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UK Local Elections

BBC News: General election - Greens complain about BBC's UKIP coverage

"The Green Party has accused the BBC of breaching impartiality guidelines by giving "disproportionate coverage" to UKIP during the local elections.

The party won 40 seats in last week's elections, compared with UKIP, which lost 145 of its 146 seats.

They are also angry that UKIP's leader, but not their's, will feature in two prime time pre-election programmes.

A BBC spokesman said it was not aware of any formal complaints "but if we receive one, we would respond then"."

Obviously not a new phenomenon. UKIP has been getting disproportionate coverage for quite some time. Obviously the degree to which they'd be wiped out in locals wasn't expected, but the media does seem to love them in a way that they don't the Greens.
 
Information Analyst said:
Sorry, a lot of the second page is taken up with talk of independence, right up to Mike objecting to it on Post #66. It's not like he suddenly kicked off in response to a single mention of it.
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Sorry, where?

Can you quote the lines that are not on topic and relate to independence debate? As I Say the discussion was about spin on the election results and then a sidetrack on the word nationalist.
 
Information Analyst said:
BBC News: General election - Greens complain about BBC's UKIP coverage

"The Green Party has accused the BBC of breaching impartiality guidelines by giving "disproportionate coverage" to UKIP during the local elections.

The party won 40 seats in last week's elections, compared with UKIP, which lost 145 of its 146 seats.

They are also angry that UKIP's leader, but not their's, will feature in two prime time pre-election programmes.

A BBC spokesman said it was not aware of any formal complaints "but if we receive one, we would respond then"."

Obviously not a new phenomenon. UKIP has been getting disproportionate coverage for quite some time. Obviously the degree to which they'd be wiped out in locals wasn't expected, but the media does seem to love them in a way that they don't the Greens.
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Been quite disgraceful recently. Part of the reason we now have Brexit was media complicity in promoting farage and his message.
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Sorry, where?

Can you quote the lines that are not on topic and relate to independence debate? As I Say the discussion was about spin on the election results and then a sidetrack on the word nationalist.
Click to expand...

I didn't say they were "not on topic," but they are still "about" independence. I don't necessarily agree with Mike, but I can see where he's coming from.
 
Information Analyst said:
I didn't say they were "not on topic," but they are still "about" independence. I don't necessarily agree with Mike, but I can see where he's coming from.
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I can see where he is coming from too. Sadly it's not a good place.

Mike seems to object to the SNP being discussed at all ( unless it's to insult them) so it's hard to talk about politics in any Scottish context without annoying him.

There at about ten different ideas in this thread people could discuss freely if they are interested.
 
More information about the apparently intentional BBC spin on the Scottish council election results.

https://wingsoverscotland.com/a-little-more-certainty/

Yesterday Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland approached the academic who was commissioned by the BBC to produce the "notional" 2012 results using the 2017 boundaries. Prof. Denver sent him the text of the reply he'd sent to the BBC when they had enquired about the basis for his findings. Stuart just sat on it to see what the BBC would do with it.

What the BBC did was publish it, with the passages where Prof. Denver explained that it was "rough and ready" but simply the best guesstimate possible under the circumstances edited out. In fact there are glaring problems with the methodology, which are inherent in trying to second-guess voting patterns under STV. Just off the top of my head, if the number of councillors to be elected in a ward goes up or down, that inevitably affects how many candidates the parties will put up, when then affects the vote transfers. You can't just assume the next one down would have been elected, or that the last one elected would have been dropped off.

He's probably right that there's no better way to do it, but it's not a meaningful exercise. The BBC has punted it so hard there are people trying to edit Wikipedia to put these figures in as the actual result for the 2012 elections!

Now, I ask myself whether the BBC would have run with this if the effect of the Prof's notional sums had been the other way around. If the SNP had actually lost a handful of seats, but compared to the notional numbers had gained a handful. I don't think they would have, quite frankly.

The effect of the analysis is nil for the other parties. But the effect for the SNP is that an actual gain of seats is being reported as a loss. On the basis of some guesswork numbers an academic crunched just for the hell of it (he's been doing it since the 1980s, when of course with FPTP it would have been a more meaningful exercise, and has just struggled on with STV despite the uncertainties it introduces).

I don't think this is defensible on the part of the BBC. And this on top of some very dodgy reporting of the 2012 results at the time when they persistently reported a whole lot of Labour "hold" wards in Glasgow as Labour "gains", again giving rise to a similar "didn't the SNP do badly" narrative when in fact the SNP won the bloody elections in 2012 as well.
 
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