Category: Media Ethics
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“Repeated failure to be impartial” … “in built bias” … these are the favoured lines of attack for Conservative-supporting newspapers as they seek to galvanise the BBC’s opponents for what might become a final, make-or-break assault on the licence fee.
Battle lines were drawn when Nadine Dorries fired the starting gun in January with her infamous tweet that the most recent “licence fee announcement will be the last”.
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BBC bashing by Boris Johnson’s closest aides and supporters has already been knocked on the head by the deepening coronavirus crisis and the government’s desperate need to maximise every possible means of communicating with the public.
Ministers are coming face to face with the stark reality that the nationwide network of television and radio coverage provided by the BBC is a unique resource that any responsible administration should be duty bound to preserve and maintain.
Well over half the 28 million television audience for the Prime Minister’s Downing Street address announcing the lockdown was tuned to BBC 1 and the channel’s Six O’clock New has been attracting as many as 9 million viewers, twice the average viewing figure.
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Just as MPs are having to shoulder an unprecedented responsibility following Theresa May’s historic Brexit defeat, broadcasters should rise to the challenge and find a more informative and representative way to test local opinion.
News coverage in the immediate aftermath of the crushing rejection of May’s EU withdrawal agreement displayed yet again all the faults of the tired and repetitive formula used by television and radio programmes to canvas views of those living in prominent Leave or Remain communities.
If ever there was a format that illustrated the failings of lazy broadcast journalism, it is the ever-predictable Vox Pops sequence.
Day after day throughout the Brexit trauma, from referendum to parliamentary crisis, we have seen the same scene.
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Broadcasters, like print journalists, are rightly being challenged by leading figures on the Remain side for the news media’s failure during the EU Referendum campaign to exercise sufficient scrutiny over the claims being made by Leave supporters.
Based on my 30 years as a BBC correspondent, from well before the 1975 referendum, I am in no doubt as to how viewers and listeners were short changed.
During the 1970s and 1980s there was always a clear divide during election campaigns between news stories and campaign reports.
Major announcements and developments were treated on their news value, as self-standing items, and any political ramifications were covered in separate balanced packages on the day’s campaigning, later in the bulletin on programme.
But in the 2016 referendum campaign the BBC’s news value judgement seemed to be totally awry.
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The self indulgence of a cohort of departing BBC executives in agreeing between themselves the size of their pay-offs and pension pots came as no surprise to many of the journalists and producers who had worked alongside them. Nicholas Jones, a BBC correspondent for thirty years, traces the origins of a sense of entitlement that took root in the upper echelons of the Corporation and which uncoupled an ‘officer class’from their obligations to the licence payer.
While some employees found the collective strengths and ideals of ‘auntie’ BBC outdated and restrictive, many of my contemporaries ended fulfilling careers acknowledging they had been well rewarded. Most are comforted in retirement by their good fortune in being the beneficiaries of what for them has been a generous final-salary pension scheme. But those of us who stayed the course cannot help but reflect on the gulf that grew ever wider between editorial and production staff and the multiplying layers of upper management