Will the same papers do this for Tory conference too?
As the country’s right-wing press sharpens its cutlery ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference, it’s worth noticing how coverage of the event already displays bias along political lines – and to keep this handy when the Conservative party conference is covered next week.
Consider this your cut-out-and-keep guide to newspaper bias this conference season.
Here are five general trends to watch out for:
1. Prominence – while the Left-leaning Mirror and Guardian have treated the Labour conference as a national story worthy of their front page, most of the conservative press has kept the conference off page 1 (Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express), or relegated it to second or third story (Telegraph).
This is on the morning after Labour’s shadow chancellor gave a speech laying out the party’s economic policies.
One exception is the Sun, which melds its stablemate paper the Times’s splash about Mars with the conference to attack and ridicule the new Labour administration.
This is not the first time this has happened. Earlier this year the Times kept the Labour party’s general election manifesto off the front page, where the Tory manifesto was featured positively.
Will the same newspapers keep the Tory conference off of page 1 next week?
2. Hostile editorials – while the Sun’s front page story is more an opinion column than news coverage, the dedicated editorial pages of the other newspapers are already pummeling the Labour conference.
The Mail’s columns are perhaps the most robust, though supposedly more serious papers like the Telegraph are not far behind.
As ever, this partisan coverage is written with the general public’s best interest at heart…
Will the same newspapers be as critical of the Tory conference, or will they write as critical supporters of the party?
3. Irreverence and mockery – As the Sun recently proved, mockery of politicians (an important practice) is not something the press applies without prejudice. Political sketches of the Labour conference and newspaper cartoons will similarly ridicule Labour with more gusto – today’s Sun front page being a good example.
Can we expect the same treatment for the Tory conference?
4. Ideas described as out of date – Economic, social and defence policies floated by Labour are called old-fashioned and a ‘return to the 1980s/70s’, despite their being the roughly the same vintage as those of the Tories.
Will the policies of the Conservative party be characterised as a return to the past?
5. Splits and disagreements amplified – There is certainly a big gulf between different tendencies within the Labour party over its direction with Corbyn at the helm.
But as the Tory top brass jostle for position (who was the MP and Oxford contemporary who gave Lord Ashcroft the pig story…?) ahead of their own leadership election before 2020, and as splits over the European Union bubble on, threatening to cripple David Cameron’s EU referendum campaign, their conference will surely yield plenty of comparable material.
Will the papers explore (and revel in) these warring factions within the Tory party?
Now it’s over to the papers. Let’s see how their coverage of the Tory conference resolves these questions.
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Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
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49 Responses to “Five examples of biased press coverage of the Labour party conference”
stevep
“Tirade” : A long angry speech of criticism or accusation.
Just about sums your rants up.
Magic Money Tree? Ask George Osborne. He`s been printing money out of it for the last few years not to mention borrowing more than any Labour government in history. The economy? – Down the toilet pan.
If you`re not right wing, you do a pretty good impression of it. Please tell us more.
BBC director general claiming massive left wing bias? You probably dredged that one from a 2010 interview with former DG Mark Thompson who mentioned that there was a left-wing bias there 30 years ago (1980) when he started as an apprentice. Everything was much further to the left back then, politics, media, sport, even the Tories!
If you want a more accurate and up-to-date appraisal, here`s one from the Guardian 2/6/2015:
It’s the BBC’s rightwing bias that is the threat to democracy and journalism
Owen Jones
The claim of ‘liberal bias’ is a clever fairytale that allows the right to police the corporation and set the wider political agenda
‘A study found the ratio in favour of Conservative politicians appearing on BBC news is far greater than that of Labour MPs when Gordon Brown was PM.’ Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA
There are three certainties about British life: it rains on bank holidays; England’s chances at the Euros are always inflated and then disappointed; and the right claims that the BBC suffers from “leftwing bias”. When it was announced on Friday that the TUC’s senior economist Duncan Weldon would become Newsnight’s new economics correspondent, it was like catnip for conservatives. Weldon’s first crime is to work for the TUC. Trade unions may be Britain’s biggest democratic movement, but they are generally shunned or demonised by the media and political elites alike. His second crime is – like many journalists – to have a political background; in his case, he once advised Harriet Harman. Anonymous senior Tories are briefing that it is a “grade-A BBC stitch-up” and that Arthur Scargill would have been “a more objective appointment”, while the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen has issued a letter of complaint to the corporation.
The Daily Mail is at the forefront of the campaign to prove the BBC is a den of socialism, and has even attacked Sherlock Holmes as “more evidence” of the corporation’s “leftwing bias”. The Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens claims that the BBC “is hopelessly morally, socially and culturally biased against conservative ideas”. Ironically, I recently discussed the issue with him when he interviewed me for a BBC Radio 4 documentary he was presenting. Earlier this year, George Osborne’s private secretary wrote to the BBC director general to complain, among other things, that I had been introduced on the BBC news channel as a “social commentator” rather than a “high-profile leftwing activist.” It was amusing, not least because I am routinely introduced as a “leftwing firebrand”, but have yet to hear the likes of Hitchens or the Times’s stridently Conservative Tim Montgomerie described by BBC presenters as “rightwing firebrands”.
It is a campaign based on myths and deception, but it is extraordinarily clever. It allows the right to police the BBC: to make the corporation fearful of crossing certain lines, and to ensure that the right sets the political agenda. Leftwingers are reluctant to return fire for fear they will help to fatally undermine the BBC. After all, its existence is refutation of the dogma of “private good, public bad”, and much of the right would like to privatise it. The Murdoch empire, only temporarily cowed, is always circling: a few years ago, James Murdoch attacked the “dominant BBC” and called the scope of its activities “chilling”. But the left’s reticence is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon – of a right with few scruples about going on the offensive, while the left adopts a relentlessly defensive posture.
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The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne’s special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian’s Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.
BBC stalwart John Humphrys last week joined the chorus of voices alleging “liberal bias” at the BBC. Here is a man who was slapped down by the BBC’s own trust last year for violating impartiality and accuracy guidelines in BBC2’s The Future State of Welfare. It was an extraordinarily biased piece of TV that fuelled widespread myths about social security. With such coverage, this “liberal-biased” BBC shares the blame for leaving the public completely ill-informed, with, for example, voters estimating that 34 times more money is lost through benefit fraud than is actually the case.
Tory politicians favour the BBC as a useful recruitment service too. After Andy Coulson was driven from No 10, David Cameron replaced him with the then BBC news controller Craig Oliver. Boris Johnson’s former communications supremo was the former BBC political correspondent Guto Harri; after moving to News International in 2012, he was replaced by the BBC’s Westminster news editor, Will Walden.
Rather than having a leftwing bias, research actually suggests the BBC’s output is biased towards establishment and rightwing sources. A study by Cardiff University academics found that while there is always a bias towards political incumbents, the ratio in favour of Conservative politicians appearing on BBC news is far greater than it was in favour of Labour figures when Gordon Brown was prime minister. Business representatives appear much more than they do on commercial news, and appear 19 times more frequently than trade union voices on the BBC Six O’Clock News.
When the financial system went into meltdown, BBC interviews were dominated by City voices like stockbrokers and hedge fund managers, rather than critics of a sector that had plunged the country into disaster.
Take the privatisation of the NHS: it is barely given any coverage by the BBC, and when it is, it is repeatedly presented on the government’s terms. When the legislation was voted through, the BBC reported it as “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.”
The same goes for foreign issues, too. When Israel invaded Gaza in 2009 the BBC provoked uproar when it refused to give the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal any airtime. It was left to the late Tony Benn to read out the number on air, while BBC journalists who asked to put their names to the appeal were privately warned they would be sacked.
In part, this is the legacy of the BBC’s bruising battle with New Labour over the Iraq war, which led to its chairman, director general and journalist Andrew Gilligan being driven from the corporation. The episode left the BBC supine and fearful. Its news output is deeply reactive, rather than agenda-setting, structured along the lines of government announcements.
For too long, the right has got away with weaving a fairytale of BBC leftwing bias. Until the left starts complaining – and loudly too – the BBC’s agenda will be shaped by supporters of government, big business, the free market and western foreign policy. That does not just subvert honest journalism: it undermines our democracy.
stevep
No, I stated that it was not difficult to monster them as they did a good job of it themselves. Anyone with half a brain could do it, even you.
You sure you don`t work for the SunMail? you use the same 30 year-old rhetoric!
Freedom, sorry, Plutocracy for Tooting, Wolfie!
WhiteVanMan
Assuming the party still exists by then ,if there’s less than 40,000 votes 60 years from now,they may call it a day,
WhiteVanMan
Surprised She wasn’t asked about it on Daily politics on the BBC today.
WhiteVanMan
The Daily mail newspaper was the biggest supporter of the police at the time, of the miners strike,part due to the police doing the dirty work of the Tory government at the time, stopping flying pickets preventing workers attend their jobs, during unlawful strikes, a few years later the mail would fall out with the police completely, partly due to their lack of investigation to a black youth Stephen lawrence, who their editor knew, partly due to the police opposing the pay cuts the Tories tried to introduce with the Sheehy review,after the police use of taking on unions was over, but mainly due to the event that followed with Colin Stagg.
The police in trying to save face, kept pushing to the Mail,they’d got the right man,knowing fall well they hadnt, by drip feeding the Mail with hint and innuendo, bits of information that Stagg was a psychopath, suggesting he was involved in other murders, to the point Nickells widower had repeated them in the mail, implying he was guilty and the 500 year old law, that when a person was cleared of murder, they couldn’t face a retrial,in the name of double jeopardy,
The Mail of course had said when 3 white youths were cleared of Stephen Lawrence murder in 1997′ that they were guilty after all,not being able to afford to sue them, the headline went unchallenged, by 2002 the police knew with DNA evidence they had another prime suspect for the killing of Nickell, but they wouldn’t admit it,and the unfair suspicion was still on Stagg, to the point the Mail ,knew if he could afford it , Stagg could have sued Nickells widower for libel and the Mail too. in 2008 Stagg was finally given compensation by the police, he hadn’t done a thing wrong ,with his reputation gone , but the hatred the Mail, created towards him, Nickells widower ,said he didn’t deserve any compensation, Nickells widower later apologised to Stagg, blaming the police