CIVITAS - BBC impartiality review was compromised by personal connections and riddled with basic errors
28 Apr 2014 09:23 AM
• 'Incestuous'
links between author, researchers, the BBC and the
EU
• Findings skewed by
sampling errors and random data collection
The credibility of an
"impartiality review" giving the BBC's EU coverage a clean bill
of health has been seriously undermined by a study exposing flaws in its
research methods and questioning its independence.
Last year's Prebble report
was seized on by the BBC Trust as evidence that the corporation's
programmes take in an "impressive" breadth of opinion on stories
about the EU, immigration and religion.
But today's study, published
by Civitas, shows that the review's independence was severely compromised
by incestuous ties between its authors, the BBC and the EU. There were also
failings in the data analysis used by the author, Stuart
Prebble.
Authors David Keighley and
Andrew Jubb, from the media monitoring organisation Newswatch, detail
how:
• Stuart Prebble and David
Liddiment, the BBC trustee who commissioned the review, were close colleagues
at Granada TV for many years. In addition, Mr Prebble was for eight years chief
executive and part owner of a production company that made programmes for the
BBC;
• Cardiff University's
School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, which conducted programme
research for the review, has among its senior members a number of former BBC
executives, including Richard Sambrook and Richard Tait. Research central to
the Prebble report was commissioned directly from Prof
Sambrook;
• Professor Karin
Wahl-Jorgensen, who ran Cardiff's EU content analysis project, had recently
been paid by the European Commission to analyse media coverage of further EU
integration and why the UK was sceptical about the prospect.
• The Prebble report
included programmes from only two periods, in 2007 and 2012.
The report was published last
July, when David Liddiment claimed that it provided independent verification
that the BBC's coverage of these key areas was impartial, and contained a
wide range of views from across the political spectrum. This claim was
supported by the other Trustees and the Chairman, Lord Patten.
But Newswatch shows how
Cardiff's EU research, on which Prebble based his conclusions, was also
flawed in its methodology and failed to meet basic academic
standards.
In particular, its analysis of
output on BBC Radio 4's Today programme was severely limited because it
monitored less than half of the Today programme and then focused rigidly on the
7am to 8.30am block and ignored Saturday's broadcasts
altogether.
This had the effect of
distorting Cardiff's interpretation and conclusions. Given that Today's
main business news is broadcast during the first half hour of the programme,
from 6.15-6.30am, Cardiff's sample would have constantly under-represented
business opinion - a vital ingredient of EU output.
Similarly, two-way discussions
between presenters and correspondents would have been under-emphasised as at
least six of these segments are broadcast during the first hour of Today on
weekday mornings, whereas the rest of the programme is more likely to carry
interviews with invited guests.
The regular Yesterday in
Parliament slot, (usually broadcast Tuesday to Friday at 6.45am, and at 7.20am
on Saturdays), was also omitted entirely, thereby affecting the data for
political speakers.
Cardiff narrowed their potential
sample even further by focusing solely on the main EU stories in only two
survey periods - the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 and EU budget negotiations in 2012 -
and discarding 30% of the EU-related material that did not cover these
issues.
The Cardiff researchers based
their conclusions on just 272 hours of EU broadcast output and 208
'stories'. Newswatch, by comparison, has monitored more than 6,000
hours of BBC News coverage, transcribing more than 8,200 individual EU reports,
since 1999.
A further flaw in Stuart
Prebble's findings arises from his decision to introduce his own
randomly-gathered evidence from conversations with BBC staff to support his
assertion that EU coverage was in line with quality and impartiality
standards.
The clean bill of health on the
EU component of the report was delivered despite repeated warnings from many
quarters, including the BBC's own former director general, Mark Thompson,
as well as political editor Nick Robinson, that the corporation's EU
coverage was biased against so-called right-wing opinion. These followed
earlier revelations from former senior BBC presenters and editors such as Peter
Sissons, Rod Liddle and Robin Aitken, who said the same thing in different
ways. More recently John Humphrys has also said that coverage of the EU has
been guilty of 'bias by omission'.
Newswatch director David
Keighley said: "Cumulatively, these basic errors mean that the EU part of
the report was not independent and not worth the paper it was written on. A
more accurate description would be incestuous and incompetent.
"In turn, the BBC Trustees
- the ultimate regulatory body of the corporation - have not exercised proper
scrutiny in reaching their conclusion that the EU output was properly balanced.
This raises serious questions about their own impartiality and
competence."
Notes
Impartiality at the BBC? An
investigation into the background and claims of Stuart Prebble's
'Independent Assessment for the BBC Trust' is published today
by Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society. A PDF can be
accessed here.
Newswatch (news-watch.co.uk) is one of the UK's
leading media monitoring organisations. It has conducted more than 30 separate
reports into elements of the BBC's output, including for the Centre for
Policy Studies, and has acted as consultant in a number of independent media
surveys. It has also recently given evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny
Committee's audit of broadcasters' EU-related
coverage.
David Keighley has worked in the
media for most of his career. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where
he worked on the university newspaper, Varsity, he was a reporter on the
Wakefield Express and The Evening Gazette, Middlesbrough. He worked for the BBC
for seven years, rising to become television news and current affairs
television publicity officer with responsibility for all the corporation's
highest-profile programmes in that domain. He was controller of public affairs
at the breakfast channel TV-am from 1985-92, where he was in charge of all
aspects of the £100m company's public profile, including editorial
compliance. From 1993 to the present, he has worked as a media business
development consultant, and his clients have ranged from Reuters Television to
Channel Nine, Australia. He was the originator and director of News World, the
world's first international conference for news broadcasters. He founded
Newswatch in 1999.
Andrew Jubb read English and
Media studies at Sussex University, with a strong focus on media bias, politics
and representation. He has worked for Newswatch since its inception in 1999. He
has overseen more than 6,000 hours of broadcast media monitoring, and conducted
extended analyses of the tabloid and broadsheet press. He has co-authored more
than 30 Newswatch reports and has provided statistical evidence for papers
published by the CPS and Migration Watch.
For further information
contact:
Daniel Bentley
T: 0207 799
6677
E:
daniel.bentley@civitas.org.uk
Civitas: Institute for
the Study of Civil Society is an independent social policy think tank that
facilitates informed public debate on important issues of the day. It has no
links to any political party and its research programme receives no state
funding
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