I took too long to find this. It sprang to prominence again after the case where Trump called out the BBC in a clear case of dubious editing of one of his speeches (although the BBC denied partisan intent).
I heard of individual items now and then on BBC bias but I finally tracked the whole thing. It is the excellent News Watch, a site that has been monitoring the BBC for years and applying various kinds of analyses of bias to its outputs.
Some measures of bias are pretty simple -- counting the number of time spent on reporting items, or time allocated to speakers defending particular positions (see below).
It also touches on classic themes, reminiscent of famous work in the past, like the Glasgow University Media Group (still going, and with a list of the classic stuff here) which analysed less obvious signs of preference --where spokespersons were interviewed, for example (in the studio when their opinions belonged to a cosy consensus or, literally, as outsiders in the street).
News Watch has had a number of tussles with the BBC over the years, trying to get them to take its work seriously. The BBC will not accept any 'quantitative' or 'academic' analysis of patterns, but focuses only on individual programmes and claims its staff depend on their indefinable professional judgement to decide matters like 'balance' (although the Government imposes simple constraints during elections or referenda, for example, on the number of minutes that can be devoted to spokespersons from each 'side').
News Watch says:
Mr Hutt [ the Director of the BBC Complaints Unit], ... does not believe that academic techniques of content analysis of the type used by News-watch can be used to assess bias. It boils down to that, to him, that 9:4 imbalance was totally irrelevant because any attempt at ‘simple quantification’ of BBC content is not helpful. He argues that views about the EU/EEC are not generally ‘binary’ and that in any case, someone who might be classed as ‘pro-EU’ might actually have been making an impartial contribution.
The last one is quite a good point. But someone classed as pro-Brexit might also be capable of an impartial contribution too, of course --evidently not for the BBC.
News Watch has pursued its complaints to Government regulating bodies and to the courts, without success. The BBC remains safe from NW's criticism, regulating itself, applying its own standards of 'due impartiality', an undefinable term, meaning, in effect, whatever BBC broadcasters define it as meaning. The BBC has advisers and regulators of course -- they are often BBC people too.
News Watch is struggling with current ideological campaigns running at the BBC, principally favouring the usual politics of climate change and gender diversity, but here, I am obliged to their earlier work on Brexit -- and embarrassed not to have summarised it before.There is a large dossier on Europe and Brexit.
Highlights include that in one radio programme in 2018:
18 of the 24 [speakers] were pro-EU/anti-Brexit; only three were anti-EU/pro-Brexit; two contributors made points both for and against; and one was neutral. The imbalance was startling. The 18 who made negative points on Brexit delivered 3,824 words (76 percent of words spoken by guests in this category), those speaking positively 352 words (seven per cent), and mixed/neutral speakers 838 words (17 per cent). The anti-Brexit to pro-Brexit word count ratio was thus almost 11 to one. The ratio of pro-EU to anti-EU speakers in this category was 6:1.
A radio programme 2018 introduced a feature called a 'reality check', a mechanism that [the BBC] say is ‘objective’checking the reality of Brexit:'. The BBC’s ‘reality check’ correspondent Chris Morris...[had earlier] ...presented a five-part series called Brexit: a Guide for the Perplexed. His lens was so distorted that 18 out his 24 main interviewees were anti-Brexit and only seven per cent of the words spoken were from the withdrawal perspective.
After a complaint was received about a radio programme in 2018 a standard BBC defence was offered:
that the BBC was receiving complaints that its Brexit coverage was biased from both ‘sides’, those who supported Brexit and those who opposed it. Because of this, it was risibly suggested, complaints of editorial imbalance must be unfounded.... two BBC bigwigs – Gavin Allen, controller of daily news programmes, and Ric Bailey, chief political adviser – confirmed why, in their view, the BBC’s coverage was completely impartial and met Charter requirements.... Today presenter Nick Robinson – now seemingly firmly ensconced as the Corporation’s defender-in-chief – was wheeled out to defend the relentless tide of anti-Brexit negativity.
Citing another careful content analysis in 2018, Craig Byers of the website Is the BBC Biased?:
painstakingly tracked every mention on BBC programmes of the word ‘Brexit’ between Monday and Friday last week (April 16-20).
What he found was a deluge of Brexit negativity. Craig’s blog needs to be read in full to appreciate the sheer scale. It permeated every element of its news output and even percolated down to BBC1’s The One Show and EastEnders, which had a pointed reference to these ‘tough Brexit times’. In the BBC’s world, Brexit was a threat to EU immigrants (in the context of the Windrush developments), to farmers, to interest rates, to airlines, to personal privacy (via Cambridge Analytica), to house prices, to security in Northern Ireland, and more.
Perhaps the best single item is News-Watch's summary of the BBC's output 'The Brexit Collection', its own collection of Brexit programmes (so presumably a collection that represents the BBC's unbiased policy), broadcast post-referendum, when there was all the turmoil of negotiation and threats to organise Parliamentary coups reported in this blog, and a big push for a second referendum News-Watch.co says its analysis shows :
Brexit came under sustained negative attack... Analysis by News-watch shows that only 23% of contributors in the programmes as a whole spoke in favour of Brexit, against 58% in favour of Remain and 19% who gave a neutral or factual commentary...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia
...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia
A specific example was :
Brexit Street (occasional series PM [a BBC radio programme] , 20 July – 12 August, 2016). This was a totally flawed exercise in which an atypical street with atypical problems was depicted as representative of the Brexit vote.The series began on Radio 4’s PM programme in July, and its premise is that a regular stream of reports from this ‘ordinary street’ in Thornaby-on-Tees (between Middlesbrough and Stockton) will illuminate the underlying reasons for the referendum vote and its subsequent impact on residents and the locale. However, research by News-watch has identified it is not an ordinary street at all. House prices there are a third of the national average, and the local council has taken a very high number of asylum seekers, many of whom have been housed in ‘Brexit Street’ itself. The reporter, Emma Jane Kirby spoke of houses peppered with satellite dishes, low home ownership, high unemployment and daytime street drinkers. The focus of the early programmes has been on the problems of the asylum seekers and the apparent negative attitudes of locals towards them, including verbal and physical abuse and Swastika graffiti painted onto doors. The initial choice of interviewees has also included a high number of unemployed people who are very angry with the government that it has allowed Teesside to become rundown. To date, the interviewees have all been drawn from the DE social grades, and thus in a fundamental overall sense, the choice of material cannot at all representative of the national Brexit vote. Thus PM is being deeply misleading in its claims about the series. They have chosen a street where problems related to recent incomers are disproportionately high, and the intent seems to try show that the Brexit vote was based heavily on such tensions. Clearly, they may have been an element of voting choice, but not to this extent.
The analysis is focused on radio programmes which is a limitation, and there is a lack of methods to analyses specific images in TV programmes -- they need Glasgow Media Group for that. Even so, the 'serious' TV output from the BBC -- news and current affairs -- clearly falls within the scope of this analysis.
No comments:
Post a Comment