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My favourite measure of bias across the Beeb is the super-average interruption coefficient - which is calculated very simply by adding up all the individual I.C.s for each party & then dividing them by the number of interviewed granted to each party that month. As with all statistics, the larger the sample, the better the result - and the more significant any differences (hence the increase of the I.C. to 2 decimal places).
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Here is how things worked out in January 2010. Guess who's top again?!
UKIP (5 interviews) - 1.56
DUP (4 interviews) - 1.26
SNP (6 interviews) - 0.95
Conservatives (75 interviews) - 0.91
Sinn Fein (6 interviews) - 0.82
Labour (134 interviews) - 0.61
Greens (2 interviews) - 0.60
Liberal Democrats (44 interviews) - 0.51
Independents (3 interviews) - 0.40
SDLP (2 interviews) - 0.30
TUV (2 interviews) - 0.25
Alliance (1 interview) - 0.00
Respect (1 interview) - 0.00
That very high average for UKIP, based on 6 interviews, leaps out straight off. It's very close to December's figure too (1.55), showing that there's a consistency to the BBC's hostility towards the party. The Democratic Unionist Party, propelled into the headlines by events, comes off second worse. The SNP continue to be ill-treated by the BBC and only slightly behind them come the Conservatives - again, significantly more likely to be interrupted by BBC interviewers than their Labour and Lib Dem counterparts, as shown here month after month after month. Left-wing bias at the BBC? Clearly.
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Looked at your profile - you forget to mention your love of Haydn's music judging by the picture.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was going to be either Haydn or Sibelius - but Haydn looks far less forbidding!
ReplyDeleteLove Haydn and Sibelius, but I thought the pic was George Washington !
ReplyDeleteI did briefly consider changing it for a day or so to a photo of John Prescott, just for a a laugh - but I couldn't risk scaring off potential readers!
ReplyDeleteThe only downside in moving to Canada, apart from a nice pint, is the cultural desert and the radio stations' idea of classics is to play Jonny Cash.
ReplyDeleteHave managed to get round UK's ClassicFM's block and make a point of listening to their 'Smooth Classics at Six' on the internet, the only thing I link back to the UK for. Have now totally given up on BBC World, hence I don't have much to say about it anymore. The more I see of the Fox channels we have here (and CNN) the more I realise how brainwashed the vast majority of the unthinking public in the UK have become.
Andy C
Well, that may be the one good thing you can say about the BBC - it does have Radio 3!
ReplyDeleteIt's rare, incidentally, to see a story about Canada on the BBC News website (they've got so much to tell us about Gaza of course!), and I can't recall seeing anything about the Canadian political situation in recent months.
But in saying that, there is a story about your new homeland on the website today:
"Canada's wolverine population plummets". I thought I'd click on it. The article proper has a different headline, "Climate change causes wolverine decline across Canada". There's no question mark at the end of it, and the only quotation marks are the ones I've supplied! I should have known it would have been just another 'climate change' story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8494000/8494397.stm