Who's the fairest of them all?

If you're interested, here are the results of the other surveys by Mark Lees:

Just looked at the last 50 tweets & retweets on Beth Rigby's Twitter Timeline. Of the last 50 tweets or rt's, 18 included overtly critical messaging of a political party. Of those 18: 15 were critical of the Tories. 2 were critical of Labour. 1 was critical of the Lib Dems.
As a % of criticism towards a particular party: 83% criticism of the Tories. 11% criticism of Labour. 6% criticism of the Lib Dems. 0% criticism of the SNP. 0% criticism of the Greens. 0% criticism of the BXP Source: Beth Rigby's Twitter timeline, last 50 tweets & rt's.

Here are Kay Burley's stats: Of the last 50 tweets and retweets, 24 overtly criticise a political party. Of the 24: 23 criticise the Conservatives 1 criticises Labour 0 criticise the Lib Dems 0 criticise the BXP 0 criticise the SNP 0 criticise the Greens 0 criticise Plaid
As a percentage that is: 96% criticism of the Conservatives. 4% criticism of Labour. 0% criticism of the Lib Dems. 0% criticism of the SNP. 0% criticism of the Greens. 0% criticism of the BXP. Source: Kay Burley's twitter timeline, last 50 tweets and retweets.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy

Of the last 50 tweets or retweets on Krishnan's timeline, 15 tweets overtly criticise a political party.

11 criticise the Conservatives. 3 criticise the Lib Dems. 1 criticises Labour. 0 criticise the SNP. 0 criticise the Brexit Party.
As percentages: 73% criticism against the Tories. 20% criticism against the Lib Dems. 7% criticism against Labour. 0% criticism of any other party. Source: Krishnan Guru-Murthy's Twitter timeline. Last 50 tweets or retweets.

Just looked at the last 50 tweets or retweets on Robert Peston's Twitter feed. Of the 50 tweets or retweets, 17 overtly criticised a political party. Of those 17: 12 criticise the Tories 3 criticise the Lib Dems 2 criticise Labour 0 for any other party.

You may have noticed a pattern. But there's one exception (so far):

Laura Kuenssberg
Of the last 50 tweets or retweets on Laura Kuenssberg's timeline, 12 were overtly critical of a political party. Of those 12: 6 criticised the Conservatives. 6 criticised the Labour Party. 0 criticism of other parties.
In percentages: 50% criticism of the Conservatives. 50% criticism of the Labour Party. That's an exact balance of criticism between the 2 main parties. Source: Laura Kuenssberg's Twitter Timeline. Last 50 tweets or retweets.

Weel done, Laura K!

Jess Phillips rivals Puck and puts a girdle round her consituency in 46 minutes

On today's Politics Live Labour MP Jess Phillips, talking about the 2017 general election, said:

It's funny you should say that because obviously we do a lot of polling during election time as politicians. We knock on lots of doors. I knocked on 25,000 doors in that six week period and 12 times somebody mentioned Brexit to me.

Jo Coburn didn't question her maths but, if you work out the averages, that means that Jess knocked on 4,167 doors each week of her campaign.

This also means that if she campaigned seven days a week throughout those six weeks without a single day off she knocked on 595 doors each day.

And if she didn't sleep and knocked on those doors 24/7 (as they say in America), that would result in 25 knocks an hour. 

But, of course, she must have slept - and so must her constituents. 

So let's assume that she only knocked on doors during daytime hours but still did very long days.

Let's say (being very generous) that she campaigned for 13 hours - say from 8am to 9pm.

Well, that would result in an average of 46 doors being knocked per hour...

...giving each voter just about a minute of Jess's time in which not to mention Brexit. 

It's theoretically possible, of course, but given the fact that...

(a) Jess must have had lunch and taken other breaks (such as toilet breaks and mobile phone calls and lots of BBC interviews), and...

(b) Jess surely can't simply have gone door-to-door among 595 very-closely-spaced houses without crossing roads and changing streets or moving areas, and...

(c) Jess surely can't have spent just a minute at each and every property, from leaving one house to reaching next door's door bell and introducing herself and making her pitch and listening to her constituents and saying goodbye,

...then, ergo, she's probably wildly overstating the number of doors she knocked at during the 2017 election.

Unless she's Superwoman or Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman.

(And, even then, it's pushing it.)

On the other hand, if Jess isn't wildly overstating the number of doors she knocked at and really did speak to all of those 25,000 door-opening constituents (from leaving the previous house to leaving the next house, and not one of them being out or ignoring the door bell), then no wonder only 12 people mentioned Brexit to her. 

In fact, if she did speak to all of those 25,000 door-opening constituents then the true miracle (a miracle of miracles) is that even as many as 12 people managed to mention Brexit to her. 

Think about it:  Unless the voter opening to the door to her immediately yelled 'Brexit!' and then slammed the door in her face prompting her to make a very quick exit after her very quick arrival, not one of her 25,000 constituents would have had the time to talk about Brexit to her - or anything else for that matter. They would barely have had time to say 'hello' and 'goodbye'.

So maybe Jess should slow down and actually talk to her constituents rather than trying to cram in 46 separate chats with her voters, all in different houses, every hour during a 13-hour day, 7 days a week throughout a campaign lasting 6 long weeks.

Conclusion: Either Jess's self-promoting stat is massively wrong or she's a terrible constituency MP.

Update: Hmm. I see a sub-species of Twitter folk are also doing the sums too and finding the same results. It's hard to get a proper scoop these days. Woe is me!

More nonsense

Talking about nonsense, try this gem out:

The BBC is biased against the left.

Don’t take my word for it, just take a moment to watch this superb video from @alexnunns and @EL4JC - and then give it a retweet. pic.twitter.com/40ckrkkdk9

— Rachael Swindon #EL4C (@Rachael_Swindon) July 6, 2019

Now, this wonderful video totals up the various commenters on the old Sunday Politics show and finds that the programme was dominated by the Right, with the Centre coming in second and the Left lagging way behind. It also find that there has never been two left guests on the panel. 

Damning, eh? Except that the chaps behind it chose to put Polly Toynbee, Helen Lewis, George Eaton, Steve Richards, Anushka Asthana, Rafael Behr, Gaby Hinsliff and Ella Whelan in the Centre column rather than the Left column and shoved everyone else not of the far-Left into the Right Column.

Now, if you move Polly & Co, back into the Left column, a very different story emerges. The Centre plummets and the Left soars, and it also turns out that there have been many occasions when there were two left-of-centre commentators on the same programme.

Actually, if you watch the dizzying sequence grow on that video, a proper trend does emerge. As the date gets nearer to today the frequency of the far-Left's appearances grows. (The show sadly ended before Ash Sarkar arrived on the scene!)

Are 'Question Time' and 'Any Questions' biased against Leave supporters?

Last month came that Civitas paper The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation? which laid bare, in considerable detail, twenty years' worth of material proving that pro-withdrawal voices were consistently marginalised by the BBC despite large percentages of the British public (just-as-consistently) wanting us to leave the EU. It's main focus was Today.

Then, on the very last day of last month, came an Institute of Economic Affairs study into the same subject which focused instead on Question Time and Any Questions and which also found systematic bias against Leave supporters. 

Looking at 281 Question Time panellists and 297 Any Questions panellists over an 18 month period from June 2016 to December 2017, it found that: 

Balancing on the basis of whether panellists voted for Remain or Leave, both programmes favour Remain by about 68% to 32%.  

Even if you were to re-categorise Remainers who are now supporting Brexit from the government benches into the Leave column, the balance is still 60% to 40% in favour of Remain.

The statistic in the second paragraph is a useful one. That was something The Sun failed to consider when it tried a similar (but far more inept) thing with The Andrew Marr Show and The Sunday Politics last year. It's only right and proper that the IEA includes those 'Releavers' as the first statistic by itself wouldn't be enough now. 

The IEA goes on: 

The imbalance on the two programmes is substantial, consistent and at odds with public opinion. The analysis reveals a two to one bias in favour of those who voted for Remain. 

Brexit is probably the most defining issue of the UK policy debate at present and as such should be vital in balance. For the vast majority of both programmes, Brexit has been the most dominant issue discussed on both programmes. Both shows appear to accept the predominance of Brexit as an issue, but by the selection of panellists seem to attach a low priority to balancing the panel on the topic.

The BBC's response is typical. It runs as follows:

Neither Question Time nor Any Questions are ‘single issue’ programmes and panellists are expected to address a range of subjects each week. 

Aside from politicians, the rest of the panels consist of political commentators, journalists, and other public figures who represent a range of viewpoints. 

The BBC is no longer reporting on the binary choice which faced the electorate in the referendum 18 months ago. 

Question Time and Any Questions – with due impartiality – are giving audiences the opportunity to hold to account politicians from government and opposition parties for the way they are carrying out Brexit.

This restates the Nick Robinson line that "the war is over" and that the BBC doesn't have to balance both sides of the Brexit debate any more. It's all about that fuzzy phrase 'due impartiality' now. 

I can see the logic of the BBC's defence. Given that our political class is overwhelmingly 'not keen' on Brexit and that these programmes have to balance panellists across a whole range of issues, an imbalance in favour of various shades of Remainers is probably inevitable when programmes aren't 'single issue' programmes and we aren't in a pre-referendum period (and Question Time, at least, was pretty much exemplary in balancing its panels in the months leading up to the referendum, with 39 Remain, 35 Leave and 3 undecided panellists, and 6 panels biased towards Remain, 6 panels biased towards Leave and 3 balanced panels - which shows it can be done!). That said, it looks as if the IEA saw the BBC coming here by saying that Brexit was the dominant issue on both programmes for "the vast majority" of the time. 

This kind of study is different though to that carried out by Civitas. The Civitas study focused only on the BBC's coverage of EU membership/Brexit-related issue so the BBC couldn't counter it by saying that Today isn't a 'single issue' programme. The Civitas study made it into an entirely 'single issue' matter. The BBC's defence doesn't work at all with that kind of study. 

The BBC Hasn't Got a Leg to Stand On

The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation? is the title of a new Civitas report published today. 

It's a gathering together of over 18 years worth of work by David and Andrew at News-watch and takes about two hours to read the whole thing - something I'd recommend you do if you can, especially as there are plenty of fascinating details...

...such as that during News-watch's first monitoring exercise - the 1999 European Parliament elections - there was just one interview on the theme of withdrawal from the EU. It was with a 38-year-old UKIP spokesman by the name of Nigel Farage: "In the exchange, John Humphrys bracketed the party with the BNP, and then suggested that leaving the EU was ‘literally unthinkable’ because of all the turmoil that would be created". 

The central theme of the report is that, despite public support for withdrawal from the EU being either a huge minority or a majority throughout that entire time, the BBC pretty much ignored it. 

For starters, the BBC only very rarely interviewed pro-withdrawal speakers over a long period: 

The BBC's choice of guests, therefore, has been consistently and overwhelmingly biased against pro-withdrawal voices to a truly staggering degree - until the referendum of course (though the BBC has subsequently regressed again).

And the agenda-setting BBC behaved even worse when it came to asking questions about withdrawing from the EU. Basically they hardly ever did it:

Yes, the BBC only asked the questions it wanted to ask and only discussed the subjects it wanted to discuss. If it didn't want to talk about something (such as withdrawal from the EU), even if large swathes of the public might want the subject discussed (as also with immigration until fairly recently), it simply didn't ask about it or talk about it.

That's quite astonishing really when you think about it - a public broadcaster that won't talk about things that matter to large sections of the public! 

Here's another telling point: 

That's tied to the remarkable fact that in the same period Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine "made between them 28 appearances, with contributions totalling 11,208 words – over nine times the amount of airtime allocated to all left-wing supporters of Brexit" - an astonishing finding. 

The second part of the report is headlined The BBC complaints procedure – unfit for purpose? The answer to that question turns out to be 'Oh yes!!!". It's a fascinating essay in its own right. Many of you will nod your head in recognition at many points. Here's an extract:

Another measure of the overwhelming negativity involved in the BBC complaints process can be found in the Corporation’s response to a News-watch complaint in 2013. On January 23 of that year, David Cameron announced his pledge to hold, after the next general election, a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership. That evening, Newsnight on BBC2 broadcast a reactive programme which featured 18 supporters of remaining in the EU and only one who wanted to leave. News-watch, backed by a cross-party group of MPs concerned about BBC bias, submitted a complaint under the BBC’s formal procedure. The matter was eventually considered by the Editorial Standards Committee, but it ruled that the programme was not in breach of impartiality rules. It came to this view on the grounds that it had not been a major news event (which would be governed by special conditions of impartiality), that an edition of Newsnight six weeks previously had contained supporters of withdrawal, and that the aim of the January 23 programme had been simply to explore elements of the reaction to David Cameron’s speech – and most at Westminster supported remain.  

As in 2007, the defence amounted to preposterous stone-walling. For example, the earlier Newsnight edition cited by the BBC did include limited opinion in support of leaving the EU, but the programme as a whole was strongly biased in favour of Remain. There was no way it properly ‘balanced’ the January 23 edition. Further, the ESC’s denial that Mr Cameron’s speech was a major news event flew in the face of basic common sense: newspapers the following day carried dozens of pages of news reports and analysis. No appeal was allowed.

The BBC's initial response was as deeply inadequate a piece of brazen stonewalling as you're ever likely to see. Note how they simply ignore the whole mass of evidence and just go on asserting their own impartiality regardless:

We’re covering the process towards Brexit in a responsible and impartial way independent of political pressure. The job of impartial journalism is to scrutinise the issues and interrogate the relevant voices, not advocate for a position. It’s precisely for this reason that the public trusts the BBC.

They remind me somewhat of The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This Civitas report has cut off the arms and the legs of the BBC's claims to impartiality over Brexit but the BBC is still there, giving it large, saying "I'm invincible!"

All Roads Lead to Morecambe

The 'For Sale' sign makes it even funnier

Apropos of nothing, just some interesting facts about roads I learned today the way the BBC so often 'learns' things - by reading someone else's article!....

According to the Ordinance Survey Open Names database there are 788,340 roads with a name in Great Britain. Alphabetically, these range from Aachen Way in Halifax to Zurich Gardens in Bramhall.

'Road' is the most common suffix for road names, accounting for some 20% of the them, beating 'Close' at 15%, 'Street' at 10%, 'Lane' at 8%, and 'Avenue' at 6%.

The most common road name is 'High Street' (there are 2,453 of them). 'Station Road' is second, followed by 'Church Lane', 'Church Street' and 'Mill Lane'.

For those with a low taste in humour, there's a Fanny Hands Lane in Ludford, Lincolnshire and a Burnt Dick Hill in Boxted, Essex.

Oh, and 30% of the road names in Blackpool are 'Avenues' - a shocker given that Blackpool never really strikes me as being particularly tree-lined. 

(Blackpool, incidentally, is a seaside town which truly merits a Trumpian epithet - unlike its more northerly rival Morecambe. I suspect the US President would, in contrast, find Morecambe great, so great.) 

All credit though to Ed Jefferson for this fine, not-at-all-geeky piece of research. I love this kind of thing. First-class-travelling Trot Michael Rosen and his 'Robin' Dr Laura Wright will surely be inviting you for a chat on Word of Mouth soon (or should be doing)!

[P.S. As this is the internet and you never know who's watching: This post doesn't commit a hate crime against Blackpool. It was a joke. I don't really think it's a s*i*h*le, though others are free to disagree!].

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.

...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."

Lies, damned lies and the BBC

This week's Feedback featured an interview with Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of the four panellists on the BBC Trust's latest impartiality review - one looking at the corporation's use of statistics (and, largely, giving the BBC a clean bill of health). 

When Mr Johnson and Roger Bolton turned to the question of the EU referendum, it wasn't hard to guess where the BBC might take Mr Johnson's call for the BBC to be "braver" in the future: 

Roger Bolton: But you go further than that. You say 'braver'. It's not a question of just being informed, to explain things. It's being braver. Some people would say that would mean you're going to editorialise. 'Go on, tell us what you really think?', that sort of thing, And that's not  really the BBC's job. [Not that doesn't stop lots of BBC reporters from editorialising anyhow!]

Paul Johnson: Well, you can be brave by saying that something is highly likely to be true, as opposed to not. So if you look back at previous reviews that the BBC Trust have done - e.g. the reporting of climate change - there was a period during which what was reported was, you know, 'On the one hand some scientists think this. On the other hand some scientists think that' [Really? That's not how I remember the BBC behaving. They always seemed to be talking about the '97%' or the 'consensus' in the years before that impartiality review], and the braver thing to have done would have been to say, 'Well look. the vast majority of scientists think this thing, and there are these very tiny minority on the other hand who think the other and, therefore, we're going to say, you know, on the huge balance of probability, one thing is true and not the other'. And, actually, there are quite a lot of things were that is terribly important because simply telling people, 'Somebody says this. Somebody else says that', doesn't help inform.

Roger Bolton: Well, that's just what some people have said. There is...the idea of 'false balance'. But, I mean, it's alright talking about that in theory, and maybe it's OK talking about science, but when you're in the nitty-gritty of politics, such as the referendum campaign, and one side, for example, says...talks about the £350 million that we're going to get back [how typical of Roger Bolton to have chosen that particular stat rather than, say, the Treasury's '£4,300 worse off' claim!] then, you know, the BBC journalists are thinking, 'What do I do here?' Do you think they treated that issue properly?

Paul Johnson: Not in all circumstances, though - let's be blunt - the £350 million number was simply untrue, just straightforwardly untrue.

Roger Bolton: And you would like the BBC journalists to say, 'It's untrue'?

Paul Johnson: And there are...

Roger Bolton (interrupting): Would you like the BBC journalists to say, 'It's untrue'?

Paul Johnson: There are some places where they come very close to doing that, particularly in the 'fact check' part of the website [indeed they do - far too much so for some people], where it comes very close to doing that. More often it refers to the number as being 'disputed' or 'uncertain' [or 'controversial'] or what have you, and I think it should have been clear that this is a number that is not correct.

Roger Bolton: My thanks to Paul Johnson from the Institute of [sic] Fiscal Studies, whose statistics are always reliable.

All of which reminds me of something from an edition of The Andrew Marr Show a couple of weeks ago where former BBC DG Mark Thompson and Coco the Clown made their return after an earlier joint appearance on Eadio 4's The Media Show.

Again, it wasn't hard to figure out which side of the Brexit debate Coco was intended to represent (especially given the previous discussion about experts and people being fed up with them, a la Michael Gove):

Andrew Marr: And, of course, referendums change things completely, because here on the newspaper review, and all the rest, we had to balance Brexit versus non-Brexit in every case. 

Mark Thompson: So referendums present, I think, very difficult, possibly even, under the current rules, insuperable problems for broadcasters. You have imaginary parties. They’re temporary, they’re going to cease... 

Andrew Marr: In and Out, yeah. 

Mark Thompson: In and Out. They’re going to cease to exist the day that the vote happens, and yet you’ve got to treat them as if they are exactly equally balanced in the...in the polls. And in a sense, if...if one side, you know, produces an eminent, you know, economist, the other side produces, you know, Coco the Clown, they’re sort of treated as if they’re somehow equal. So I think there may be a case for looking at the rules for how referenda are...are covered in...in broadcasting.

In other words, Coco the Clown on one side shouldn't be accorded the same respect as the eminent economist on the other - a repeated call which continues to echo the gripes of aggrieved Remain supporters like Timothy Garton Ash, Roy Greenslade, and Feedback listeners who wanted the BBC to rubbish every 'clownish' Leave claim and to treat one side differently from the other if the BBC feels that side was right and the other wrong on any particular point....

....rather as Evan Davis did week in and week out during Newsnight referendum coverage anyhow!! (and it was always the Leave side which got the sharp end of the stick from Evan)...

...and just as Paul Johnson was calling for on Feedback.

If such people ever get their second referendum you can bet your bottom euro that they will lobby like maniacs to get the BBC's rules of engagement changed, and this BBC Trust impartiality review will doubtless help them down that road.

Just imagine a BBC that's even more off the leash 'next time around'!

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?

Monitoring the BBC News Channel

Warning: This post contains almost as few funny, clever jokes as Will Self's From Fact to Fiction tonight.

Here's a cautionary tale for anyone who fancies monitoring the BBC News Channel to see if it's providing balanced coverage of the EU referendum debate.

I read a comment somewhere today saying that, having just watched the 1pm News on the BBC News Channel for 30 minutes, there hadn't been a single representative of the Leave camp asked to comment. Someone from the Remain campaign had appeared though, and there had been extracts from the PM's speech and a Jeremy Corbyn interview. The comment said, "Frankly I couldn't believe it, not even from the BBC".

The thing is though that if someone on another site (say a pro-EU one) had tuned in at 1.30pm and watched the next 30 minutes of the BBC News Channel they would have seen a 10-minute interview with a Leave supporter, a 2-minute interview with a second Leave supporter and then a 4-minute interview with a third Leave supporter, and they mightn't have believed it either. 

As I wrote this morning, I tried something along these lines over a 4-hour period on Wednesday afternoon's BBC News Channel and found - if you count up the guests - plenty of pro-Remain interviewees but not one pro-Leave supporters (unless James Forsyth of the Spectator is pro-Leave, which I don't think he is.) 

But that was only a snapshot, and who's to say that it's in any way representative? What if straight after I turned off, a parade of passionate Leave supporters appeared on the News Channel. I'd never know about them yet any 'bias-proving' statistics I'd drawn from what I'd observed would be worthless. 

If 30 minutes isn't enough and 4 hours isn't enough, what would be? You'd need whole teams of people watching the BBC News Channel in shifts over at least a couple of weeks to do it properly - or at least properly enough for the wider world (including the BBC) to accept that it's been in any way worthwhile.

******

For the record, however, here's a complete list of all the interviews on the BBC News Channel from the end of David Cameron's Downing Street speech through to Dateline London at 5.30.

It includes full interviews and partial reprises of those interviews, but not the recurring clips of David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Alex Salmond or Nigel Farage. 

12.29-12.35 Sir Malcolm Rifkind, REMAIN

12.42-12.48 Graham Stringer, LEAVE

13.22-13.26 Sir Stephen Wall, REMAIN

13.32-13.42 Chris Grayling, LEAVE

13.46-13.48 Robert Oxley, LEAVE

13.49-13.53 Douglas Carswell, LEAVE

13.53-12.56 Sir Malcolm Rifkind, REMAIN (partial reprise)

14.08-14.11 Chris Grayling, LEAVE (partial reprise)

14.15-14.19 David Coburn, LEAVE

14.21-14.25 John Mills, LEAVE

14.38-14.40 Andrew Percy, LEAVE

14.45-14.48 James McGrory, REMAIN

14.48-14.51 Sir Malcolm Rifkind, REMAIN (partial reprise)

15.07-15.10 Chris Grayling, LEAVE (partial reprise)

15.18-15.21 Steve Baker, LEAVE

15.35-15.38 Graham Stringer, LEAVE (partial reprise)

15.41-15.44 Sir Malcolm Rifkind, REMAIN (partial reprise)

16.09-16.12 Chris Grayling, LEAVE (partial reprise)

16.14-16.17 Caroline Lucas, REMAIN

16.24-16.27 Steve Baker, LEAVE (full reprise)

17.20-17.24 Mary Creagh, REMAIN 

For what it's worth, that equates to 5 pro-REMAIN individuals and 8 pro-LEAVE individuals.

Or it equates to 8 segments for pro-REMAIN supporters and 13 segments for pro-LEAVE supporters (including repeats and partial repeats).

Or it equates roughly 29 minutes of air time for REMAIN and 50 minutes of air time for LEAVE.

Now that, obviously, looks biased in favour of the Leave campaign. But - to repeat - all it shows is that Leave supporters got more air time than Remain supporters in the 5 or so hours of this afternoon's BBC News Channel. That really is all it shows.

This evening's News Channel could have a 20-minute interview with, say, Alan Johnson or Ken Clarke and the balance could tilt back again towards 'impartiality'. Or, with lots more pro-Remain interviews tonight, it could go on to bias the day's coverage against Leave instead. 

You could, of course, keep watching till, say midnight, and find the same 'bias' as this afternoon but what if tomorrow, when you don't watch, the bias is outrageously in the other direction? And what if someone from the other camp was monitoring that and took to the pages of The Guardian to say so?

Unless you are able to monitor it in such a way that you are not left open to charges of cherry picking (i.e. choosing a half an hour, four hours, a day that 'proves' the point you're trying to demonstrate) then the BBC/your critics will be able to debunk you quite easily - especially if (a) they've watched what you've watched but seen more of it than you or (b) if they cherry picking a few hours of the News Channel (say around a particular campaign event) that 'proves' their point in contradiction to yours. 

As for the BBC, it's well-resourced and secretive and it will always play the 'it has to be judged over time' card - across a suitable period, on a particular programme, etc. They won't accept you breaking their 'rules' over this, ever. 

That's why it has to be 'closed' programmes like Today or Newsnight or PM (or whatever) that are monitored, if you're going to monitor such things. Months of evidence on individual programmes (no episodes missed) could prove bias to the satisfaction of any reasonable person, and be much harder for the BBC to dismiss. 

I could go on but I wouldn't want you to lose the will to live.

Statswatch

Ah, happy memories! Ullswater. 

Just as an aside..

Here are are some statistics I saw on Mark Easton's Twitter feed which I thought I'd pass on simply because I found them interesting. They come courtesy of the Office for National Statistics:

The value of the UK’s lakes, reservoirs, marshes, bogs, canals & rivers UP 26% in 5 yrs to £37bn says first ever @ONS analysis.

In Iceland 1/3 of over-65s are working. In UK it's 1/10. In Spain it's 1/59.

In 2012 Brits took 36.2m overseas holidays. In 2013 it was 37.6m.  Last year 39m+

To add to those, here are some more:

UK residents made 3.9 million visits abroad in January 2015 and spent £2.3 billion during these visits.

In 2013 more than one in three adults (36%) reported having a long-standing illness or disability (LSI) and one in five (20%) reported having a limiting LSI. People living in Wales (27%) were more likely to report having a limiting LSI than those living in either England (19%) or Scotland (20%).

The last one is one, I'm guessing, that 'sensitive BBC type' Mark would have hesitated about ever reporting.

Promotional headlines?

And talking about checking things and avoiding confirmation bias...

I saw some comments early this year on one of Owen Bennett-Jones's "right-wing, media-monitoring blogs" noting that Labour's election agenda was being heavily promoted (that day) by the Today programme, the BBC News website, BBC Breakfast, and the like. A few commenters went on to make the claim that this was likely to keep on happening right up till the general election in May.

So I thought I'd start checking it out by finding something easy to monitor and then focusing on it for a while. Would it bear out their (and my) suspicions?

The easiest thing to do was to screengrab the home page main headlines on the BBC News website every morning and record all the election/manifesto-related stories. That way any pattern of bias - say, headlining Labour election pledges/Labour's election-related charges more that those of its opponents - would duly emerge. 

It's early days yet, having started it on 6th Jan), and some of the initial New Year frenzy of electioneering appears to have worn off. But the results so far are as follows (and, NB, some days are missing because there were no election-related stories that day and some days had more than one election-related story):

6/1 - Lib Dems in NHS funding pledge

7/1 - Labour seeks summit to find A&E 'fix'

8/1 - Cameron: I can fix EU 'problem'

10/1 - Conservatives pledge new strike curbs

12/1 - Cameron warns of 'legacy of debt'

13/1 - Clegg on 'snoopers' charter' attack

14/1 - Leaders warn PM over TV debates

15/1 - Labour pledges caps on fat and salt

16/1 - Almost 1m voters missing - Labour

17/1 - Tories should fear Miliband - Patten

18/1 - No child illiteracy by 2025 - Clegg

19/1 - Cameron makes full employment vow

19/1 - Miliband pledges mental health push

20/1 - Mansion tax 'crude' says Mandelson

So far then, I make that 3 pro-Lib Dem ones, 5 pro-Labour ones, 4 pro-Conservative ones, 1 anti-Labour one and 1 anti-Conservative (or, at least, anti-David Cameron) one. 

As with everything like this, such results partly depend on what constitutes an election/manifesto-related story - and there can be no hard-and-fast rules on that, only rule-of-thumb ones. The rule-of-thumb one here is that the articles in question should, in some way, clearly tie the news story to the general election. Plus there's got to be a strong element of (dangerous) subjectivity in judging the pro-/anti- tenor of the story and placing the item firmly in one camp or the other. (So, should I have put "Tories should fear Miliband - Patten" in the pro-Labour camp? I think so, but do you?) There could even - God forbid! - still be some lurking confirmation bias remaining.

So far there's not much evidence here of the BBC promoting the Labour Party at the expense of the two governing parties, is there? I'll keep an eye on it for a while longer though. 

'More or Less'

I was going to do a piece on More or Less's take on the BBC's coverage of the Gaza casualty statistics. It would have involved lots of transcribing and taken lots of time.

Thankfully Hadar at BBC Watch has already done it, including all the transcribing. Her piece is well worth reading. Its focus lies less in confronting More or Less's statistical findings than in undermining the integrity of the three organisations consulted by the programme  [the United Nations High Commission of Human Rights, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem]. She argues that the programme breached BBC editorial guidelines by failing to point out their respective anti-Israel political activities. 

Unusually for More or Less, the programme didn't do its own statistical study of the casualty figures, so they didn't actually have any of their own 'findings'. It merely asked those three organisations to defend the controversial stats, which they duly did, and then framed their justifications with little other than the background story of the BBC website article that provoked the storm in the first time. 

Thus, what we got was was the UN plus two of the very groups the UN uses to compile their figures all saying that the much-disputed UN stats are robust and trustworthy - which surely prompts the thought, "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?"

The other two main items on the programme were much more typical of More or Less - a take-down of the UK coalition government's numbers over the Troubled Families initiative and a take-down of the Guardian and the left-wing High Pay Commission over their fatally-flawed chief executive pay stats. 

Preface to a study

One of the frustrating things about answering the question 'Is the BBC biased?' is that, however long you may blog about it, providing anecdotal evidence by the bucketful over many years and finding that people who agree with you agree with you, is that huge numbers of people don't agree with you - or don't even care about the issue.

That's why I always hoped (with hope in my heart) that statistical evidence (like counting interruptions) would help win over some of the unconverted - the guiding principle behind my 2009-10 blog. (I think I succeeded there, but the BBC didn't agree.) 

I still think such an approach could have an impact (though I've not exactly exerted myself much on that front recently it has to be said).

Unfortunately though (for those who think like us, vis a vis the BBC), the statistically-minded bias hunters/debunkers who agree with me about the value of stats tend to lie on the Left, and that's why much of our efforts can be derailed by a well-publicised (sometimes BBC-funded) academic study which uses statistics, like that (deeply dubious) Cardiff University report from Mike Berry & Co. and which "finds" that the BBC is biased in favour of, say, the Conservatives, Eurosceptics and business. That survey, you may remember, delighted the likes of Owen Jones, many a Guardian/New Statesmen reader, and  the Twitterati - and it probably delighted the BBC too, on the 'if we're seen to be getting flak from both sides, then people will assume we must be getting it about right' principle! It didn't delight many on the Right, however.

Then there's Mike Berry's friend Greg Philo from the Glasgow Media Group, ready to produce statistically-backed reports "proving" that the BBC is pro-Israel by a margin of 2:1. I've never come across his previous efforts, but he's apparently working on the current BBC coverage too - and I think we can guess in advance what he'll "find". 

The thing is, though, that no one who doesn't want to believe them will believe them any more that they believed my interruption statistics or everyone else's anecdotes - particularly if the bias hunter's own bias too obvious (eg. if the academics in question also happen to be public far-left/anti-Israel activists.) The ad hom fallacy may be a fallacy but it's not always wrong, and confirmation bias is very real indeed.

But, nonetheless, that Cardiff Uni study got a lot of coverage. 

I remind you of all this (yet again), because I'm going to do what such reports don't do. I'm going to dump all the raw material I intend to use to analyse the BBC's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict (over a three-week period) in the post directly below this one. 

I wanted to record it all just in case the likes of Greg Philo, Mike Berry or the Media Lens/Electronic Intifada crowd start producing literally incredible stats and claims about the BBC's coverage - and because they should not be allowed to have all the raw material at their fingertips.

Make no mistake about it, they will be doing something similar - except that they won't publish the raw material either in advance or on publication, merely present their results and the conclusions they draw from it. I hate it when people do that. 

Similarly, the BBC will be doing something similar - and they won't be publishing any of it (even if you go after them through FoI requests).

What you'll see here is a regular sampling of BBC news bulletins from 7th July-27 July (inclusive), transcribing every Israel-Gaza-related report in full from four bulletins at specific times each day (84 bulletins in all).

While I'm analysing it over the coming weeks, you might want to do your own analysis and think of ways of assessing whether it shows bias or not. What questions should be looked at? What would prove (or disprove) bias?

Initial ideas might be: How many quote Israeli sources, how many Palestinian sources? How many cite casualty figures from 'health officials in Gaza'? How many mention 'human shields'? How many come from Israel, how many from Gaza?

Anyone may feel free to use anything they like from the post below. 

A question of bias: Is the BBC's Question Time balanced?

Is there any BBC programme more studied for bias than BBC One's Question Time? 

I ask this because yet another statistical attempt has been made to assess its record for impartiality.  

I had a half-hearted go back in 2010, finding evidence of a left-wing bias. Then came Phil Burton-Cartledge at A Very Public Sociologist's attempt back in 2012, finding evidence of a right-wing bias. [My partial debunking of his efforts can be found here]. 

Was it a coincidence that I'm right-wing and found what I found and that he's left-wing and found what he found? In other words, was confirmation bias at play in our respective studies? 

Well, obviously not on my part because I'm scrupulously impartial and produce accurate stats. I can't vouch for him though! [Joke. Or is it?] 

Now it's the turn of Jon Bounds, writing at Contributoria. 

Jon's very interesting article, entitled A question of bias: Is the BBC's Question Time balanced?, looks  at the composition of the panel, just as Phil's earlier study did. [My efforts looked at something else altogether]. His answer to the question posed in his title is "Yes...and no". 

Essentially he finds that the party political make-up of the Question Time panel is scrupulously balanced, reflecting an accurate compromise between a party's parliamentary representation and opinion poll standing [thus with UKIP's 8% of the panel spots falling between their parliamentary representation (0) and their opinion poll ratings (9-20%)], but finding that when you take the non politicians on the panel, it swings sharply to the Right (thus, right-wing journalists outnumber left-wing ones, right-wing think tankers, economists (etc) outnumber left-wing comedians, etc).

Now, Jon himself - a former BBC man - is left-wing, and his far-from-objectively-stated conclusions will chime with left-wingers and repel right-wingers:

The problem for left wingers who see bias on Question Time is that the BBC is part of the establishment, and the establishment is institutionally right wing. As such, it does not represent the views of the public.

The problem for right wingers is that, as Stephen Colbert identified: “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

And, after the most recent "political earthquake", it may be the BBC that needs to get in touch with that reality beyond the political media bubble. Much more than the mainstream party leaders need to.

His crowd-sourced methodology, however, is intended to be objective.

But just look at how his system works in practice: 

First, I took the panel for every show for the past year from the BBC website, and then recorded occupations and political affiliations of each guest (this was open to all Contributoria readers to edit and add to — you can see it here ). Non politicians got a rating from one to ten on a scale that went from Katie Hopkins to Bob Crow. Marking on a a right/left political spectrum is a rough measure, and could be described as subjective, but I tested my ratings with crowdsourced opinions and by measuring the results of elections and polls by the same system and it proved to be robust.

Some non-politicians didn’t end up being rated as their positions didn’t seem to have any logical, consistent position: on the scale or otherwise (sorry Fairground Attraction singer Eddie Reader). Politicians were assigned ratings based on their party: for example Ukip were a ‘2’, the Conservatives a ‘3’, Lib Dems ‘5’ and Labour ‘7’. 

I think that system has a whopping in-built (left-wing) bias of its own that damagingly skews the results. 

The scale begins at '1', which stands for "very right-wing" (Katie Hopkins is his example), and ends at '10', which is "very left-wing" (Bob Crow is his example). The 'dead centre' on his spectrum, therefore, is 5.5.

Now, as you can see, that puts the Lib Dems (who call themselves a 'centre-left party') on the right of the political spectrum. [Their '5' is to the right of the spectrum's centre point of '5.5'.] Thus, the avowedly left-of-centre Tim Farron is placed on the political right in Jon's survey, which cannot be right. 

You will also note that Labour Party people are placed just 1.5 points away from the dead centre while Conservatives get placed 2.5 points away from the centre, which is another skewing of the results (and a heavy tilt away from 'reality' as I see it). 

The whole numbering system has a left-wing bias, does it not? So it's hardly surprising then that the results will make things appear more biased to the right on Question Time than they may actually be. 

[Crowd-sourcing won't counter that problem either if the crow being 'sourced' is predominantly left-leaning].

Still, he's not complaining about the party political representation on Question Time, as he thinks that's balanced. What Jon is bothered by is what he claims is right-wing bias in the programme's choice of non politicians. Has he proven a right-wing bias there?

Here again, there's massive skewing going on in the awarding of points, and this is where all his credibility flies right out of the window! (You'll enjoy this!!)

Let's try out some examples. 

On a 1-10 scale from far-left to far-right (Katie Hopkins to Bob Crow) where would you place Socialist Workers Party-type comedian Mark Steel? I would unhesitatingly place him at 10. Where does Jon Bounds put him though? At 8 - just one point away from Labour! 

Similarly Billy Bragg comes in at just 8. As does Owen Jones and Laurie Penny. Russell Brand comes in at just 7! And Will Self is a 6!!

And yet right-wing journalists like Amanda Platell, Quentin Letts, Peter Oborne, Peter Hitchens (etc) get placed at 1 - ie. as far-right as you can go - and lots of centre-right journalists get shoved at 2 [miles away from the centre.]

The whole thing is a nonsense.

And it gets worse. Labour-supporting David Aaronovitch gets a 5 (just right of centre). Labour supporter Nick Hewer is placed as a 2 (alongside UKIP). Socialist Julie Bindel is a  2 too. As is the FT's Gillian Tett, placing her in the UKIP camp - as is Matthew Parris of The Times! [He won't like that].

In other words, nearly all non politicians of a right-leaning persuasion are showed on the far-right of the spectrum while nearly all non politicians of a left-leaning persuasion are placed much nearer the centre than they should be. Plus plenty of left-wingers are wrongly placed as right-wingers. 

The whole thing is full of errors and, therefore, worthless. So much for crowd-sourcing!

Jon Bounds is also a comedian and this whole exercise could be a satire on the kind of people who misuse statistics to make a political point about BBC bias. If so, he's done a fine job!


Update: Heeeerrrre's Jonny!...

Always nice to hint a nerve http://t.co/NYmK7KOxAK
— Jon Bounds (@bounder) June 2, 2014

Oh, my nerves are shot tonight. They've never been 'hinted' at before. I'd better put ice on them, and rest.