - 1 hour 45 minutes 39 seconds, 6.99%

SNP - 1 hour 0 minutes 22 seconds, 3.99%

UKIP - 11 minutes 17 seconds, 0.74%

DUP - 9 minutes 2 seconds, 0.60%

BNP - 8 minutes 8 seconds, 0.54%

Sinn Fein - 6 minutes 16 seconds, 0.41%

Greens - 5 minutes 20 seconds, 0.34%

Alliance - 3 minutes 26 seconds, 0.22%

Plaid Cymru - 3 minutes 16 seconds, 0.21%

UUP - 2 minutes 27 seconds, 0.15%

November 2009

Labour - 7 hours 44 minutes 21 seconds (41.1%)

Conservatives - 6 hours 25 minutes 11 seconds (34.1%)

Liberal Democrats - 2 hours 16 minutes 19 seconds (12.0%)

SNP- 1 hour 15 minutes 4 seconds (6.7%)

UKIP - 29 minutes 10 seconds (2.6%)

Greens - 16 minutes 34 seconds (1.5%)

Sinn Fein - 9 minutes 35 seconds (0.9%)

Independents - 8 minutes 1 second (0.7%)

Plaid Cymru - 4 minutes 59 seconds (0.4%)

December 2009

Labour - 56.20% (7h 49m 56s)

Conservatives - 29.01% (4h 2m 40s)

Lib Dems - 11.65% (1h 37m 30s)

SNP - 1.21% (10m 13s)

UKIP - 0.99% (8m 25s)

Independents - 0.65% (5m 40s)

Plaid Cymru - 0.29% (2m 46s)

January 2010

Labour - 54.81% (12h 13m 18s)

Conservatives - 22.81% (5h 5m 13s)

Lib Dems - 12.65% (2h 49m 19s)

SNP - 2.25% (30m 10s)

Sinn Fein - 1.68% (22m 49s)

UKIP - 1.44% (19m 28s)

DUP - 1.22% (16m 34s)

Independents - 0.90% (12m 1s)

Greens - 0.60% (8m 4s)

SDLP - 0.48% (6m 46s)

Alliance - 0.46% (6m 18s)

TUV - 0.46% (6m 18s)

Respect - 0.24% (3m 16s)

Of course, that was then and this is now. UKIP gets a lot more airtime these days. The Conservatives are now the government and the BBC, I don't doubt; will have been inviting them on more than their political opponents (even before the present EU referendum debate). 

But how much so?

I half-regret not monitoring these airtime figures in the months after the 2015 election to see just how much more coverage the Tories got than, say, Labour - if they got more coverage. 

I only 'half-regret' it because I've got absolutely no intention of ever putting myself through such a wearying (if strangely enjoyable) monitoring exercise again - even if such a monitoring exercise has now proved its value by totally disproving a much-tweeted assertion about BBC pro-Tory bias from the Left. 

Maybe, if there's still a Conservative government in 2019, I might return to the fray and seriously monitor this issue again for, say, a couple of months (and not during the party conference season) in order to test how things stand under a Conservative government as opposed to a Labour government. 

It really would be fascinating, I think, to see if the Tories are dominating the BBC's airwaves to the extraordinary extent that Labour did when they were in power (in a non-referendum period, of course). 

In the interests of democracy, that is surely a question worth investigating. I probably ought to step up to the mark and do it (in 2019 - if, post-referendum, the government hasn't completely fallen apart to such an extent that the fixed-term parliament act is overridden, an election has been held and Jeremy Corbyn (or John McDonnell) is PM).  

What questions would it answer? Well, questions like:

• Did Labour rule the BBC waves back then simply because they were the governing party? (The 'pro-establishment' v 'pro-Left-biased' question). 
• Would a similar survey show as much of a 'bias', airtime-wise, towards the Tories in the latter stage of their term in office? - and if so, what would that prove? (and if not, what would that prove?)
• Is the BBC biased?

The Great European Disaster Movie III

News-watch's David Keighley has posted an article today which casts a good deal of extra light on the subject of the previous post [Update: Er, actually he posted it in March when the programme originally sent out. So much for my ability to read a date!]. 

He says that when the BBC said that no EU money was used "in the making of the programme being aired on the BBC" they were technically correct but were choosing their words very carefully - or, as David puts it, using "weasel words":

The reality is that post-production, the film-makers Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras – both of whom are pro-EU fanatics – have told the outside world they are receiving EU money for the transmission of the film in other languages. So put another way, it is an EU propaganda project. 

And the BBC were co-producers of that film.

So it's not quite as simple as I first thought.

(Darn it! Those BBC spokesmen make Sir Humphrey Appleby seem like a rank amateur at times). 

And it gets even less simple as the question still remains: Who did fund the making of the film? 

Given that the funding of the small company behind it (owned by Ms Piras) remains a mystery and that such a glossy documentary wouldn't come cheap, David says:

Someone with deep pockets and a deep desire to spread massively pro-EU propaganda was behind it. The BBC should tell us who this was so we can make up our own minds about the decision to show it.

(As per the comments on the previous thread), he then says that more questions arise due to former BBC top executive-turned Cardiff University professor Richard Sambrook's involvement with the Wake Up Foundation, of which Professor Sambrook, Ms Piras and Mr Emmott are all trustees.

Professor Sambrook was the co-author of a much-cited, BBC-backed Cardiff University report which 'found' - to general astonishment - that the BBC didn't just not have a pro-EU bias but 'actually' has a pronounced anti-EU bias!...

...and this report fed into the BBC's widely-reported Prebble Review:

So, put another way, the BBC commissioned a rabidly pro-EU programme from a programme making duo who have close professional and organisational links with a former Director of BBC News who, in turn, has been appointed by the Corporation to tell the outside world – on a supposedly ‘objective’ basis – how balanced and impartial the BBC’s output in relation to the EU is. 

The linkage raises several awkward questions.  Was Sambrook directly involved in the making of the European Disaster Movie? Was he involved in any way in persuading the BBC to show it and to become co-producers? To what extent is he involved in the dissemination of the pro-EU propaganda of the Wake Up Foundation? Were the BBC aware of his links with Emmott when they commissioned his department to do the Prebble survey? 

Something in the state of Denmark, if not rotten, smells very fishy indeed.

Doesn't it just!

Oh gawd, and now the BBC's Head of Newsgathering is at it!

If there's one thing you can say about the Twitter feed of Jonathan Munro, the BBC's Head of Newsgathering, is that it's ultra-loyal to the BBC. If there's praise for the BBC or a defence of the BBC, he'll tweet about it. 

That said, he did tweet a link to an article about BBC bias that does contain some criticisms of the BBC and whose conclusions are:

So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.

Inevitably, Mr Munro of the BBC, links (without comment) to far-left Cardiff University academic Mike Berry's piece at The Conversation.

Hard Evidence: how biased is the BBC? http://t.co/LwDFxvIyLt via @ConversationUK

— Jonathan Munro (@jonathancmunro) May 10, 2015

It's an article countless left-wingers on Twitter (including Owen Jones and Jon Donnison) have been tweeting about and re-tweeting for nigh on two years. 

And now here's the BBC's Head of Newsgathering recommending it to the world on Twitter.

Presumably he did so in order to 'prove' that the BBC gets criticism from both sides and must, therefore, be getting it about right.

The fact that Mike Berry's piece was based (as we've pointed out before) on a debunked, BBC-funded study written by a collection of far-left wing academics and people with close links to the BBC won't stop people like him from using it to serve their own purposes. 

And because it comes from Cardiff University's huge media department and the BBC relies on the Cardiff University's media department for much of its 'independent' research, it doubtless sounds authoritative enough to be believed by people who haven't thought to stand back from it and scrutinise it. 

It's not very impressive, therefore, that Jonathan Munro is using Mike Berry's article in this way, is it?

Mr Munro's own latest tweet, if you were wondering, is this:

So UKIP's only MP says #Farage needs to take a break. All going well then.

— Jonathan Munro (@jonathancmunro) May 15, 2015

#bbcbias?

Cardiff Uni and the Guardian combine in praise of the BBC

Oh my, this is funny!

Yes, the BBC's election night coverage may have been savaged by all-and-sundry in the UK press, but at least one British newspaper is still prepared to stick up for it.

That newspaper is....brace yourselves for a shock!...The Guardian. (I know. I was completely gob-smacked too!):

And it gets better: The people extolling the BBC's coverage there at the Gnuariad are our old friends from Cardiff University, Richard Sambrook and Stephen Cushion. 

Richard Sambrook was, of course, the top dog at BBC News until 2008 and Stephen Cushion  (as you may recall from an earlier post) was employed by the BBC to work on two BBC Trust impartiality reviews into the reporting of post-devolution Britain and three BBC-funded reports into 24-hour news.

All hail the BBC-Guardian-Cardiff University axis, for their wisdom knows no end!