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Andrew Marr began the new year with an interview with Gordon Brown (as he did last year). Next week it will be David Cameron's turn and, presumably, the following week we'll see young Nick Clegg in the studio.
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The Brown interview was a large-scale one, lasting 30 minutes (and 43 seconds!) and containing 25 interruptions. This results in an interruption coefficient of 0.8.
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This gives us another useful benchmark for comparison.
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The last weekly series of party leader interviews was at the time of last year's party conferences and saw these notorious results for Andrew Marr (with Cameron being interrupted over twice as often as Brown):
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Brown - 1.0
Clegg - 1.3
Cameron - 2.1
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Today's 0.8 figure for Brown shows that it was a somewhat softer interview this time than it was last time (the interview with the eye-sight question!). Indeed, 15 of those 25 interruptions came in just 10 minutes, as the topic turned to the economy - leaving only 10 interruptions for the remaining 20 minutes (and 3 of those were used on 'the playing fields of Eton', where Marr got the chance to say that Cameron was a 'Tory toff' and repeat that there are too many old Etonians at the top of the Tory party!!). This is not unusual when Marr interviews a senior Labour politician. Brown, therefore, got plenty of time to talk, without much interruption, for a large part of the interview, while only facing a few minutes of concentrated fire. He also got a lot of time to project himself as an international statesman. If Cameron becomes prime minister, what will he do about Yemen, or Somalia, or Afghanistan? Will Marr ask him about this next week? Or will he not give Cameron the chance to pose as an international-statesman-in-waiting, and stick to questioning him almost exclusively on domestic issues instead (cuts, cuts, cuts, Eton, cuts)?
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We'll see next week what happens to David Cameron this time round & whether or not this will provide further proof of pro-Labour bias on Marr's part - a bias previously displayed most keenly prior to the June 2009 elections and during the party conferences seasons i.e. when it most matters. We're now at the beginning of the year of the general election, so it matters again.
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Over to you then Andrew Marr! I will be watching (and counting) next Sunday. Behave yourself, score an I.C. somewhere around 0.8 & you'll prove me wrong!!!
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I'm glad that someone is at last trying to quantify BBC bias.
ReplyDeleteHowever, for me the main problem is the news. I go there seeking facts as to what is happening in the world and I'm never sure how biased the information is. Yes, one can compare the time given to politicians to make statements, etc, but it is hard to judge what is happening in, say, Afghanistan, because there are few comparison sources. In my youth, you could believe that anything the BBC told you on the news was factual, now you just have to listen to them on the subject of Arab/Israeli relations to find it is far from being so.
Thank you for your kind words.
ReplyDeleteYes, it would be wonderful to have a reliable source of news (and wonderful if that were the BBC).
Wherever they report from in the world these days, I always have a nagging suspicion (even if it's from India or China or Brazil) that I am probably being fed a line in some way. That may mostly not be the case but, as you say, how can you tell?
And then there's the superficiality of so much of it, feeding us emotionally-charged stories rather than factual information.
The coverage of the situation in Yemen is a case in point. Why is it in the mess that it's in? What can be done about it that won't make matters worse? I've heard little so far that skims below the surface and the BBC don't seem to be drawing on a great pool of internal (or external) expertise on the matter, and when the do ask an expert (usually the same onee each time) they ask questions that encourage that expert to skim over the surface too, especially as there's usually too little time to expand on any points and dig deeper.
And as for domestic politics, that's if anything even worse!