Wednesday 8 April 2015

It Is Not Being Done

Peter Hitchens writes:

As I dipped in and out of the ‘election’ coverage, I was reminded quite strongly of the BBC’s outrageously biased handling of the 1997 election.

They behaved like a partisan newspaper and turned their huge magnifying glass on any dissent about the EU inside the Tories.

By the end of each day some minor disagreement in an individual election leaflet in one small constituency had assumed the proportions of a mighty ‘Tory split’.  

This would have been perfectly reasonable at The Guardian or the Daily Mirror (or The Sun which I think was at the time a keen supporter of the winning side, for a change). But it wasn’t the job of the BBC, with its commitment to impartiality.

Similarly, by the middle of today they were reporting ‘confusion’ about Ed Miliband’s proposals on non-domiciled tax status.

Well, there isn’t any, really.

Mr Miliband, who is the party leader, favours a policy of withdrawing this status and has presumably persuaded his party’s leading councils to approve the speech in which he said so.

No doubt some of them disagree with him. Likewise, no doubt, many senor figures in the Tory and Liberal Democrat parties have reservations about things that Mr Cameron or Mr Clegg say during the campaign.

But that’s for their enemies to exploit, as and when they can. It’s not ‘confusion’ if they do so – merely a fact of political life.

The job of the BBC, most especially during an election, is to report these policies, to examine their implications and effects as fairly as possible and to report the reaction to them, using accuracy and proportion, taking no position on them itself, and staying well clear of any attempt by the other parties to shout them down and muddy the waters. 

It should then do exactly the same for the policy announcements of the other parties I do not think it is doing this impartially.

I think it has, subconsciously, bought the anti-Miliband conventional wisdom of the rest of the media.

One thinks of certain elements of the ‘debate’ in which Messrs Miliband and Cameron were supposedly given equal treatment in face-to-face interviews and audience encounters.

In my view, they were not.

If these rules are properly observed, voters can then decide if they want to support the policy, or if they want to vote against it.

It’s called straight reporting and, as an openly biased person, I can tell better than most when and how it is not being done.

No comments:

Post a Comment