How BBC kept Leavers off the air for a decade
Pro- Brexit voices are being drowned out on the BBC’s news programming, an analysis has claimed.
only a very small proportion of speakers on radio 4’s today programme are long-term supporters of leaving the eU, the Civitas think-tank said in a report.
the authors claimed the BBC has been unable to supply an example of a single programme since the June 2016 referendum which has examined the opportunities of Brexit.
Last night the BBC described the analysis as flawed and insisted it was ‘covering the process towards Brexit in a responsible and impartial way’.
the Civitas report, entitled the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation?, said that for the past 20 years the BBC has consistently viewed the issue of withdrawing from the eU through the prism of splits in the Conservative Party.
of 4,275 guests talking about the eU on today between 2005 and 2015, only 132 (3.2 per cent) were supporters of leaving. And an analysis of four weeks of the programme in october and November last year found that it carried 97 interviews on eU topics, but only nine were with long-term supporters of Brexit.
Looking at today’s business coverage in late 2016, Civitas found 53 per cent of speakers were anti-Brexit.
in the week of Article 50 being triggered last March, only 6.5 per cent of speakers in today’s coverage were given space to be pro-Brexit, the report said. An analysis of a selection of radio 4 programmes called the Brexit Collection found it included no attempts to explore the benefits of leaving, and only 23 per cent of contributors were pro-Brexit.
Civitas said pro-Brexit views have been under-represented on flagship BBC news programmes for decades.
in 274 hours of monitored BBC eU coverage between 2002 and 2017, only 14 speakers (0.2 per cent of the total) were Left-wing advocates for leaving the eU. these 14 contributors delivered 1,680 words, adding up to approximately 12 minutes.
in the same period two strongly pro- eU tories, Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine, made 28 appearances between them, with contributions totalling 11,208 words – over six times the amount of airtime allocated to all Left-wing Leave supporters.
the authors, David Keighley and Andrew Jubb, wrote: ‘When opinion in favour of leaving the eU has featured, the editorial approach has – at the expense of exploring withdrawal itself – tended heavily towards discrediting and denigrating opposition to the eU as xenophobic.
‘the overview provided here is a shocking indictment of the BBC’s failure to achieve impartiality.’
they called for a judicial review to force the BBC to reform its complaints process.
the BBC said: ‘there have been a number of flawed “analyses” trying to depict the BBC as favouring one side or other. the reality is we’re no longer covering the binary choice of a referendum held 18 months ago, we’re covering the process towards Brexit in a responsible and impartial way independent of political pressure.’
‘A shocking indictment’
CREDIT where it is due, the BBC had a good referendum campaign. As the Mail acknowledged at the time, the Corporation was reasonably impartial and gave equal prominence to both Leave and Remain.
However, as a damning report by the Civitas think-tank proves, that short period was but a blip in two decades of unremittingly biased coverage in which the BBC has fully merited its nickname ‘Brussels Broadcasting Corporation’.
The report provides the proof of pro-EU bias which is in evidence daily to millions of viewers and listeners. In a detailed analysis of output since the early 2000s, it shows how pro-EU MPs were given disproportionate prominence, and Eurosceptics treated like cranks and xenophobes.
The report also confirms this paper’s long-held view that since June 2016 the Corporation – horrified that its previous impartiality may have been a factor in the referendum result – has reverted with a vengeance to its hatred of Euroscepticism.
Day after day, the BBC gives massive prominence to the Jeremiah voices of the Remoaner camp, but scant attention to positive news about the British economy. Only this week, the pound – in an amazing comeback – was shown to be higher against the dollar than it was before the referendum and employment is at an all-time high.
But then in a sane world the BBC would be devoting its energies to combating American entertainment behemoths such as Netflix and Amazon, instead of obsessing about gender pay. The Corporation needs to find men and women of stature to run it, if our airwaves are not to be dominated by US imports.