Friday, February 18, 2011

One orifice...


Two cheeks (follow the AM link below and you'll see what I mean). A little less than month ago The Daily Mail, the only major UK daily newspaper with a growing - albiet small increase - circulation, published Peter Sissons' BBC bias bombshell onto a largely shocked and unsuspecting au fait public who in greater and greater numbers are realising that 'Auntie' isn't really all it should be. His comment "Left-wing bias? It's written through the BBC's very DNA" was IMHO a clear riposte to director of BBC News Helen Boaden's not quite accurate 'Impartiality is in our genes' comment. Peter Sissons was quite clear:

"I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told 'it's all in there'".
Considering that quote, and considering also that in some years the money spent on recruitment advertising for new staff in daily newspapers by the BBC has been over 80% spent in the Guardian** we should take note, especially given other known factors like that which Autonomous Mind reminds us of today (image credit also, click to enlarge):

"The disproportionate influence of the Guardian at the BBC"... ... "When given a choice of a national newspaper we can see that out of an average 10,197,331 copies sold each day during January 2011 (including bulk buys) less than 280,000 copies in the UK were the Guardian. That represents just under 2.74% of national circulation."... 
"That puts the Guardian's popularity, or lack thereof, in its proper context...
...What this also puts into context is the BBC's indefensible bias in only trawling a very narrow and self professed left wing pool when only using the Guardian to advertise vacancies."
** Scroll down DT Letters for an account of amounts, info obtained under FOI HERE.



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4 comments:

Paul said...

The disproportionate influence of the Guardian at the BBC"..

Not to mention the disproportionate whinging by the right wing in this country that the BBC has a left wing bias! Peter Sissions had a book to sell and wanted to make a bit of publicity. There may well be some bias but surely all young hip gun slingers are left wing and move to the right as they grow older.

Span Ows said...

Not disproportionate at all...I'm surprised it's so faint (the whinging). He may have had a book to sell but I doubt he would have spouted a bunch of lies just beforehand to boost the launch.

I know lefties (most of them) change when they grow up and grow a brain but it is interesting that the beeb still insists on using the Guardian so much when it has such a narrow focus/readership...

Paul said...

Don't know where you are at the moment but CNN had their annual state of the nation debate on last night, three people I didn't know plus P.J O'Rourke. I thought of this posting when one of the four said, "It's actually fact that in the United States there are more households with a parrot in them than there are subscribers to Fox, but guess which has the most influence?"

Span Ows said...

I'm sure there must be a few appropriate Polly jokes to that!

I'm in Spain, hence picture of fridge earlier. :-)