Not Many People Know That

Facts prove……

Interesting fact of the day…The BBC’s Question Time is biased towards the Right.

Is there bias on BBC Question Time?

Phil Burton-Cartledge has crunched the numbers on the political persuasions of the guests on the BBC’s flagship politics programme….. just shy of four years worth of data. Please note I have excluded Question Time’s annual forays to Northern Ireland from the figures.

As of 22 November, 362 individuals have occupied 704 panel slots. For those interested in gender and political participation, only 98 guests have been women. These between them have occupied 235 slots.

Actually I’m not sure what he says he has proved….apart from being an enormous waste of his time…I always assume QT is in the main ‘balanced’…audience aside….so to crunch the numbers on this over a four year period is sheer folly.

The main conclusion seems to be that Nigel Farrage gets on far too many times and that Union Barons hardly at all….and that’s so unfair because Union Barons are the true representatives of millins of hard working people…aren’t they?

Seems just another New Statesman effort, however slight, to ‘defend’ the BBC from charges of being a Lefty bunker.

Here’s an interesting comment on the article from the writer’s own blog:

‘The issue with journalists going on Question Time and spouting off completely destroys the laughable notion that still gets trotted about hacks being “neutral” – all news and editorial judgments are inherently subjective.

But rather than bleating about this, and imaging that Lord Leveson is going to deliver a fairer media through some sort of state-backed regulation, the the left would do better to develop more TV friendly independent minded journalists who are able to articulate the very many popular left positions clearly.

Anyway, great piece and should be spread far and wide every Thursday the minute a right-winger opens their cake hole to bleat about the Marxists controlling the BBC.’

I should of course add a  correction to that…..when they say ‘all news and editorial judgements are inherently subjective’.…they don’t mean the nice BBC.  Clear?

Here’s the thing…why did the author, ‘Phil the sociologist’, put this piece together?

Phil said…(in reference to the comment about right wingers bleating about the Marxist BBC)

Re: your final comment, I wrote it specifically for those annoying Question Time moments  

So essentially it was written as a political piece designed purely to attempt to spike right wing claims of BBC bias…..all it really does is confirm what we always knew about sociologists…they’re a complete waste of time and money…..they come up with ‘research’ that you can hear in any pub any night of the week….as he says in his banner….‘Sociology with a socialist spin’

The rather shy ‘Phil’ is Phil Burton-Cartledge....Ex-ex-blogger, Stoke Labour Party vice chair, constituency secretary & bag carrier, co-founder of Democratic Futures. ….Phil received his PhD from Keele University in 2010. His thesis concerned the life history of revolutionary socialist activists. Phil is interested in political sociology and the sociology of social movements, and in social theory more generally’

Apparently this is Phil on Twitter:

This is him (bottom) in real life along with co-founder Gavin Bailey: Gavin completed his PhD at Keele University in 2011 and his doctoral research looked at the community activities of radical Islamist and far right activists:

The photo of ‘Phil’ raises questions about the truthfulness of this Tweet of his:

Phil BC ‏@philbc3

@The_Iron_Lad People like me were actively fighting the Nazis on the streets. Right wingers like you were trying to cut deals with them

Obviously takes a good photo.

Oh yes….can’t have you miss this from the comments, which I’m sure is totally untrue and the mere ramblings of a disgruntled ex-employee…..

‘Lest we forget, the great neutral arbiter Dimblebot himself has form as a nasty, penny pinching businessman. He and his brother owned a series of newspapers in south London until the late 90s where reporters had to buy their own notebooks and were reputedly paid less than the minimum wage based on their long working hours. These journalists only received a substantial payrise and celebrated wildly when the Dimbleboys sold it to the US multinational Newsquest – itself a hated firm not known for their high pay!‘