Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 25, 2014 19:45:56 GMT
It's something we have seen and reported on here all too often, that the BBC commissions a supposed 'independent review', only to find that the panel comprising this review have a particular interest in the outcome, which matches the BBC agenda.
Civitas is a registered charity formed in their own words to: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is an independent think tank which seeks to facilitate informed public debate
They had Newswatch (Newswatch is one of the UK’s leading media monitoring organisations. It has conducted more than 30 separate reports into elements of the BBC’s output, including for the Centre for Policy Studies, and has acted as consultant in a number of independent media surveys. It has also recently given evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee’s audit of broadcasters’ EU-related coverage) investigate the background and claims of Stuart Prebble's 'Independent Assessment for the BBC Trust'.
The report is 16 pages long but here is the summary. I suggest reading the complete report available from the link below, and with further links available to see the evidence that shows just how skewed this insidious BBC attempt to justify their output truly is.
Civitas is a registered charity formed in their own words to: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is an independent think tank which seeks to facilitate informed public debate
They had Newswatch (Newswatch is one of the UK’s leading media monitoring organisations. It has conducted more than 30 separate reports into elements of the BBC’s output, including for the Centre for Policy Studies, and has acted as consultant in a number of independent media surveys. It has also recently given evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee’s audit of broadcasters’ EU-related coverage) investigate the background and claims of Stuart Prebble's 'Independent Assessment for the BBC Trust'.
The report is 16 pages long but here is the summary. I suggest reading the complete report available from the link below, and with further links available to see the evidence that shows just how skewed this insidious BBC attempt to justify their output truly is.
Summary
In this report Newswatch finds that the BBC’s independent Prebble report – which the BBC Trustees claimed gave a clean bill of health to the Corporation’s coverage
of the EU, immigration and religion – is seriously flawed.
Newswatch has unearthed ties between Stuart Prebble and the BBC, between the BBC and the university department which conducted the supposedly impartial research, and between the university’s project director and the EU. The independence of the project is thus severely compromised.
The Prebble report included programme research from periods in 2007 and 2012 conducted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, a department of Cardiff University. It was published last July, and the BBC Trustee who commissioned it, David Liddiment, claimed that it provided independent
verification that the BBC’s coverage of these key areas was impartial, and contained a wide range of views from across the political spectrum; that it thus met
the terms of the BBC’s Charter and Guidelines. This claim was supported by the other Trustees and the Chairman, Lord Patten.
Mr Prebble and Mr Liddiment were close professional colleagues at Granada TV for many years. Mr Prebble was also from 2002-10 the chief executive and part owner of Liberty Bell, 3 a television production company which made programmes for the BBC.
Senior members of the Cardiff University department are former BBC executives, including Richard Sambrook, a former Head of BBC News, and Richard Tait, a former editor of Newsnight, who served as a BBC Governor and Trustee from 2004-10. The BBC Trustees commissioned the research upon which Mr Prebble largely relied directly from Professor Sambrook.
Professor Sambrook’s colleague, who directed the research, had recently been paid by the EU to analyse media coverage on further integration, and why the UK was sceptical about that prospect.
The clean bill of health on the EU component of the Report was delivered despite repeated warnings from many quarters, including the BBC’s own former director
general, Mark Thompson, as well as political editor Nick Robinson, that the Corporation’s EU coverage was biased against so-called right-wing opinion. These
followed earlier revelations from former senior BBC presenters and editors such as Peter Sissons, Rod Liddle and Robin Aitken, who said the same thing in different
ways.
More recently, John Humphrys, arguably the BBC’s highest profile and most respected presenter, has also said that coverage of the EU has been guilty of ‘bias by omission’. (For example, it almost entirely failed to air the case of those who want to leave the EU, despite its promise after the 2005 Wilson Report that it would do so.)
The following report also demonstrates how Cardiff’s methodology does not meet basic standards of academic inquiry:
These claims are also not supported by their data. For example, conclusions about the amount of coverage of those favouring withdrawal from the EU were drawn from samples so small as to be almost meaningless.
Cumulatively, these basic errors mean that the EU part of the report was not independent and not worth the paper it was written on.
In turn, the BBC Trustees – the ultimate regulatory body of the corporation - have not exercised proper scrutiny in reaching their conclusion that the EU output was properly balanced. This raises serious questions about their own impartiality – and competence.
In this report Newswatch finds that the BBC’s independent Prebble report – which the BBC Trustees claimed gave a clean bill of health to the Corporation’s coverage
of the EU, immigration and religion – is seriously flawed.
Newswatch has unearthed ties between Stuart Prebble and the BBC, between the BBC and the university department which conducted the supposedly impartial research, and between the university’s project director and the EU. The independence of the project is thus severely compromised.
The Prebble report included programme research from periods in 2007 and 2012 conducted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, a department of Cardiff University. It was published last July, and the BBC Trustee who commissioned it, David Liddiment, claimed that it provided independent
verification that the BBC’s coverage of these key areas was impartial, and contained a wide range of views from across the political spectrum; that it thus met
the terms of the BBC’s Charter and Guidelines. This claim was supported by the other Trustees and the Chairman, Lord Patten.
Mr Prebble and Mr Liddiment were close professional colleagues at Granada TV for many years. Mr Prebble was also from 2002-10 the chief executive and part owner of Liberty Bell, 3 a television production company which made programmes for the BBC.
Senior members of the Cardiff University department are former BBC executives, including Richard Sambrook, a former Head of BBC News, and Richard Tait, a former editor of Newsnight, who served as a BBC Governor and Trustee from 2004-10. The BBC Trustees commissioned the research upon which Mr Prebble largely relied directly from Professor Sambrook.
Professor Sambrook’s colleague, who directed the research, had recently been paid by the EU to analyse media coverage on further integration, and why the UK was sceptical about that prospect.
The clean bill of health on the EU component of the Report was delivered despite repeated warnings from many quarters, including the BBC’s own former director
general, Mark Thompson, as well as political editor Nick Robinson, that the Corporation’s EU coverage was biased against so-called right-wing opinion. These
followed earlier revelations from former senior BBC presenters and editors such as Peter Sissons, Rod Liddle and Robin Aitken, who said the same thing in different
ways.
More recently, John Humphrys, arguably the BBC’s highest profile and most respected presenter, has also said that coverage of the EU has been guilty of ‘bias by omission’. (For example, it almost entirely failed to air the case of those who want to leave the EU, despite its promise after the 2005 Wilson Report that it would do so.)
The following report also demonstrates how Cardiff’s methodology does not meet basic standards of academic inquiry:
• The Cardiff researchers made biased assumptions about their data which meant that a serious skew in sampling techniques was amplified. For example, they claimed that the BBC was biased towards Euroscepticism, yet, in the case of the Today programme, 20 of the 21 pro-EU speakers during Cardiff’s 2012 survey were either omitted or ignored, giving a false impression of pro-EU voices being under represented.
• Stuart Prebble also seriously compounded the errors of Cardiff by introducing evidence of his own gathered outside the survey periods. This, it transpires, was given to him – and apparently accepted by Mr Prebble uncritically - by unnamed BBC editorial staff. Further investigation by Newswatch has shown that this additional ‘evidence’ provides no basis for Mr Prebble’s claim that the programmes involved met the BBC’s standards of editorial impartiality.
• The Cardiff researchers have compounded their errors by going into print in the national press and a book with different claims that the BBC’s EU coverage is
skewed against Europhiles and the left.
• Stuart Prebble also seriously compounded the errors of Cardiff by introducing evidence of his own gathered outside the survey periods. This, it transpires, was given to him – and apparently accepted by Mr Prebble uncritically - by unnamed BBC editorial staff. Further investigation by Newswatch has shown that this additional ‘evidence’ provides no basis for Mr Prebble’s claim that the programmes involved met the BBC’s standards of editorial impartiality.
• The Cardiff researchers have compounded their errors by going into print in the national press and a book with different claims that the BBC’s EU coverage is
skewed against Europhiles and the left.
These claims are also not supported by their data. For example, conclusions about the amount of coverage of those favouring withdrawal from the EU were drawn from samples so small as to be almost meaningless.
Cumulatively, these basic errors mean that the EU part of the report was not independent and not worth the paper it was written on.
In turn, the BBC Trustees – the ultimate regulatory body of the corporation - have not exercised proper scrutiny in reaching their conclusion that the EU output was properly balanced. This raises serious questions about their own impartiality – and competence.