Adrian Owens: BBC coverage stuck in a groove

Tuesday 3rd October 2006.
BBC TV news at 6:00pm.

Conference-related coverage on the main 10 o’clock BBC news bulletin lasted around 7 minutes – more than 25% of the total bulletin.  Not bad in our sound-bite obsessed times.

What a pity then that the BBC continue to rehash old stories.  Tonight almost half the coverage was taken up with an item on William Hague’s attempts to forge a new European grouping to rival the EPP.  This gave Mark Mardell the excuse to spend some license payers' money trotting off to the Czech Republic and then Poland, first to interview the party’s new Czech allies and then to sneer at the very traditional stance on certain social issues of the Polish Justice and Peace party even though they were explicitly excluded from Hague’s grouping.  Viewers would however have been forgiven for making a link between the British Conservatives and this Polish party – but then that was no doubt the purpose.

The remaining three or so minutes were taken up with some film of George Osborne’s conference speech focusing again on tax; a minute or so on Boris’s latest gaffe which David Cameron deftly shrugged off:  “What do you do with a problem like Boris?”, he said; and a minute or so with Nick Robinson interviewing once again, you’ve guessed it, David Cameron.  Where was the interview with George Osborne?  After all, according to the Beeb yesterday, the party was rowing about tax - surely they wanted to question the Shadow Chancellor?

The contrast with Sky’s coverage was quite marked today.  Firstly Sky covered an interview with a frontbencher other than the leader. Then in their interview with George Osborne, Adam Boulton asked the Shadow Chancellor whether he believed that lower taxes boosted economic growth.  When Osborne answered in the affirmative, Boulton proceeded to give Osborne a sticky time over what he then perceived to be an illogical stance taken by our Treasury spokesman.  The interview kept my interest because Boulton asked a question that a Conservative supporter would have been itching to ask George Osborne.  When was the last time we could say that of the red-cornered BBC?

Comments

[Christopher North]

The problem is that the EPP is not an old story. By postponing the decision, our leaders have ensured that it remains a divisive issue for the next three years. And their climb-down, when it eventually comes, will be all the worse for the delay.

[Tom]

I know the BBC is a bunch of pinko subversives at the best of times but I have to say the coverage of the two conferences in the last two weeks has been downright biased even by their standards.
To take just the contributions by Caroline Quinn on the Today programme, following Tony Blairs emoto-thon of a speech last week she spent her entire report fondly reminicising with teary-eyed members of the Shadow Cabinet about what a marvellous guy Tony is. Do we get a comment from any of the brothers glad to finally see the back of him, or the ordinary members repulsed by his foreign policy?...err, no.
Then at the Tory conference yesterday we have some pathetic excuse of a report where our daring investigative journalist discovers that...gasp...there are some members of the Tory party who want to pull out of the EU and that...shock, horror...the party has NOT ruthlessly crushed this hideous dissent but has actually allowed them to hold a fringe meeting.
The low point of this travesty comes when Ms Quinn then tries to ambush Francis Maude with a question about what the party plans to do about these europhobes who clearly pose a dire threat to the party's unity.
I could go on but you can see equally blatant examples on any BBC bulletin at the minute.

[johnC]

I didn't watch their coverage of the other party conferences but I would be interested to know how many times the BBC deliberately broadcast a close-up of a delegate snoozing / looking bored / picking their nose / reading the paper during a speech. This seemed to be happening all the time yesterday. They also seemed to be trying to home on in the wierdest / most reactionary looking. Also, they seem to have made no attempt to film the videos screened at the conference between speeches and debates; they remained a distant blurred image. Surely they could have been perfectly easily transmitted by a normal TV camera ?

[Angelo Basu]

Re transmitting images of the videos shown between speeches, I'd imagine that the BBC lawyers would have advised that there would be copyright issues about broadcasting them and they couldn't be bothered to seek consent from the copyright holders of the videos.

As to asking questions Conservative supporters would like answered, this is obviously good but the bigger point is surely that the BBC should ask questions that everyone, including those who are not currently our voters, would like answered (and then to show the answers).

[Adrian Owens]

Angelo,

Agree that the BBC should ask questions that the public as a whole want an answer to. My problem with the BBC is that they rarely ask questions that a right of centre person would want to ask to balance the leftish mindset that prevails in nearly all their output.

[James Browne]

The BBC's Martha Kearney did a thorough hatchet job on the "A" list on Newsnight last night. She wanted to make the point that the profile of your average wannabe Tory candidate is still a public-school educated toff. Now those of whose who were at the candidates' reception at Bournemouth on Sunday evening know this is rubbish. However most TV viewers wouldn't know this.
What Kearney did was to profile 2 candidates - one on the A-list but not yet selected and one selected though not an A-lister. She picked on the Rees-Mogg siblings, Jacob and Annunziata. Now I know Jacob of old from university. I have never met his sister. Jacob is a thoroughly decent bloke with a long track record of hard work for the party but unfortunately both he and his sister come across as hopelessly patrician. The viewer was invited to see them as typical and although to be fair another A-lister, Laurence Wedderburn was also briefly featured the key point would have been obvious to the general public: if the Rees-Moggs are typical of Tory candidates as the presenter suggested then nothing has changed under Cameron.
We all know this isn't true. Is this is a case of classic BBC stitch-up or should the Rees-Moggs be a little less keen to get their faces on the box? The jury's still out on whether the party has truly changed and this feature did absolutely nothing to help.

[eugene]

I too thought the BBC coverage was biased. However, Sky , I found, was not much better. Adam Boulton- did he not recently marry a Labour toady ? ( and invited Tony and his mates to the wedding?)- that should exclude him from reporting on Party political matters.