60,000 complaints over BBC’s Election coverage
THE BBC received more than 60,000 complaints over its General Election coverage, according to a Corporation insider.
News and politics shows including Question Time, The Andrew Marr Show and BBC Breakfast were among the targets of viewer criticism, with many of the objections about anti-Tory bias.
The BBC source believes the flood of complaints, said to be unprecedented and a massive increase on previous Elections, could lead to a fundamental rethink over the way in which the Corporation covers politics.
The Mail on Sunday has been able to verify that there were approximately 45,000 complaints over Election coverage detailed in reports published by the BBC.
However, a BBC spokesman did not dispute that the source’s higher figure of more than 60,000 was correct, although he declined to give an exact figure. In contrast, the BBC’s 2015 Election coverage attracted 5,000 complaints, while the 2017 poll received 7,000, according to the BBC insider.
Programmes covering politics on
December 13, the day after the Conservatives won an 80-seat majority, were also considered as part of the campaign coverage, and the complaint figures take into account these shows.
Andrew Marr’s interview in which he repeatedly interrupted Boris Johnson on Sunday, December 1 received 12,000 complaints alone.
More than 900 viewers also took issue with Andrew Neil’s on-air challenge to Mr Johnson a week before polling day, when he publicly criticised the Prime Minister for refusing him an interview. Mr
Neil’s interview with Jeremy Corbyn attracted 1,300 complaints over bias against the Labour leader.
And 15,000 viewers took exception to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg claiming on the eve of the poll that the results of postal voting were already making ‘grim’ reading for Labour.
In an email to staff the day after polling, BBC director-general Lord Hall admitted the Corporation had made mistakes with some of its coverage but had ‘held up its hands’.
Who can blame the Tories for giving Radio 4’s Today and BBC2’s Newsnight a wide berth, especially when, as you reported last week, the latter programme has employed as its policy editor someone who openly backs Labour? Has any broadcaster in the UK ever employed so many out-of-touch producers, directors and presenters?
Even the comedy shows, such as BBC1’s Have I Got News For You and Radio 4’s The News Quiz, are so Left-wing that I can’t listen to them. The same now applies to anything that the Brexit-insulting luvvie Steve Coogan appears in. And if that Remoaner Gary Lineker is going to continue presenting Match Of The Day,
I’ll never watch it again.
Hopefully, under Boris Johnson the BBC will be exposed to the real world without the licence fee and allowed to sink or swim. Alan Aitchison, Wakefield
You really have to question the intelligence of Newsnight’s new policy editor, Left-wing serial tweeter Lewis Goodall, and those who employed him. Not because of his political views – I’m Left-wing myself – but because he has been so desperate to air them. Has it not occurred to him, or those who hired him, that as a supposedly objective reporter or editor, you should not be so publicly partisan?
What good is this going to do the BBC? Maybe Goodall can be excused because he is only 30.
But, on that point, why is Newsnight hiring a relative kid in such a senior position?
Alas, I fear that we will be seeing a lot more of Mr Goodall in the future: his keenness to be heard shows that he clearly wants to be famous, and Newsnight’s apparent faith in him will do nothing to stop that. And what are the odds that one day he won’t try to be the news rather than reporting and commenting on it, by standing as a Labour MP? C. Dodd, Durham
Before he died, Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent a total of 12 years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, urged people not to pay their BBC licence fee, saying the BBC was biased.
Nothing has changed. On the Today programme recently I heard a woman with MS talking about how she had decided to break the law and take cannabis. Instead of interviewing the families of those people who had taken cannabis and ended up in mental hospitals or committed knife crimes and robberies, the programme-makers seemed to condone taking the drug. Josephine Juden, Bournemouth
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a masterpiece, yet the recent BBC version destroyed it. The same can be said of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which has just finished on BBC1. A. Still, Ilford, Essex
After years of paying for a TV licence to watch very good programmes, we now find we are paying to watch shows we have already seen. Anne Eggins, Woking, Surrey