Dimbleby: It’s too costly to have politically balanced BBC audience
Broadcasters go to great lengths to achieve balance in studio audiences, but it is proving a tricky task
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY has admitted it would be too costly for the BBC to produce a politically unbiased audience for Any Questions?.
The chairman of the Radio 4 programme, responding to claims of Leftwing bias, said a balanced audience would never be selected because it is “complicated”, “expensive” and because the BBC is “a tad strapped for cash”. Maria Miller, the former culture secretary, said that the BBC should ensure all “overtly political programmes” have a balanced audience.
The show’s producers were criticised after Mr Dimbleby admitted that they have no control over the political make-up of the people who ask questions – unlike Question Time.
Allison Pearson, The Daily Telegraph columnist, claimed she was “shouted down” while appearing on the panel at a recording in Cambridge, adding that a producer told her it would cost “£5,000 a week to pay someone to assemble a politically balanced audience”. Mr Dimbleby said: “We choose our au- dience in the following way – not very much.
“We are invited to venues all across the country and we are guests and whoever lives in that community is invited to come.
“That makes it a unique programme and an open forum for people to come and we would not seek, or I would certainly not be party to seeking to censor anyone because their views don’t actually fit a balanced panel.”
Julian Knight, the Conservative MP and a former BBC journalist, described Mr Dimbleby’s comments as “illjudged”. He told The Daily Telegraph: “It is deeply disturbing to hear such an eminent broadcaster as Jonathan say it is acceptable for the BBC to host a major political show in front of a potentially biased audience and using the questionable issue of funding for the state broadcaster as a fig leaf.” A BBC spokesman said: “Since Any
Questions? started in 1948, we haven’t routinely vetted the audience which is recruited by the host venue with guidance from the BBC. Tickets are distributed fairly to political parties in the area, to the venue’s own community and among local people in general.
“In addition to the audience, the diverse panel and Jonathan’s robust chairing all contribute to a range of views being heard during the programme and it’s not unusual for there to be a lively debate across issues.”
Of the many issues that worry political parties when they negotiate with broadcasters over the format of live televised debates, none is more vexing than the composition of the studio audience. They fear that boos, hisses, jeers and cheers from a vocal few will sway millions of voters watching at home.
It is no surprise, then, that of the 76 rules in the infamous document which governed (some say throttled) the televised debates before the 2010 general election, more than half covered the selection, role and behaviour of the studio audience. At a cost of tens of thousands of pounds to broadcasters (and licence fee payers), a polling company, ICM, was recruited to select a demographic cross-section of the country, broadly reflecting voting intentions. After knocking on thousands of doors and conducting hundreds of face-to-face interviews, ICM delivered “balanced” audiences to the studios who, on the insistence of the parties, were then commanded (by rule number 40) to sit on their hands in silence. Oh the irony. Both the BBC’s Question Time and Any Questions? have come under fire in recent days for having audiences that amplified the voice of the Corbynistas beyond their apparent support in the country. In this newspaper, Allison Pearson wrote that the audience she encountered when she was a panellist last week on Any Questions? was “outrageously biased” towards the Labour leader.
She is certainly right that audience selection is an imperfect business. It is also very costly. The more perfectly balanced your desired audience, the more expensive it will be to find.
Question Time gets around 1,000 people each week applying to take part. All fill out a 15-point online questionnaire asking about party affiliation, activism, and questions they would like to put. Those selected are vetted by telephone. But it is not only balance the producers are after. They need people who have something to say – it is supposed to be entertaining after all.
Finding such people requires budgets that only a major television programme can provide.
Any Questions? on Radio 4, for example, is an altogether more modest beast. Travelling from village hall to community centre, it puts audience recruitment in the hands of the local organisation hosting the event. The BBC encourages them to distribute tickets to constituency parties in equal but not overwhelming numbers (as a rule of thumb, 10 tickets to each party), but much of the crowd on the night simply fills the seats on a first-come first-served basis.
It is possible, of course, for both systems to be flawed. We know from the general election that pollsters can get it very wrong, so can we be assured that their techniques produce accurately balanced audiences for television programmes? And, of course, a village hall can be packed with activists by the determined.
But this is not happening to a sinister degree. What we are seeing today is not ridiculously unbalanced audiences. Rather, it is the result of one group in the audience being more willing to “get stuck in”. At any given moment, one part of the electorate is more “energised” than another – at the moment it is Corbyn’s supporters. This goes in cycles. In a room full of Leftwingers, Greens and social-democrats, those of the far Left are likely to be more vocal, just as in a room full of Conservative and Ukip supporters, Farage’s troops are bound to make themselves heard.
What never changes, though, is the phenomenon of the “shy Tory”. Pollsters know that Conservatives are more reluctant than supporters of other parties publicly to declare their affiliation.
It is no surprise that when they do get into a studio audience they tend to be more reticent. While they may not take up the cudgels in television studios, however, they evidently do so where it counts, at the ballot box. Richard Nixon exploited this when, in 1969, with the protest movement apparently all-prevailing, he identified and then mobilised the “silent majority”.
Does this problem pose a threat to the health of political discourse? Does nationwide debate really pivot on a bit of hissing in response to political panels? If you think it does, there is only one solution. A great deal of time and money is already spent on balancing the audience – and it is clearly not to everyone’s liking. So the simple answer is to enforce rule number 40. Silence the audience. The politicians would welcome it, if no one else.