BBC is twice as likely to cover Left-wing news stories than Right-wing ones

Blackleaf

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It has long been suspected that the world's largest broadcaster has a Left-wing bias, and now a study has found it is twice as likely to cover Left-wing policy proposals as Right-wing ones....

By Lucy Osborne
Daily Mail



  • Centre for Policy Studies found 'left of centre bias' on BBC website
    [*]Study compared corporation’s coverage to Daily Telegraph and Guardian

Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters in Marylebone, central London, since 1932 (although BBC Television, including BBC News, moved here from BBC Television Centre earlier this year). With 23,000 staff, the BBC is the world's largest TV and radio broadcaster

Long-running accusations that the BBC is biased have been backed by a study that found it was twice as likely to cover Left-wing policy proposals as Right-wing ones.

It said the BBC website tended to describe Left-wing think-tank reports as ‘independent’, while Right-wing research was given a ‘health warning’ to say it had an ideological position, the Centre for Policy Studies found.

Oliver Latham, who wrote the Bias At The Beeb report, said: ‘Our results suggest the BBC exhibits a left-of-centre bias in both the amount of coverage it gives to different opinions and the way these voices are represented.’

The study, due out next month, compared the corporation’s coverage to the Daily Telegraph, which is thought of as Right wing, and the Left-leaning Guardian.

The BBC covered seven out of ten of stories from the Guardian, compared to three out of ten from the Daily Telegraph.

And of the left-of-centre think-tanks that were looked at, namely the Social Market Foundation, Demos, the New Economics Foundation and the Institute for Public Policy Research, only one received a health warning more than 10 per cent of the time and another never received one.

In contrast, of five right-of-centre think-tanks in the sample – the Centre for Social Justice, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, Policy Exchange and the Adam Smith Institute – the lowest proportion of health warnings was about 25 per cent and the highest was above 60 per cent.

Mr Latham said: ‘The BBC seems to treat right-of-centre views as more “extreme” and in need of caveats than roughly equivalent left-of-centre views. The implication seems to be that the BBC sees left-of-centre views as being more reliable than right-of-centre ones.

‘Overall, the picture is that the existing accusations of bias at the BBC are supported by a more dispassionate, quantitative analysis.’


The BBC website tended to describe Left-wing think-tank reports as 'independent', while Right-wing research was given a 'health warning' to say it had an ideological position, the Centre for Policy Studies found

He said they could not pinpoint where the slant came from, but added: ‘The results are consistent with both subconscious “group-think” among BBC journalists or a more deliberate left-of-centre bias.’

Mr Latham called on the corporation to be more open to criticism and to respond to it, adding that it was in their ‘best interest’ both because of its commitment to impartiality and because if a media organisation ‘loses its reputation for balanced reporting is also likely to lose its ability to influence and persuade the public’.

Tim Knox, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, itself a right-of-centre think tank, said: ‘This is the first statistical evidence of bias.’

Despite the debate, the BBC is the most trusted news organisation in Britain, polls suggest.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘BBC News is required to provide impartial and independent coverage, reporting on a range of views. It is policed by the BBC Trust, its editorial guidelines and its audiences. We have yet to see the report.’

‘It sees these views as more reliable’


 
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Blackleaf

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Sorry, but anybody who buys into this left/right BS is not playing with a full deck.

I disagree.

The BBC is the most left-wing and most politically correct organisation in the world, and this is shown not only in its news coverage but in its increasingly dumbed-down dramas, "comedies" (not as good as they once were because of increasing PCness) and other shows.

I mean, take a look at its long-running Saturday night TV medical drama Casualty, which has been on our screens since 1986. In the old days before the BBC was as loony-lefty PC as it is now this was a brilliant drama, with its characters just being its characters. They all thought for themselves and had their own opposing views - like in the real world.



Now the show is infested with the left-wing thoughts of its BBC makers, so now it seems that every doctor and nurse working at the show's fictional Holby City Hospital is gay, and every newspaper they read is the Guardian. They all talk as though they are at a Liberal Democrat Party conference. In other words, they aren't being like real-life characters anymore. They're being used as mouthpieces by the BBC to put across its Left-wing agenda to the masses.

Last Saturday night's episode saw the gay doctors all treating an Iranian illegal immigrant. Despite being illegal he was seen by the doctors as though he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and when the cops arrived at the hospital to do the RIGHT thing - arrest him - he was bundled by a black gay male nurse (who fancied the Iranian illegal) into an office and hidden away in an attempt to stop the cops arresting him and, of course, the cops (who were all white, of course) were treated as though they were gormless, braindead morons who looked as though they didn't know what day it was (you'll see this sort of thing in a lot of series and movies these days as they become increasingly infested by lefty thinking), who were nasty pieces of work for wanting to arrest an illegal.

Leftiness is also creeping into Doctor Who. Again this used to be a brilliant show back in the Sixties and Seventies before silly Leftiness creeped in. Now hardly an episode goes by without a gay reference (if you don't believe me, just google it) and a man kissing another man.

The BBC is a hornet's nest of Marxists - and it's now time to call in Rentokil.

 
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damngrumpy

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Listen there is no left right bias in the medial. When I was a in broadcasting
I loved it when someone called me a communist lefty, and another called me
right wing nazi, and they did depending on their bias. The bias is in the mind
of the person reacting to the coverage of a story, and to some degree whatever
is important to us we react in some measure.
The difference today is polarized politics. The agenda has been taken over by
the loony tunes on both sides.
We hear things like we can't have any pipelines and we can't have rail tankers
at all yet those same people scream about the price of gas at the pump. Will
Rogers once said I don't belong to a political party I'm a Democrat.
On the right we hear people talking about pregnancy during a rape and calling
it God's will. Or they rant about gay marriage. These issues fill the mind of the
mindless.
Meanwhile they don't try to figure out how to fix the infrastructure and medicare
and pensions and the real issues of the day. They climb into their mental bunker
and rant about nonsense and the media is supposed to take either side seriously
 

Mowich

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We don't need a study in Canada to tell us how left-leaning the CBC is, Blackleaf - all one has to do is watch their new commercial calling for citizens to 'free the cbc' from political interference. Nothing like biting the hand that feeds them. What is interesting about the ad is where they run it. Grant it that I don't watch the CBC on a regular basis so they might be running it on their network but I have only seen it on the TSN network which is funny because covering sports is about the only thing that they do do well. IMHO.
 

WLDB

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Leftiness is also creeping into Doctor Who. Again this used to be a brilliant show back in the Sixties and Seventies before silly Leftiness creeped in. Now hardly an episode goes by without a gay reference (if you don't believe me, just google it) and a man kissing another man.

[/IMG]

Get over it. Time and sensibilities change. I couldn't get through a single episode of that show from any decade without getting bored. Never understood the appeal.
 

gerryh

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Nov 21, 2004
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Get over it. Time and sensibilities change. I couldn't get through a single episode of that show from any decade without getting bored. Never understood the appeal.


yup, piss poor acting and juvenile special effects.
 

Corduroy

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Reality is not at the centre of the political spectrum. The media cannot simultaneously appear unbiased and report the news honestly.
 

Blackleaf

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Listen there is no left right bias in the medial.

There's a left wing bias in the BBC. Didn't you read the opening post?

Get over it. Time and sensibilities change. I couldn't get through a single episode of that show from any decade without getting bored. Never understood the appeal.

If Doctor Who is so rubbish it wouldn't be the most successful sci-fi in history.

Plus, I don't appreciate there being gay references in every single BBC programme that I watch, including in the world's greatest sci-fi series.


How the biased BBC linked my free-market views to homophobia: Researcher says he was asked to debate against gay rights campaigner


By Alasdair Glennie
13 August 2013
Daily Mail


Astonished: Ryan Bourne of the Centre for Policy Studies

A senior researcher at a respected think tank has revealed that he commissioned a study into the BBC’s left-wing bias after one of its staff assumed he must be homophobic – because he believes in free markets.

Ryan Bourne, of the Centre for Policy Studies, said he was ‘astonished’ when a researcher at the BBC World Service asked him to debate against veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell simply because he works for an organisation associated with the Centre-Right.

Mr Bourne, head of economic research at the CPS, said the approach appeared to reveal a ‘deep-seated, unthinking bias’, so he commissioned the study into whether the corporation’s news output is politically skewed despite its duty to remain impartial.


The subsequent report – due to be published this week – is entitled Bias At The Beeb.

Its author, Cambridge University economist Oliver Latham, analysed BBC online news reports over the past three years and found they were more than twice as likely to quote left-wing policy proposals as right-wing ideas.

Mr Bourne said the analysis was the first to take a statistical rather than anecdotal approach towards BBC bias, but said it was prompted by his personal experience of dealing with the corporation’s staff.

He said he was contacted by a researcher for the BBC World Service radio programme Newshour for a debate to be aired on May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia.


Debate: Mr Bourne was asked to debate against Peter Tatchell, the political and gay rights campaigner

The programme wanted someone willing to argue against Mr Tatchell, 61, who has campaigned for gay rights for decades through his organisation OutRage!.

Mr Bourne told the Daily Mail: ‘They said, “This might not be up your street but we were wondering whether, as a free marketeer, you would debate Peter Tatchell on our programme about whether enough is being done to combat homophobia across Europe”.

‘I was astonished. It made no sense at all. The researcher seemed to assume that because I believe in a free market economy I must also be homophobic. It seemed to reveal a deep-seated, unthinking bias against right-of-centre points of view. I am not homophobic at all.’


New face: James Harding starts as the director of news at the BBC today

Mr Bourne declined to take part in the programme, explaining that his area of expertise was economics and that he did not believe laws against hate speech should be relaxed.

Although it is officially non-partisan, the Centre For Policy Studies is associated with the Right because it was set up by Margaret Thatcher in 1974 to champion economic liberalism in Britain.

James Harding, the former editor of the Times, started his new job as the BBC’s director of news and current affairs yesterday. He said in July he wanted ‘an ambitious BBC’ not ‘an apologetic BBC’. Mr Harding is also the Times’s former business editor and was Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times.