h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Recently, I've been quite distressed by the BBC's misleading reporting on its news web page. Two particular incidents have troubled me, and I would be interested to hear others' opinions on them.

The first was when the BBC reported the conclusions of an independent review of their middle east coverage. Essentially, the review said that although there was no conscious bias in the BBC's reporting, a failure to compensate for the inequalities of the situation itself meant that their coverage was structurally biased in favour of Israel in a variety of ways. The BBC article summarising this report didn't mention this, in fact it almost gave the opposite picture. More details on my blog entry on the topic:

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/dangoodman/entry/independent_review_of/

The second incident is more recent. A Home Office report into the 28 day limit on detention without trial was released. The BBC article is entitled "28 day limit 'inadequate'", and the one line summary reads "The 28–day limit for police to hold terror suspects without charge may well need to be extended, an influential committee of MPs says." A few days ago, it read "The 28–day limit for police to hold terror suspects without charge will almost certainly need to be extended, an influential committee of MPs says." but they changed it after I emailed them. The report itself concludes with: "Any new legislation should not propose longer than 28 days detention unless the evidence is compelling..." and includes the statement "The Committee conclude that none of the evidence it reviewed would justify a maximum detention period longer than 28 days..." Again, read the full details on my blog:

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/dangoodman/entry/bbc_news_headline/

Now, I looked into these two articles in detail because they're subjects I'm interested in (particularly from the point of view of bias, conscious or otherwise), so I wouldn't like to make any general conclusions. Is this the general quality of BBC news reporting? If so, isn't the BBC effectively worthless as a news source? If they can't even be trusted to read a straightforward press release and report it accurately, how can we have any faith in their reporting of facts whose accuracy we cannot check? On the other hand, if their reporting is generally of a higher standard than this, why this incredible failure in these two cases?

I'm of the opinion also that the standard of BBC News is declining, and it is no longer my first port of call.

Tis my feeling that the bias of the BBC in Palastine has switch from which ever side had least conspicuously done something outragouisly barbaric to the other for the longest.
Reporting from a refrugee camp trying to a be a nation state populated by maladjusted extremists and criminals under perpetual seige by another group of religious nationalists that occaisionally shoot reporters isn't the safest thing to do or the easiest thing to do. Israel can get it's side reported better simply by being a safer place to report from and having the trappings of a genuine statehood.

The BBC is news obsessed. Take for example the World at One. You get headlines then the news then the programme, headlines again after 10 minutes the closing headlines. All this within 30 minutes for Bob's sake.

And the biggest story this year on Radio 4 when in a malicious act of personal vandalism the new controller replaced the much loved UK theme at 5-30am with what, yes you've guessed headlines, just after the World Service news and just before the Today programme.

Another criticsm I've heard is that the BBC news is moving more and more away from reporting the news towards opinion.

(much loved by who? I hated the wretched thing)

Me me me. I bet you don't like the last night of the Proms either

No, but it is easier to avoid that - retuning the radio in my car was a pain so I'd just endure what felt like a hour's worth of the same tune as yesterday before we got on to farming today. I learned to hate it over a year or so of putting up with it every working morning. It is TOO DARN LONG to play at the same tie EVERY day. I wouldn't have minded so much if they had cycled through all the individual songs over the course of the week but no, the same blasted medley every morning

Anyway, enough of that little aside...

RIP "Early one morning, as the sun was rising" the ghost of the Radio 4 UK theme lives inside your head, all day. revenge is sweet. I hope Mark Damazer is

Morning, from 0530.#


Me me , me too. I hated the removal of it for the sake of more bloody news!

Novo

In passing, what are you all doing up at 05:30 am?

(The horror, the horror)

sprout

And yes, the BBC news is declining in quality.

The interviewing standard is less than I would hope. Example, and here I have to tread carefully, A) because I don't know all the facts , and B) because I will sound 'racist'

Radio 4 carried a report about the Asian community's disappointment that more positive things have not come out of the consutation with muslim groups and leaders after 7/7.carried out by the Govt.

What wasn't mentioned was what the muslim leaders wanted or expected. There was some #discussion# about integration - but not about who wants to integrate with whom! All froth and no content. It seemed as though the BBC didn't want to ask #difficult# questions, which had they been answered, might have gone some way to informing us what our Asian communities want, and how their aspirations might be met.

There was some comparison made betwen disaffected white youths and similarly disaffected Asian youths, but in both of those cases the answer is to get involved , go and meet life, don't expect it to arrive on a plate. I know that I am not addressing social disadvantage here - but we have been there before.

This is about inadequate reporting

Novo

I presume there are official guidelines about how to write articles, and it could be interesting to see them and compare them with what gets written.

I've always wondered what causes road accidents involving police vehicles to end up phrased as if someone else was at fault "A pedestrian was involved in a collision with a police car..."

I seem to remember reading that BBC journalists were/are unhappy with their policy of exposing both sides of the argument equally, even when one side covers 99% of all those involved, and the other 1%. I'm not sure if this has a bearing on what you're talking about, .

As regards Palestine, I think the BBC are the very least of the offenders. The governments of the USA and Israel are the primary offenders, from my perspective. Still, an unbalanced or significantly biassed approach doesn't help, and I suppose the BBC could and should do better.

As for news being mostly opinion: when was this *not* the case? The facts of the news are much less important to people than what/how we all feel about it.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I generally pay little attention to accusations of BBC bias since they're almost always bunk.

I take an interest in both the situation in the middle east and the government's response to terrorism. In both of these areas, the BBC's coverage has been mostly excellent, detailed and non-biased.

I've heard people accuse the BBC of being:

* a supporter of the government on Iraq

* an opponent of the government on Iraq

* pro-Israeli

* pro-Palestinian

Most of it comes from far-right and far-left organisations who seem to object to the BBC's giving time to positions other than their own (the Chomskyist organisation "Medialens", the Murdoch-owned media and various pressure groups are particular offenders). Fortunately, the BBC largely ignores these people and carrys on regardless.

I've seen a handful of cases of genuine bias:

*When reporting the beginning of the war in Iraq a BBC journalist on BBC Radio went into a fairly adolescent rant whilst watching American forces cross into Iraq. Despite what the Daily Mail et al seem to think, this sort of blemish is extremely rare.

*When reporting on the recent Gaza pull-out a BBC Radio two report gave several interviews with Israeli settlers and none with Palestinians. However, the tone of the reporting didn't appear to take a side so this was not serious bias so much as imbalance.

*A couple of nights ago there was a report on the Islamist militia who have taken control of Mogadishu which took a definite tone of this being a positive thing, avoiding issues of human rights and Islamist ideology and concentrating on the stability they have brought to the war-torn city. They also made a common BBC error of using "Islamic" and "Islamist" interchangably.

Apart from that, I can't think of any real bias I've seen recently in BBC reporting. The oft-quoted use of "militant" instead of "terrorist" is extremely common in media taking a neutral point of view (Wikipedia uses it for the same reason) and also regularly shows-up in newspapers like The Times.

"Now, I looked into these two articles in detail because they're subjects I'm interested in (particularly from the point of view of bias, conscious or otherwise), so I wouldn't like to make any general conclusions. Is this the general quality of BBC news reporting? If so, isn't the BBC effectively worthless as a news source? If they can't even be trusted to read a straightforward press release and report it accurately, how can we have any faith in their reporting of facts whose accuracy we cannot check? On the other hand, if their reporting is generally of a higher standard than this, why this incredible failure in these two cases?"

It's not an "incredible failure". The BBC has to cover enormous amounts of data and information and will occasionally get things wrong. Newspapers have "corrections and clarifications" sections for the same reason. You've gone through BBC output, found an error and then used it to accuse BBC news of being "effectively worthless" which is laughable.

"The first was when the BBC reported the conclusions of an independent review of their middle east coverage."

What was this independent review and who commissioned it?

Apologies folks, the bulk of this post is going to be my reply to Zagreb's stream of consciousness in the last few posts, but first some replies to the others who replied.

novos,

I've found that the quality of interviewing is quite poor too. News 24 has a programme called "Hard Talk" which is apparently very well spoken of. But as far as I can tell, it consists of the interviewer using a very aggressive interviewing style which puts their guest on the defensive and means they get very little new or interesting information out of them. Like Paxman, it's more like interview theatre: see the mighty politician humbled by being asked the same question ten times in a row when he clearly isn't going to answer it.

Potholer,

That would be very interesting. I wonder, it might be possible to get hold of any such advice if it exists.

P-c,

I agree that the BBC is one of the least worst offenders amongst TV news (although I think channel 4 news is probably better on average). The report did say they were doing a lot of things very well (and we could add, better than most), but that that was no excuse for not doing better.

Zagreb,

OK, a couple of points. My point was mostly one about the quality of BBC news, not about bias. In both the cases I mentioned, all that the person writing the article had to do was read about a page or two and summarise it. In both cases, they summarised it as saying almost the opposite of what it actually said. This is nothing to do with bias per se, but everything to do with accuracy.

The independent review was commissioned by the BBC governors and was made up of Lord Eames, Professor Stewart Purvis, Philip Stephens, and Dr Elizabeth Vallance, but how they were chosen and who they are I don't know. I imagine google can help here. You can download the report here:

http://www.bbcgovernors.co.uk/docs/reviews/panel_report_final.pdf

It's an interesting read (and no, I'm not being sarcastic I found it interesting). Given what you said about complaints from either side, I'll just quote one little paragraph from the report:

"It is clearly not enough to say that, as there are complaints from both sides, the BBC is presumably getting its coverage about right. This kind of complacency would not be acceptable and the Panel has not found it among BBC journalists or management."

Now, there is some substance to this (from Zagreb's post):

"The BBC has to cover enormous amounts of data and information and will occasionally get things wrong."

Agreed, but... I emailed the BBC to complain about the article in my second example. They presumably read and agreed with my email (or a similar one sent by someone else), because they changed the one line summary (it's now only misleading rather than outright false). But, they didn't change the title, which I repeat is "28 day limit 'inadequate'" even though the report on which the article is based explicitly says "The Committee conclude that none of the evidence it reviewed would justify a maximum detention period longer than 28 days...". Let's assume it was an error. Why wouldn't they change it given they've taken the time to change the one line summary in response to a complaint?

One more thing to reply to in Zagreb's post:

"You've gone through BBC output, found an error and then used it to accuse BBC news of being "effectively worthless" which is laughable."

No, but you have made an unfounded hypothesis and then selectively quoted me, giving a misleading impression (incidentally, just like the BBC in my second example). I haven't "gone through BBC output". I read the BBC news web page, and occasionally follow up on the references given in their articles. In these two cases, the reporting was inaccurate. I'm not an academic researcher in media, I don't have the time or resources to do a comprehensive study. I have, over the past year or so, become increasingly frustrated with the quality of BBC news and journalists, and I picked these two examples to illustrate my point because I had already written reasonably detailed blog entries about them with links to the offending articles. I could also have mentioned anecdotal evidence of this decline in quality, but that wouldn't be worth much would it?

Also, I haven't "used it to accuse BBC news of being "effectively worthless"". Read what I said (copied again here):

"... I wouldn't like to make any general conclusions. Is this the general quality of BBC news reporting? If so, isn't the BBC effectively worthless as a news source?"

"But, they didn't change the title, which I repeat is "28 day limit 'inadequate'" even though the report on which the article is based explicitly says "The Committee conclude that none of the evidence it reviewed would justify a maximum detention period longer than 28 days..."."


From the article you link to:

"But it adds: "The growing number of cases and the increase in suspects monitored by the police and security services make it entirely possible, and perhaps increasingly likely, that there will be cases that do provide that justification.

"We believe, therefore, that the 28-day limit may well prove inadequate in the future." "

Hence "28-day limit "inadequate"". It's quoting from the report mentioned in the article and the quote-marks show that this is just a quote and not a statement of fact by the BBC.

Having read the article, I've no idea why you take such exception. It tells me what the report says and what it's critics say. It doesn't take a side. This is what the BBC should be doing.

"
"... I wouldn't like to make any general conclusions. Is this the general quality of BBC news reporting? If so, isn't the BBC effectively worthless as a news source?""

I can't see anything wrong with the quality of reporting, though. And you most definitely directly-claim that your opinion could lead to the BBC being "effectively worthless as a news source" which I still find an extraordinary thing to say.