BBC Question Time: analysis of guests over nine years suggests an overuse of rightwing voices
https://theconversation.com/bbc-question-time-analysis-of-guests-over-nine-years-suggests-an-overuse-of-rightwing-voices-232315
Posted by Leelum
BBC Question Time: analysis of guests over nine years suggests an overuse of rightwing voices
https://theconversation.com/bbc-question-time-analysis-of-guests-over-nine-years-suggests-an-overuse-of-rightwing-voices-232315
Posted by Leelum
20 Comments
Read this earlier, I think Farage was even more present on QT before 9 years ago.
Colour me shocked. A country suffering from over a decade of wage stagnation, wealth inequality and a surging cost of living has had nothing but right wing voices shoved down their throats for the past decade.
Wonder when people will put 2 and 2 together
This is not a very convincing analysis.
The study deliberately parses out the professional politicians and concludes there is a right-wing bias because there have been more right-wing non-politician commentators than their equivalents from across the political divide.
Yet the reason for that would seem to me to be rather straightforward. If you want to assume (for the sake of argument) Labour politicians are centre-left and Tories are centre-right, by the time you add in Lib Dem, SNP, Green and Plaid MP’s, all of whom will generally be to the left of most Labour MP’s, then even with UKIP/Brexit/Reform on the other side, the left is “over-represented” which is reflected in the numbers they have published.
This explains the “excess” of absolute oxygen thieves like Hartley-Brewer and Oakeshott as a way of balancing the weekly panel in a way that I find more convincing than BIAS!
Aren’t right-wing guests normally brought onto Question Time to either be a punching bag or rage-bait?
In other news, Pink News is aligned with the far right and Channel 4 is literally owned by Hitler. I’ve been Rob Burgundy
I’m not sure this analysis stands up to much scrutiny. It’s basis is purely on the non-political party guests. Surely it would be better to give each guests a left or right label or even a score to check properly and see what you end up with. I’d put money on it being pretty balanced.
If you add up the right and left parties you basically have Ukip/reform and the conservatives Vs everyone else. This would lead to very unbalanced panels and they already get complaints about too much Farage, so they address this by inviting on right wing journalists. I guess you could argue that some viewers may give them more weight because they are more independent then politicians but that’s a pretty dim take.
Laughable, the opening paragraph is to explain how unbiased the BBC aims to be, then all the data they release shows exactly how bias they really are.
They’ll have a centre left guest, then in order to provide ballance platform some righwing lunatic like Farage. These are not equal.
This comes as absolutely no shock to anyone who’s watched any political programme on the BBC with some regularity, it’s absolutely gone downhill since the Tories installed their cronies running it. Question Time in general has plummeted in quality since Dimbleby quit.
People were saying this 5/10 years ago and got called loony lefties, even by those in the centre politically.
This is one of those statistics that just leaves things far too open to interpretation.
It could be we are just naturally right wing and prefer hearing right wing view points, or we are so left wing we are giving the right wing more of a platform for the sake of balance.
Now try looking for just the last 5 years – different result perhaps?
All the right-wing subs say the BBC are commies and all the left-wing subs say they’re Nazis.
Least surprising news ever! BBC even justify it by claiming the audience is made up to represent voting at the LAST election, and the panel is usually….one labour MP, one LD/PC/SNP voice, a “celebrity” usually right wing and linked to the tories, a tory MP and then an anonymously funded think tank member.
The BBC has always been bullied by the right on issues of pure stupidity. Namely climate change and brexit. ‘Fair and and balanced’ is not relevant when the opposition is lying to itself and others. Yet because everyone pays the license fee tbey get guilt tripped into providing a platform for lies.
Its not a difference of opinion, it’s lies.
I’m sick to fucking death of seeing this fringe’s face plastered all over the BBC News website. His party is forecast to gain fewer seats than Plaid and the Greens and yet I’ve seen more quotes from and about him than I have the actual current Prime Minister.
Yes, this is called platforming. It’s why “both sides”ing is stupid.
Key paragraphs:
> Removing politicians from the list of most frequent guests shows that several high-frequency panellists are being used, most of whom come from the political right. The regularly featured journalists are typically opinion columnists who contribute to rightwing press outlets such as the Mail or the Telegraph, or who make appearances on right-leaning broadcasters like GB News and TalkTV.
> The Spectator wields significant influence, with the top five most frequently used panellists [10-13 appearances] all writing for the magazine. In contrast, there is no comparable influence from leftwing publications. The most frequently featured writers from the left were Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar (six appearances) and former Guardian columnist Giles Fraser (five appearances).
This came up around the time of the EU referendum that the show booker, [Alison Fuller Pedley had far right sympathies and had liked several BNP/Britain First posts on Facebook.](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ourbeeb/is-question-time-s-audience-producer-really-fascist/)
This is digging hard to find a right-wing bias.
Their own data shows that left-wing political parties are over-represented, especially in 2017 onwards. For all the people moaning about how often Nigel Farage is on the panel, Caroline Lucas is on it more.
To find the alleged right-wing bias, they list how often various people have been on the panel, then remove politicians from the list. They find that the people who are on most often are generally journalists from right-leaning publications.
That’s it. That’s their evidence. The data is curiously cherry-picked; for instance, they cut off the list at seven appearances. But they don’t list *everyone* who’s been on seven times; [Owen Jones has appeared seven times over the same timeframe](https://www.strudel.org.uk/panelshows/people/np24rr55.html).
Did they ask whether more journalists from left-leaning or right-leaning publications appeared? No, they did not. One has to wonder why. An equally reasonable explanation is that QT has an approximately equal balance of journalists from across the spectrum, it’s just that they draw on a smaller pool of journalists from right-leaning publications who therefore appear more frequently than those from the left. That effect was pretty evident in the run-up to 2016, when Farage appeared quite often because the BBC didn’t seem to be able to think of anyone else who supported Brexit that they might invite.