Looking back

WARNING: This is one of those posts that got more confusing the more I wrote. And you may feel the same by the end of it. Apologies in advance...

The Defund The BBC campaign group tweeted the following this afternoon:

Surprise, surprise, the BBC’s ‘impartiality guru’ has locked his Twitter account after being found to be completely biased against both Boris and Brexit calling Brexit result ‘utterly stupid’. It’s no wonder the BBC is so shamelessly partisan!

They are a bit out-of-date though...by over two years. 

They linked to a 15 June 2020 Guido Fawkes article BBC IMPARTIALITY ADVISER’S ULTRA PARTISAN ANTI-BORIS, ANTI-BREXIT TWEETS where Guido did a spot of 'Twitter archaeology' on Richard Sambrook, the former BBC executive turned Cardiff University media professor turned BBC official reviewer tasked with assessing whether the BBC's social media accounts are going against the BBC's impartiality policy. 

Guido found a string of partisan tweets, all in the usual direction, from the man appointed to assess BBC impartiality on Twitter and other social media.

An update that day on Guido Fawkes said:

Following our story this morning about his clearly partisan public tweeting, [Richard Sambrook] has now locked his Twitter account making his tweets private.

...which was an absolute joke and should have led to the BBC dropping him instantly.

Prof. Sambrook was appointed to review the BBC's social media on 29 May 2020. Guido was on it just over two weeks later on 15 June 2020.

I remember all this because - not to blow our own trumpets, while actually blowing them like Dizzy Gillespie  - looking back, we were actually well ahead of Guido there. On the 29 May 2020 itself I posted a piece where I wrote:

Salford, we have a problem.  The Times reports today that the BBC is so concerned about their journalists discrediting them by expressing their views on Twitter that they've now hired their former head of news, Richard Sambrook, to look into the problem. Mr Sambrook was, you may recall, the co-author of a much-cited, BBC-backed Cardiff University report which 'found' that the BBC didn't just not have a pro-EU bias but 'actually' has a pronounced anti-EU bias. His own Twitter feed reveals him to be anti-Brexit. Wonder what he'll find and recommend?

And Sue, that very same day, wrote: 

Hiring Richard Sambrook to review how the BBC “maintains impartiality on social media, amid concerns that journalists are discrediting the corporation by revealing their opinions” is a bit like getting the Supreme Court of Injustice to adjudicate on the lawfulness of something Lady Hale isn’t keen on.

We'd even done a piece in November 2019 on one of Richard Sambrook's impartiality-free 'chats' on Twitter, when he was a mere Cardiff University professor overseeing monitoring of BBC impartiality, which ended with the line:  

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

It's still worth returning to all of this though because the 15 June 2020 Guido Fawkes piece ended with this:

There will now be no confidence in his review, as a former journalist he should know that cover-ups always backfire and transparency would have been better. He will surely have to step aside from the impartiality review…

What happened next? Well, as per various BBC reports from later that year that mentioned his review in passing, he didn't step aside, and he and the BBC seem to have carried on regardless. New guidance on social media use by BBC staff was issued on 29 October 2020, though that apparently came before the Sambrook review itself was finished. 

And that's where things get cloudy. Was the Sambrook review ever published? If I ever knew, I've forgotten. 

[That's what comes of closing the book and losing your page].

If anyone knows please let me know below. 

Why Cardiff University's claims of BBC 'right-wing' 'impartiality' are not to be believed

The work of Cardiff University's Media department is continuing to provide comfort to BBC supporters in 'refuting' claims of a left-wing bias at the BBC and to be cited as 'proof' of a right-wing BBC bias by some left-wingers (especially on Twitter). 

Cardiff's 2012 report, 'proving' the BBC to be right-leaning, anti-European and anti-Islam (yes, I know!), was expertly debunked in a Civitas study by David Keighley and Andrew Jubb.

David and Andrew got into the statistical nitty-gritty of the Cardiff study and found it wanting. (I provided a summary here.)

The worrying thing about that Cardiff report though - with its fatally flawed and, frankly, bizarre methodology - was that it went on to form the academic underpinning of the major BBC-funded Prebble Report into BBC impartiality, which found (by and large) that, yes, the BBC is impartial. 

Statistical trashing is all very well, but the ad hominem approach seems to work better.

The lead authors of the original report, part-funded by the BBC, were: Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Richard Sambrook, and Mike Berry. 

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen was director of the Prebble content analysis project, and worked previously for the European Commission on a report investigating how the media were reporting the idea of greater European integration and why the UK was sceptical about it. She's also written for the far-left Red Pepper. 

Richard Sambrook was the former Head of BBC News until 2008.

Mike Berry, who acted as chief spokesman for the report, is Greg Philo's partner-in-arms at the campaigning, far-left Glasgow Media Group. He's not a fan of Israel - to put it mildly. 

Yes, ad hom arguments are generally considered fallacious, but if these people's methodology has been shown to be highly dubious (at best) and their findings seem to fly so insanely in the face of reality, then - given their backgrounds and beliefs - maybe there really is something to be said for the ad hom approach after all, don't you think?

Later, the top bod at the Cardiff Media department, Justin Lewis, earned the admiration of some on the Left by using those original findings to condemn the BBC for being right-wing.

Playing the man rather than the ball, I then checked ol' Justin out and found him to be very left-wing too (the kind of professor who is openly anti-capitalism and thinks Muslims get a raw deal from the British media).

Curiously, however, he exempted (not explicitly, but by not mentioning them) the BBC from that latter criticism (well, could he really pretend otherwise?) and he writes articles with titles like, A monster threatens UK broadcasting? It's Sky, not the BBC. Hmm.

Why am I regurgitating all of this recent history again? Because the Cardiff profs are back.

The Guardian has published their latest election 'findings' (repeatedly) and left-wingers on Twitter are linking to it gleefully, saying it disproves charges of left-wing bias at the BBC.

The first of those Guardian pieces found that David Cameron was granted "by far the most airtime of the party leaders in the first two weeks of the campaign" by the media as a whole, but praises the BBC specifically for focusing more on policy than their rivals. 

The second of those Guardian pieces - a piece I'd urge you to read as a masterful example of studiously biased academic reporting - found that "BBC and Sky News’ election coverage featured Conservative sources speaking for longer than those from other parties" but that Channels 4 and 5 gave the Tories even more airtime. [Ed: Tory 'Channel 4 News'? Jon Snow on Cardiff Uni's Line One!] 

Even this leftist-outpouring-dressed-in-the-cloak-of-academic-'impartiality' was honest enough to report something that must really have stuck in their throats to have to report: They described the BBC as "an outlier", in that the BBC gave "more time to Miliband, who made up 24.3% of time leaders were speaking on screen, compared to 21.9% of time for Cameron". 

Still, "Nigel Farage appeared in more image bites on the BBC than David Cameron", so that's evidence of BBC pro-UKIP bias, eh?

The Guardian pieces as a whole, however, were consistent with the spirit of the 2012 Cardiff report and Justin Lewis's later comments. They portrayed the broadcast media (Channel 5, Channel 4, ITV, BBC) as essentially right-leaning, but - despite some criticisms - the BBC came out as the least biased of all (if still right-leaning).

And who were the Cardiff University authors of these two Guardian pieces? Former BBC head of news Richard Sambrook and his colleague Dr Stephen Cushion. 

Now, Dr Cushion is new to me. Is he a Cardiff Media department with a non-BBC background - unlike Richard Sambrook? 

Er, no. He was brought in 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.

And as for the three other Cardiff Uni people credited on those Guardian articles as helping with the latest research - Richard Thomas, Allaina Kilby and Marina Morani - well, here's PhD student Marina (on the Cardiff Uni website).

I'm going to quote the whole of this because I suspect you'll enjoy it.

I haven't made this up. This isn't satire. This is the real thing:

It has commonly been noted how Italy shifted in the last decades from being an emigration country to a migrants destination. The presence in the peninsula of a few million of immigrants calls for the urge of communication means that take into account the contemporary multicultural society.

In recent years a number of “intercultural media” – newspapers, magazines, radio programs, websites, online TV – have been created in order to provide alternative sources of information and new representations avoiding the use of cultural stereotypes and stigmatizations which too often affect the mainstream media language.

Among various initiatives, the study will focus on a selection of independent websites where foreign origin together with autochthonous Italians are engaged in producing and sharing information, news, video, stories, experiences, expectations.

In the first phase of the research I intend to build a comparison between the image of the immigrant population emerging in national media and the alternative social representations that these progress media aim to construct and promote.

In the second phase I will analyse the contents of the most effective online projects in their attempt to offer diverse representations on immigration issues. With regard to methodology the main methods will be critical discourse analysis and content analysis of written and audiovisual texts. An important part will be dedicated to the narrative and rhetoric multi-modal constructions.

The use of language here not only counters cultural stereotypes and generalisations but also turn them into new positive representational worlds where “the immigrant” is regarded as persona and “active subject” of the media production.

Well, I think we know where she's coming from! (And Mike Berry, Justin Lewis & Co. would surely approve).

As for Allaina Kilby...well, here's one for David Preiser (and it's based on her university thesis): Jon Stewart has made us laugh at politics – and restored our sanity. (Nothing 'incriminating' UK-wise though so far). 

And as for Richard Thomas (who writes discourses entitled From Executive Remuneration to the Living Wage: Pre and post-crisis discourses of income distribution on UK television news), well, just allow me to quote his Twitter blurb:

Richard Thomas @rich_thomas99
Writer for All Out Cricket. Doctoral researcher into income inequality, wealth and poverty in the media.

Call me a running-dog capitalist lickspittle if you like, but I'm guessing where he's coming from too - and checking out the rest of his Twitter feed I'm sticking with that hunch.

So....

A university media department stacked with BBC insiders and leftists produces a couple of studies of BBC bias which find that the BBC is the least biased broadcaster, even though it has a right-wing bias.

And some people still think that ad hom critiques are always wrong?

More on the BBC's re-hiring of Richard Sambrook

This is interesting from Channel 4's former doorstepper-in-chief Michael Crick:

[Richard] Sambrook was asked by the board of Channel 4 to do a similar inquiry into bias on C4 News, though it was all a bit rushed. His report - kept secret - concluded there wasn’t enough diversity in the backgrounds and outlooks of people on the programmes, especially senior staff. 

Among Sambrook’s recommendations was that the programme make a “senior counter cultural appointment” - either a top presenter or editor - to balance “the uniformity of editorial attitude and approach in the [C4News] newsroom”. I’m not sure that would have worked.

“Senior counter cultural appointments” at, say, Newsnight? It's an intriguing suggestion, but I'm not sure it would work either. Such outsiders would probably get a very frosty reception. 

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! 

The BBC: Conservative, Eurosceptic and pro-business. Apparently.

Oh, I do like statistically-based reports about BBC bias.

There's a new report out from Cardiff University that's making a few waves, claiming as it does that the BBC is indeed biased - albeit not in the way right-wingers think. 

The study comes bearing the intriguing statement that

"The funding for some of the research discussed in this article was provided directly by the BBC Trust." 

Just as intriguing is the fact that one of its listed authors is none other than Richard Sambrook, former director of BBC News, the BBC World Service and BBC Global News. (Wonder which bits he wrote?)

The report claims to have shown that the BBC is pro-Tory, pro-Eurosceptic and pro-business - a set of conclusions which flies in the face of...well, if not reality then at least my (and many other peoples') sense of reality.

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).

Does that campaigning left-wing standpoint necessarily mean that Mike Berry can't be objective in his academic research? Obviously not, if he chooses to set that aside and see where the evidence takes him in a disinterested fashion. However, that disinterested starting point doesn't seem to be the Glasgow Media Group's guiding principle and I choose to remain sceptical.

Besides Mike Berry and Richard Sambrook, the report's other authors are Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (who has previously written for far-left Red Pepper), Kerry Moore (who has written about the British media's ill-treatment of Muslims), Lucy Bennett, Jonathan Cable, Inaki Garcia-Blanco, Jenny Kidd, Lina Dencik (who describes herself as an 'activist') and Arne Hintz (who describes himself as an 'activist')...in other words, as fine a collection of disinterested academics as you could possibly hope to find - as I'm sure you'll agree! 

As regards matters of party political coverage, the Cardiff report examined a mere five days-worth of coverage and considered only the BBC News at Six (for national TV) and only a part (7.00-8.30 each day) of five episodes of the Today programme (for national radio), plus a handful each of local and national bulletins (ie. one each day from, say, the Midlands and Scotland). That seems to me to be a very small sample, the exhaustive concentration on which could lead to some very skewed results. 

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.

It showed that the incumbent Labour Party got the lion's share of the airtime (not unreasonably - being the government of the day). But how much of the lion's share? From June 09 to January 10 (inclusive) Labour got 53.81% of the total airtime, while the Conservatives got 26.52% - i.e. almost precisely double the airtime. 

As well as interview airtime, I also tried to measure the character (the quality) of those interviews by the simple act of counting the number of times a politician was interrupted by his or her BBC interviewer - on the not unreasonable grounds that (all things being equal, generally-speaking, blah blah) the more times a politician gets interrupted the harder the interview is likely to have been. 

The results were clear. Going from the most-interrupted to the least-interrupted, the final results came out as (with the number of interviews and my 'interruption coefficient' included):

UKIP (30) - 1.01

Conservatives (619) - 0.85

English Democrats (1) - 0.80

SNP (70) - 0.76

Sinn Fein (9) - 0.71

BNP (4) - 0.65

Plaid Cymru (11) - 0.65

DUP (10) - 0.62

Labour (1054) - 0.59

Liberal Democrats (333) - 0.44

Greens (16) - 0.26

TUV (2) 0.25

SDLP (3) - 0.20

UUP (2) - 0.15

Alliance (6) - 0.03

Respect (1) - 0 

Yes, despite being in opposition, a Conservative politician was significantly more likely to be interrupted than a Labour politician - albeit not as likely to be interrupted as someone from UKIP! (UKIP really did get a rough ride back then). 

A massive sample such as this is surely preferable to a small sample, such as that used by the Cardiff team. Small samples are more prone to lead to statistical errors. They leave the researcher open to questions such as: Which five days did you choose? Why did you choose them? How did you choose them? What happened on those five days, news-wise, and did that bias your results?

Still, a report is a report and should be read with an open mind (within reason). Take a read of it for yourselves and see what you make of it. From what I've read so far, my scepticism is growing ever deeper.

Update: This report isn't as new as the surge on Twitter suggests. Alan at Biased BBC was onto this story early last month - as I should have remembered, as I read it at the time!

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. 

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!

Salford, we have a problem

The Times reports today that the BBC is so concerned about their journalists discrediting them by expressing their views on Twitter that they've now hired their former head of news, Richard Sambrook, to look into the problem. 

Mr Sambrook was, you may recall, the co-author of a much-cited, BBC-backed Cardiff University report which 'found' that the BBC didn't just not have a pro-EU bias but 'actually' has a pronounced anti-EU bias. His own Twitter feed reveals him to be anti-Brexit. 

Wonder what he'll find and recommend?

Ms Valiant-for-Truth

There's quite a striking revelation from Anita Singh in today's Daily Telegraph. 

She quotes a letter to a complainant from the head of the BBC's complaints unit, Jeremy Hayes, in which Mr Hayes objects to Emily Maitlis's interviewing style during a March 2019 interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

Mr Hayes writes that the interview "cast more heat than light" and describes Ms Maitlis's "failure to cast light on matters" as "regrettable", doing "little to aid audience understanding of the issues discussed". 

He even appears to sympathise with the complainant's description of Emily's laughter as "mocking" (a hallmark of her style we've commented on quite a few times before). 

The same article also notes that the Newsnight presenter remains unabashed about her behaviour, sharing the following tweet demanding that her employers show her more respect:

Such brazen behaviour suggests that Charles Moore, also writing in the Telegraph, has it right. It's a win-win situation for her. What matters to her is how well what she says and does goes down with the people who really matter to her - her colleagues and her Twitter followers. She's clearly soaking in their admiration. Plus, for all her present discomfort, she will be doubtless also be relishing the increased fame. And, given what happened to Naga Munchetty...

Ms Maitlis might well win...a reprieve, perhaps slightly qualified by bureaucratic mumbling about “fresh guidelines” on BBC impartiality on social media which have been commissioned from its former Director of Global News, Richard Sambrook. Then Ms Valiant-for-Truth will have prevailed against the “suits” and the Government. She will have been allowed to state, as fact, that Dominic Cummings did break the rules and that Boris lied. Even if she loses, and the ruling against her stands, she is most unlikely to be demoted, let alone sacked. The suits will be portrayed as having given in to Government pressure. In due time, Emily will be promoted to a show with more viewers than Newsnight, or hired by a rival channel.

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.

"Getting it about right"

So, as might be expected, left-wingers on Twitter are reacting with glee to the report from Cardiff University 'proving' BBC bias in favour of right-wing perspectives. (For my take on it, please see below and for DB's take on it at Biased BBC please click here). 

This report, part-funded by the BBC Trust and part-written by the BBC's former head of news Richard Sambrook, will doubtless be used by the BBC to say that they are criticised from the Right and the the Left - and, thus, they must be getting it about right. 

That's as inevitable as the punchline of a Marcus Brigstocke joke. 

The Great European Disaster Movie IV

Mark Wallace at ConservativeHome has now taken up the story: The BBC denied ‘The Great European Disaster Movie’ was EU-funded: that was untrue (though as we now know, they actually partially covered themselves by means of a canny 'form of words').

Mark seems determined to pursue the parties involved (including the BBC) in search of some answers. He's also concerned about the Richard Sambrook angle. 

Maintaining impartiality

Hiring Richard Sambrook to review how the BBC “maintains impartiality on social media, amid concerns that journalists are discrediting the corporation by revealing their opinions” is a bit like getting the Supreme Court of Injustice to adjudicate on the lawfulness of something Lady Hale isn’t keen on. As soon as anyone cites the Cardiff University study as definitive (on BBC impartiality) they’re on a sticky wicket.

“Maintains"? I think that train left the station some time ago. 

Never mind “social media”, what about directly on the *actual* BBC? Surely everyone knows the BBC acts as an unofficial wing of the Labour Party?   Do we just have to take that into account forever because that’s the way it is?  Or will someone somewhere do something about it?

Douglas Murray says:

“Of course, plenty of media figures are open about their political views. Several have left Newsnight in the past and pursued modestly successful careers in Left-wing activism. 

[...] “After the declining standards of recent years, I know many who no longer bother to appear on Newsnight when asked, and not just when Maitlis is presenting. Many believe it has increasingly come to resemble the unwatchable Channel 4 News and, more importantly, they feel that it is no longer worth it. Fifteen years ago, when Jeremy Paxman was the presenter, being on Newsnight was an event for guests and viewers alike. Commentators would come off air to find their phones buzzing with congratulations or commiserations.

Today, the buzz has long stopped and the programme has now come to feel like it is being broadcast into a great silence.”

Douglas Murray is a fine fellow, but even he is not as BBC-geeky as some of us. Holding Jeremy Paxman up as a representative of ‘better times’ strikes a bit of a bum note with me. Maybe go back much further and try, say, Robin Day?

Anyway, it’s a bit sad being BBC-geeky. So I’ll leave it there.

Over to Them

I remember talking about ‘the swing of the political pendulum’ in 2009. Then there are Craig’s analyses of Cardiff uni’s insanely biased study of the BBC’s bias.
Richard Sambrook! What a choice!

Not to mention over a decade of hollow screeds from us about the BBC’s left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-anti-anti……. you know.

Yesterday I was going to write about the pissing man. Two weeks in custody!!
The other day I started something about Piers Morgan’s atrocious bullying of a US lawyer named Earl Gray. “That was the worst interview I’ve ever heard” declared Piers afterwards. Yep. It certainly was, but not in the way you meant.

In the new world of opposites, where all meanings are reversed I set off on a stream-of-consciousness post about BLM:

"The slogan “Black Lives Matter” is such a platitudinous statement of the bleeding obvious because of course they matter! duh! As do lives of all shades and sizes.
As Andrew Doyle said "who, in this day and age, could disagree?"
Its very obviousness carries a built-in implication - namely, only black lives matter. So not “inclusive”, then, in the woke sense. 

As a slogan, it’s pointedly not ‘all lives’ and you can get yourself into real trouble for suggesting that it ought to be. So no, just the one skin-shade. Not even ‘as much as everyone else’s lives’,  and -  conspicuous by its absence - not BAME lives. Just the Black ones. 

Black Power! The Nation of Islam! The most racist outfit imaginable. Raised fists!.
Look at the new language. These days anti-racism IS racism so we must get used to opposites being the new normal. Someone has decided that anguage is officially allowed to mean the opposite of the old meaning. Consistency is the key. Oh, and inconsistency.
Example.
28 injuries to policepersons occur during a peaceful incident.
Another incident results in injuries to 2 police officers.
Which was the more violent incident? Obvious!
Once you get used to it it’s fine.

How long-winded that was - and that was the edited version of the beginning of a beginning.  I scrapped it.


Then I saw this on YouTube. So I just thought Bollox. Why bother? Let Mahyar and Konstantin take the floor.

Fixed!

For some reason, YouTube (Or maybe just this video (?) ) seems to be (temporarily I hope) out of order with Blogger, so here's a grab of the image. (You can access the video (direct) via YouTube)

 If I can, I'll try again later. See above.
(Note: I'm a swearier person than Craig)

"As fruitful as arguing that a prawn should be a giraffe"

Newsnight's one redeeming feature - poor, worn-out, disenchanted, utterly-bored-to-tears Jeremy Paxman - has written an article for the Grauniad laying into philosopher Alain de Botton and his much-plugged views on the news. (We even plugged A de B here at "Is".) 

It's hardly a profound piece, but it certainly made me laugh. 

Of course, some people will pick up on the perfect translation of Paxo's trademark arched eyebrow and sneer into prose in this passage: 

Thanks be, Alain de Botton has come among us again, as he does so often when we're perplexed. Anxious about whether you understand art? Do you appreciate sex properly? What's religion about? How can you be happy? Fear not, De Botton can tell you, quickly and easily. Not since Moses went up a mountain and came down carrying a couple of slabs of granite reducing life to 10 commandments has anyone been able to reduce the complex enigmas of existence down to simple injunctions. The man has a solution for everything.

Or this delicious turn of phrase (perfectly capturing former BBC Head of News turned Professor of Media Studies at Cardiff University, Richard Sambrook, perhaps?):

Reporters in rehab (now often posing as professors of media studies)...

The Daily Mail has also been quick to spot and blow up a passing dig at the Newsnight presenter's BBC colleague Huw Edwards...

Admittedly Huw Edwards can come across like some evangelical preacher on a wet Sunday morning in Merthyr Tydfil

...turning it into "an extraordinary attack" and "a bizarre feud". Which calls for this image:

But Jeremy Paxman had some interesting things to say about the news as well. 

His article begins, with plenty of the the studious cynicism for which he's known:

What is news? To judge from the daily newspapers and TV bulletins we can discard my favourite definition – that it is something that someone somewhere doesn't want us to know.

Jeremy's conspiratorial definition of the news (which he then dismisses) is something which will resonate with many of the BBC's critics (and critics of Newsnight). 

For those of us on the mainstream Right (as we see ourselves) - the Biased BBC/Daily Mail/Is the BBC biased?/Daily Telegraph/Not a Sheep/The Commentator tendency - that's a definition which finds itself crossing our minds, from time to time, to varying degrees, probably without us even being aware of it having done so.

For example, from Quentin Letts at the Daily Mail and Damian Thompson at the Telegraph, through to many commenters at Biased BBC - and, well away from the mainstream Right, Roy Greenslade at the Guardian too - many people have been aghast (if not exactly surprised) that the BBC has (at least until this afternoon) resolutely avoided reporting the Harriet Harman-Jack Dromey-Tessa Jowell PIE/NCCL paedophile allegations being made by the Mail - a story the Mail has been making hay with for several days now (and which other papers have subsequently taken up). 

Except for Prof. Greenslade of the Graun, all the above have seen that refusal to cover the story by the BBC as clear evidence of pro-Labour bias on the BBC's part - and a case of "something that someone somewhere [the BBC and the Labour Party] doesn't want us to know". 

What's changed today that finally provoked the BBC to break cover (keeping with this way of thinking), is that Harriet Harman and her husband have now denounced the Mail's investigation as a "smear". The BBC, so it seems, now feel safe to leap into action in response. Clicking its heels, so to speak, at Hattie's command.

I doubt that example was in Paxo's mind though.

His main point seems to be that the news just isn't interesting enough these days, that the news needs to be perpetually new and surprising:

Astonishing events that burst into our consciousness with the impact of the attack on the Twin Towers are very rare indeed. Most of the rest is just regurgitated announcement, speech or advertisement. Sometimes, the press release has scarcely been rewritten. Maybe that's why so many people don't seem to be paying much attention any more.

That's far too world-weary (and wrong-headed) for me. There's plenty going on, and novel excitements aren't everything (or anything much). 

Just because Jeremy is bored and just because Ian Katz's Newsnight isn't interested in covering the lurch into leftist authoritarian - and the reactive protests - in post-Chavez Venezuela, for example, doesn't mean that it's not a story of importance for our times, telling us important things about radical chic regimes and their way of degenerating into Gadaffiesque strangeness (or, in Maduro's case, extreme mediocrity) and cruelty.

Still, I've got to concede that there is some truth in this:

Technology has eliminated time-delay and now enables us to be virtually present at any event, almost anywhere. Enjoying lives of greater comfort and safety than ever before, we can be regaled in our own sitting rooms with mayhem or misery from most corners of the globe. But the more news there is, the less anyone really needs it. The result, too often, is paralysis – information overload. What are we to do with it all?

And, in a dig that I think applies to many a BBC editor (Newsnight's Ian Katz included), I rather liked this:

When it comes to it, news is just some things that have happened, as chosen by some not-very-interesting people running newspapers and television.

These people have rather predictable tastes and rather obvious blindspots. 

Don't they just! (See our coverage of Newsnight and Sunday for evidence of that). 

The most exciting bit for me involved that old chestnut - one which gets me and Sue playing conkers with each other from time to time: the question of impartiality v advocacy for the 'best kinds of bias'. Paxo is on my side here:

De Botton's cure for the indifference that afflicts so many of us when confronted with tidings of some awful human tragedy far away is for the news to be less preoccupied with accuracy and more with advocacy. Fine if De Botton is the advocate-in-chief. But just supposing that George Galloway, David Icke or Abu Hamza got the job?

Anyhow, in the spirit of Newsnight's David Bowie tribute act, I think the last word is best left to the Thin White Duke himself:

All the young dudes/Carry the news/Boogaloo dudes/Carry the news. 

I can imagine Newsnight editor Ian Katz sagely nodding his head at that (like it actually means anything).

Lies, damned lies, and Cardiff University academics

Mark Twain is the likeliest candidate for having coined the killer quote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".

I've always felt that to be deeply unfair to statistics. 

Statistics are invaluable. It's how they are used - and misused - that's the problem. 

Think of it this way, if you like. People (though not Mark Twain) sometimes say, "There's no such thing as a bad dog, just a bad owner." Well, I'd say there's no such thing as a bad statistic, just bad users of statistics.

As someone who (in the past) based an entire BBC bias-related blog around statistics, I'm bound to say that of course. But the importance of using statistics to help answer the question "Is the BBC biased?" is something that many people (besides me) cling to with hope in our ever-optimistic hearts of finally nailing the BBC down over its strangely slippery bias.

That's why high-profile statistical reports about BBC bias always create such a stir (in certain circles).

Not that they usually seem to do much good. 

However watertight they may be, people who dislike their findings are free to dismiss them (and they'll find plenty of like-minded people cheering them on as they do so.) 

Similarly, it's a simple fact of life that reports that come to conclusions about BBC bias which confirm our personal opinions tend to be the ones we find most persuasive, and about which we are least critical. 

Thus, my world-famous interruption stats proved popular with UKIP and certain Conservative MPs, plus right-leaning readers of blogs about BBC bias. Left-wingers ignored them. The BBC dismissed them. 

Can you guess what I found?

Similarly, a Centre for Policy Studies report investigating the BBC News website's coverage of right-wing and left-wing think tanks, tied to citations of the right-wing Telegraph and left-wing Guardian, found an enthusiastic response at the Telegraph and at right-wing blogs but got trashed at the Guardian and left-wing blogs, and the BBC actively rubbished it. 

Can you guess what it found?

Plus (and from a different perspective), when Labour activist Phil Burton-Cartledge published findings about BBC bias on Question Time on his A Very Public Sociologist blog - along with his own interpretations of those results - the left-wing Twittersphere and the New Statesman were delighted. Right-leaning blogs like Biased BBC weren't impressed and couldn't believe what they were reading. 

Can you guess what Phil found?

Next. When John Robertson, an academic from the University of West Scotland, provided detailed statistical evidence of pro-union/anti-independence bias in the BBC's coverage of the independence debate, pro-independence/pro-SNP people danced a caleigh while anti-independence/pro-union types cocked a deaf 'un. The BBC went on the warpath. 

The mostly influential BBC bias-related statistical report of recent times though came from the University of Cardiff. It provided the statistic backbone for the BBC's own 'independent' study into the BBC's coverage of immigration, bias and religion - the Prebble Review - before developing a life of its own (thanks to the efforts of the left-wing academics behind it), finding great favour with left-wingers like Owen Jones, It appalled the Right. 

Can you guess what it found? 

We've dealt with all of these before at Is the BBC biased? and, I hope you'll agree, dealt with them fairly - except, of course, as regards my interruption stats, which are an unassailable paragon of objectivity and statistical rectitude and, thus, completely beyond criticism!

As a result, the CPS findings were found (by me) to be flawed, even though they accord with my own findings and right-wing intuitions, and Phil's finding on Question Time were given one-and-a-half cheers (not three cheers and not no cheers), despite running counter to my own suspicions and despite Phil's left-wing gloss on them. The Scottish independence report was only touched on briefly, and I can't really give a proper opinion on it without wasting hours and days investigating it (which ain't gonna happen), though it looked pretty convincing to me, even though I think a 'yes' vote in Scotland would be a very bad thing. 

That's me plugging my attempts to be fair-minded there. (You'll have spotted that, of course, being shrewd types.) It's me saying I 'dis' the Right' and 'give respect' to the Left if I see the evidence inclining their way. 

I can't help it. That's the way I am. So gimme a medal for it.

But even I was far from respectful towards the the most influential report of all, and joined in the robust rubbishing of it by many on the Right. 

This was the Cardiff University report, which I regarded as a crock of shite right from the start.

It has a curious history. It was part-commissioned by the BBC itself, as part of the 'independent' Prebble review into BBC bias. The Prebble Review used it, by and large, to advance the view that the BBC was, by and large, impartial - much as you'd expect from an official BBC 'independent' report. Then the Cardiff University academics behind it began giving it a new life, using it to advance the startling view that the BBC is pro-Right in its bias.  

The Left loved it (some, no doubt, with tongue firmly in cheek.) We right-wing bloggers were aghast. Alan at Biased BBC bashed it. I bashed it here at Is the BBC biased? 

And we were right to do so.

One of our lines of attack on it smacked somewhat of the ad hom fallacy, but - as fallacies go - this one had legs, and it was worth using them to run with. Let's sprint through it again.

We noted the BBC Trust's direct funding for the report. 

We noted that Cardiff Uni prof Richard Sambrook (former director of BBC News, the BBC World Service and BBC Global News) wrote part of it. 

We also noted that the lead author charged with publicising it, Mike Berry, is associated with the far-Left Glasgow Media Group (a group that tends to see blues under the bed). 

Plus, we noted that the other listed authors contained far-left Red Pepper writer (and European Commission-commissioned academic) Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Kerry Moore (who has written about the British media's ill-treatment of Muslims), Lina Dencik (who describes herself as an 'activist') and Arne Hintz (who describes himself as an 'activist')

...in other words, as fine a collection of disinterested academics as you could possibly hope to find - as I'm sure you'll agree! 

The report got another media boost (in the left-leaning press) when Cardiff Uni media department boss-man Justin Lewis accused the Beeb of downplaying the report it funded/commissioned and of suppressing its findings that the BBC is pro-Right. We noted that Prof Lewis is a dyed-in-the-wool leftie, whose take on the BBC comes from the far-Left. 

We were suspicious, to say the least, of a BBC-backed report which the BBC used ('independently') to back its contention that it is an unbiased broadcaster of news. 

We were even more suspicious - given how convenient it is for the BBC to be able to advance one of its favourite arguments, "We get complaints from both sides; therefore, we must be getting it about right" - that the BBC-backed academics behind it (including a former VERY senior former BBC news supremo) then trotted out the remarkable claim that the BBC is actually right-biased.

Moving away from this line of argument, I complained that the Cardiff report used "a very small sample, the exhaustive concentration on which could lead to some very skewed results", contrasting that (modestly) with "my own intensive period of research", noting that "a massive sample such as this is surely preferable to a small sample, such as that used by the Cardiff team. Small samples are more prone to lead to statistical errors."

Well, blow me down with a feather, but there's a new report out today from the right-leaning think tank Civitas that rubbishes the Cardiff report along much the same lines as Is the BBC biased? and Biased BBC. 

It's an-easy-to-read 21-page report (and that even includes the footnotes). It may even turn out to be shorter than this post. 

I both recommend it and give my thanks to its authors, David Keighley and Andrew Jubb, for agreeing with me over everything I've ever said on the subject. I only wish they'd dedicated their report to me. [For any passing non-British people, this is an example of self-deprecating British humour. I don't actually mean it]. [[Or do I?]]. 

David and Andrew find that the BBC's Prebble report is "seriously flawed". They discuss Stuart Prebble's links to the BBC, the links between the BBC and Cardiff Uni's media department [another senior member is Richard Tait, former BBC trustee and Newsnight editor], and the university project director and the EU, saying the independence of the project is "severely compromised." They note (something we didn't) that the report was commissioned by BBC trustee David Liddiment, an intimate of the self-professed "liberal progressive" Mr Prebble. 

Excellent, compelling ad homs, as I'm sure you'll agree, but as a stats lover it's the critique of Cardiff Uni's methodology that really interests me...

...especially as it backs up my own criticism here at Is the BBC biased?.....[sorry for the break but I've had to move my big head off the keyboard here to type again].....that the Cardiff team based their study on what I at the time called "a very small sample, the exhaustive concentration on which could lead to some very skewed results" (contrasting it, oh-so-modestly again, with my own nine-month, exhaustive study of every interview with a party politician (some 2,200 of them) on all of the main BBC current affairs programmes over this period), adding that "A massive sample such as this is surely preferable to a small sample, such as that used by the Cardiff team. Small samples are more prone to lead to statistical errors."

David and Andrew's criticism of the Cardiff report focuses on several areas of concern that those familiar with statistics will be well aware of. 

The Cardiff team studied the Today programme, understandably. But they only studied part of it - one and a half hours (the same one and half hours) each day (i.e. only half of its air time), and missed an entire eight of their one-months-worth of programmes in 2012 - something I would never have countenanced when I did my nine-month survey of BBC interruptions. (A single missed edition, I felt at the time, would have scuppered it). Cardiff covered too short a period and missed too much.

This also provides an example of what are known as 'constant errors'. Omitting the first hour-and-a-half of the programme and the Saturday editions they omitted such things as the (pro-EU-inclined) business spot at 6.15-6.30 and, even more important, the mass of BBC interviewer-BBC reporter interviews that dominate the early stages of every Today programme. Why didn't they monitor Today over the entirety the programme, or over different periods of the programme each day? Why be so rigid?

Then there's 'convenience sampling', where the Cardiff researchers reached back, grabbed and re-cycled a random study from 2007 (something 'at hand') to compare to 2012, based on the BBC Trust's 2007 Bridcut Report into impartiality. This was presented as a 'before and after' but, as they had no report at hand from before Bridcut, they had to use one from just after Bridcut, making both post-Bridcut. 

David and Andrew's research is far more extensive and comprehensive. They recorded everything over the period Cardiff covered (luckily for us). They spotted 21 guests in that month in 2012 who spoke in favour of the EU/EU legislation. Fully 12 of them would have been missed by the Cardiff team because they appeared before 7.30 am or on Saturday. 

Worse, due to the Cardiff team's extremely restricted choice of criteria as to what constituted a relevant EU discussion, a further 9 speakers fell out of the Cardiff survey's field of sight. Only one of those 21 pro-EU guests, therefore, registered on the Cardiff survey. Wiping 20 pro-EU speakers out of a survey of pro-EU BBC bias certainly strikes me as a good reason to dismiss the Cardiff team's findings. As the Civitas researchers say, 

this methodology [by Cardiff] would have identified only 4% of the total number of pro-EU speakers who appeared on Today between 15 Oct and 15 Nov 2012.

They then note what will sound remarkable to many of us - the way the Cardiff researchers blatantly conflated ALL UKIP and Conservative right-wingers as holding identical views on EU withdrawal - despite the fact (as we righties - unlike those Cardiff lefties - know very well) that there's a huge range of opinion on the Right about Europe, from UKIP 'withdrawalists' to Conservative 'stay-in-the-EU-and-renegotiate' types and Conservative Europhiles). 

Even though the Cardiff team spotted a fall in UKIP voices on the BBC between 2007 and 2012, they (and Stuart Prebble) dismissed that because UKIP-type views were expressed elsewhere by Conservatives (many of whom didn't share UKIP's views on withdrawal). 

David and Andrew say

...in 221 full weeks of analysis of the Today programme, between 2005 and 2013, Newswatch’s research shows that Conservative withdrawalists appeared on only 14 occasions (equating to less than four times a year) and UKIP appearances outnumbered those by the Conservative withdrawalists by a ratio of almost six to one. Conservative ‘come out’ supporters made only 0.4% of the total EU-related speaker appearances, compared to 2.2% from UKIP. 

...which throws another spanner into the cogs of the Cardiff media machine.

The lesson of all this is that, in the absence of official BBC statistics on bias/impartiality (something they never publish), we shouldn't give up attempts to be statistical but we should, nonetheless, be rigorously sceptical about any such statistics-based surveys that come our way...

...and, I suppose, any attempted rebuttal.

To boldly go...into the 'Independent' comments section

You don't have to be Captain Kirk or Mr Spock to experience what it's like to visit a parallel universe. I visited one only this morning.

I was reading an article on the Independent website by the paper's media editor Ian Burrell, outlining the complaints of Prof. Justin Lewis of Cardiff University. Prof. Lewis is unhappy that a report from this university claiming to have proven that the BBC is biased towards the right has been ignored by the BBC. The report 'found' that the BBC is pro-Conservative, pro-Eurosceptic and pro-business. 

You can read my own sniffy take on that report here. 

Partly I played the slightly less-than-reputable ploy of playing the man rather than the ball, noting that the lead author also writes for the far-left Red Pepper and that the report's public face has long been involved with a hard-left media campaign. Other members of the research team were left-wing activists too.

Now, just because several of the Cardiff research team hold very left-wing opinions and are politically active doesn't necessarily mean that their findings aren't correct or that they can't attempt to be as objective as possible whilst doing their academic research. 

Still, their findings, taken as a whole, have the feel of a rogue poll, a statistical outlier - and bias (however unconscious) could be a factor. 

The findings certainly fly against expectation - and not just mine. Polls show that over four times as many people believe that the BBC has a pro-left bias than believe it has a pro-right bias. 

I also questioned the limited nature of the study though, especially its small sample and surprisingly short duration - just five days of one BBC news bulletin, for example, which seems absurdly short, and prone to producing very skewed results. I contrasted that, oh-so-modestly, with my own massive 9-month survey into interruptions back in 2009-10. 

Still, back to that parallel universe - the world of that 4% of people who told YouGov they think the BBC is pro-right in its bias. 

The way to enter it is to read the comments beneath Ian Burrell's report. Here's a selection of them. Enjoy.

The BBC does seem to give Europhobes, Climate Change deniers and other whacky right wingers almost unchallenged platforms for their views. How often is Farage wheeled out on almost any topic? He's on QT more than anyone else and repeats his myths and nonsense and no-one is there to state that facts. Same with Lawson, Delingpole, Philips and other climate change deniers.

At last the truth is out - something that has been obvious since 2010, the BBC has turned right. The frequency with which UKIP and Tory representatives are used on interviews, quiz shows and magazine type programmes, compared to representatives of broader interests, has become so blatant that it is surprising that it has taken this long to be officially noticed.

The BBC has been right leaning for years. Just look at any episode of Question Time. There are usually five guests and at least three are right wing leaning. The Tory, The Lib Dem and usually someone like the right wingers Starkey or Hislop. I have seen episodes where four of the five are right leaning. However I have never seen an episode when more than two are left leaning. A totally biased based program chaired by a mate of HRH Charles. Then there's Nick, our Chief Political Editor, and ex chair of the University Student Conservative group. And doesn't if show in his reports.

"BBC accused of political bias – on the right, not the left". Ain't that the truth I wrote this elsewhere just today: I've been amused by the BBC, who've gone out of their way to play down the Labour win. "UKIP swing was greater than Labour's", they got 18% of the vote

So how awful was the Labour vote? 55% of the vote.. More people voted Labour than all the rest put together, but UKIP had a bigger swing - that's the good news for, apparently, the BBC.

BBC News has actually been "captured" by the British Bankers Asssociation. "Having deduced that Robert Peston is a liar and shill, in a cascade you are then forced to the realisation that he cannot continuously disseminate BBA propaganda so liberally in BBC broadcast News without the collusion and corruption of the BBC News Group."

The BBC has been on egg-shells with this Govt since the Savile debacle and all dodgy pay-offs of recent times. Then you have a spiv like Grant Shapps issuing not so veiled threats to the Beeb from Conservative HQ. The bias to the right has been apparent for some time. Last year 55 000 people marched on the Tory Conference and through Manchester on a pro NHS anti Austerity march and the BBC tried to pretend it wasn't happening. It barely made the local news. Then the "Million Mask March", an anti-capitalist protest in 400 cities across the world including London and, again, the BBC were "LALALALA it's not happening". And yet, the merest micro-hint of anything that might be construed as a bit on the Left, and the Beeb is pounced upon by the Colonel Blimps on the Right as being practically "Marxist". See the foam-mouthed reaction to PJ Harvey's guest editing of "Today" on Radio 4. It seems the Govt is bullying the Beeb into being it's mouthpiece and using the License Fee as leverage to ignore many stories that show up the myriad defects in the Coalition, and the Tories in particular. It's a sad state of affairs that you have to go to RT and even Al Jazeera to see some of the stories the BBC shy away from these days! Will, they take notice of this, I wonder? Maybe after the next election!

The right wing bias has been obvious for years. This is apparent not only in the selective use of news items but in any political discussion programme. Andrew Neil regular has journalist from the right wing press as guests on his politics today. Question Time always loads its panel with those from the right and the worst example of this bias is the Andrew Marr Show.

Some of those comments really do read like mirror images of comments you read at, say, Biased BBC on on Daily Telegraph comments threads. It's quite uncanny in that respect - and very interesting to read. Getting the 'alternative reality' view from time to time on the subject you're interested in is no bad thing, of course.

'Aha', the BBC will probably say at this point, 'You see. We get complaints from both sides, which shows we must be getting it about right then'.

Well, as I've noted before, there really does seem to be a more criticism of BBC bias from the pro-right side of the argument - as can be seen from the wealth of websites that campaign against the BBC on the issue, as well as from the polling evidence. So the 'to be fair, we have complaints from both sides' argument doesn't necessarily hold water. 

You could have 1,000 complaints from one side, and 30 from the other. Those from one side could be genuine complaints while the ones from the other side could be essentially disingenuous. One side could outline specific, detailed examples of bias, the other could just make unsupported assertions. 

So, there's a quantity and a quality issue with regards to the BBC's habitual 'you're going to get complaints from both sides' defence too. 

Plus, just because both sides say you are biased it doesn't necessarily follow that both sides are wrong. One side could be wrong; the other right. 

Still, none of that will prevent BBC editors from continuing to appear on Newswatch and repeating the mantra that 'We get complaints from both sides, which shows we're getting it about right', over and over and over again. They clearly think it's a knock-down argument.

Update: There's a comment at Biased BBC on David Vance's post about this same story, which reminds me of something I forgot to remind you:

Doublethinker says: February 15, 2014 at 12:00 pm
I can’t help thinking that the BBC paid this chap to produce this barmy finding. No sane person would ever publish such tripe unless they were being well paid to do so.

Well, yes. Part of this Cardiff University research 'proving' that the BBC has a right-wing bias was directly funded by the BBC Trust.

Plus one of its authors was Professor Richard Sambrook, who you may recall was Director of BBC News, then director of the BBC World Service for several years. He left the corporation in 2010.