Overview: Politics

taking on the BBC in the complaints framework is not for the faint-hearted... set-piece responses ... ‘we get complaints from both sides, so we must be getting it right’, or, ... you are not taking into account that seven weeks previously we broadcast a balancing item’... summarises the basic BBC stonewall approach...‘due’ impartialit... that not …

42% of the country see the BBC as ... pro-Remain ... just 25% who disagree... When was the last time that the BBC sought to explore the opportunities available to a post-Brexit Britain?... fits in with a general sense that the people are up against the establishment... Just 19% feel that the Commons is doing a good job of honouring the vote... two…

Gavin Hunt... Question Time... tracked the 25 editions of the programme in the series running from January 2017, and found that 22 had panels which contained a majority of EU Remainers... Ofcom... turned the complaint down... Damian Green expressed the Hard Brexit perspective, and ... in Ofcom’s judgment, host David Dimbleby ensured that debate wa…

Question Time, Politics Live and Any Questions… Since ... September, 72% of the official panel guests across the three shows have been Remainers, while a mere 28% have been Leavers...87% of the panels had a Remainer majority – only 13% of shows had a panel equally balanced between Leavers and Remainers. Not once have Leavers outnumbered Remainers.

Brexit coverage during, before and since the Referendum has been skewed in favour of Brexit... isn’t ... flagrantly biased or unbalanced: it is more subtle... because of the polarisation of views over Brexit, the BBC would attract criticism from both sides almost whatever it did...Nigel Farage stated ... BBC’s coverage had been “fair and balanced”…

monitored thousands of hours of radio and TV shows dating back to 1999... Of 4,275 guests on Today between 2005 and 2015 who talked about the EU, only 132 were Brexiteers... think-tank Civitas ... with the group News-watch, also found that Left-wing Brexiteers have been consistently excluded ... Clarke and Heseltine were given nine times as much a…

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias... a trait that should have been selected against. ... it must have some adaptive function... related to our “hypersociability.” ... Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned wit…

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…