BBC News, it’s 10 o’clock…

By Keith Moran

Michael Gove used his Newsnight interview on March 1st to turn up the heat on the BBC. He demanded the corporation spend just as much time questioning Labour and Liberal politicians about their wealthy donors’ tax affairs, after Lord Ashcroft finally confirmed what most suspected, that he is indeed a “non-dom”.

Gove’s sensitivity reveals just how much the Tories feel unfairly treated, by a media seemingly obsessed with the tax status of the former Belize Ambassador to the UN and rather a little less interested in wealthy donors of other political parties. The level of influence exerted by Ashcroft seems the key point for this extra attention, but I won’t develop that here.

Media bias is an emotive and highly subjective topic. It has received frequent attention from all sides of the political spectrum over the years. Parties, during election campaigns, develop a “mild” paranoia about who is saying what about them. So, when I started picking up some white noise from within the Labour Party and blogosphere that the BBC and other sections of the media were showing bias towards the Conservative Party, I didn’t really give it much thought.

The charge, that the media apply a light dusting of analysis over Tory proposals, whilst Labour’s utterings receive a 24/7, blood and guts media autopsy, popped up in a few of Alastair Campbell’s blogs and through the mouths of some Labour MPs. The accusations seemed plausible, but didn’t evoke much anger within. It continued to skip along but just below my radar.

Then, by chance i happened to witness BBC1′s evening news bulletins on the nights of Gordon Brown’s Warwick speech on February 20th and David Cameron’s spring conference speech on February 28th.

Let’s start with the Prime Minister in Warwick, billed as the big election campaign kick off. The initial reaction coming through seemed favourable, so having been out most of the day I was quite keen to hear some of the speech. What I saw in the media resembled an experimental ITV2 youth news production, not quite to the standard of John Craven’s Newsround. My stopwatch was not at the ready, but actual footage of Brown’s speech was around the 30 second mark, if that. Following this was the spectacle of Laura Kuenssberg (just a reminder, the Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC) reporting live from Nuneaton, asking people in the street for their thoughts on Labour’s election slogan “A Future Fair For All”. This lengthy interlude took up 2-3 minutes (though it seemed like a lifetime). With all due respect to the good people of Nuneaton, this was of absolutely no consequence to the news consuming public. Surely it would be better to include an extra two minutes of the Prime Minister’s speech to allow people to decide for themselves? Or a little more detailed analysis than that offered? The reactions of the public were mixed and the tone of the report took on quite a negative feel.

The reporting of Cameron’s spring conference speech a week later had a rather different feel. The main BBC News bulletin this time kindly decided to spare us the opinions of individuals in Nether Wallop or Burpham and instead displayed large tracts of VT showing the actual speech. Yes, viewers were able to witness around 2 minutes of Dave in all his glory, preaching to his adoring congregation, all without the use of notes. That’s right, no notes. What a clever chap. There followed the compulsory snippets of Yvette Cooper and Chris Huhne commenting on Cameron’s performance, in a cursory and legally required kind of way. But the tone of the report and the time devoted to the content of Cameron’s speech was in stark contrast to the time afforded to Brown a week earlier.

There are many, many hours of BBC news content in the course of any week. So, conclusions cannot be drawn from two evening bulletins. But these are the BBC’s flagship news broadcasts, watched by between 4 million and 5 million people each evening (by comparison, Newsnight is watched by 1-1.5 million).

The main broadcasts have considerable reach and they were reporting broadly similar events, so why the contrast? As the election draws near, acute media focus will be applied to the politicians asking for our votes and in turn, I’ll be watching the media just a little more closely.