Tories willingly tell lies repeatedly, so many it hurts. Political manipulation of the media has been rife, with allegations of Britain going bankrupt under Brown turning to Greece, or Brown ‘maxing out the credit card’ when in fact the last Labour government had to recapitalise the banks to stop them imploding. Since the last general election in May 2010, there has been not a peep about the protests against the NHS privatisation, nor any discussions about NHS privatisation on the BBC. It is no coincidence then Craig Oliver was at the top of BBC News during the time of the last election – he is know of course David Cameron’s right-hand-man in PR.
For those of you who are not yet familiar with Craig Oliver’s “work”, here he is talking to Norman Smith, political correspondent for the BBC:
Craig Oliver’s current entry in Wikipedia gives the following account of Oliver’s work at the time of the last general election here in the UK:
“Oliver joined the BBC in 2006, where he became editor of BBC One‘s Ten O’Clock News,[9] He was also editor of the channel’s Six O’Clock News.[10] In May 2009 Oliver was appointed as the new deputy head of the Corporation’s multimedia newsroom, replacing Mary Hockaday, who had been promoted the previous month to be the new head of the operation that oversees all BBC News output.[11] Oliver was subsequently appointed Controller of English, BBC Global News in April 2010, with responsibility for multiplatform commissioning of all BBC Global News English output.[12] He took up this role after editing the BBC’s 2010 general election coverage.[10] At BBC World, he was part of the team which oversaw cuts to the Corporation’s World Service.[3]“
The BBC regularly reports on News International, but regularly makes far from clear how the two parties relate to one another in market share. For example, at the end of June 2012, the BBC website ran a news story on how “News Corp confirms plan to split the media giant”. In fairness, there is no such need for such a comparison in a news report in this context. However, it is highly relevant to the issue of media plurality which has become the focus of the #Leveson inquiry.
Annex 6 of the OFCOM report, published in June 2012, provides an useful introduction to this (viewable here):
“The BBC plays a significant role in news provision, given its distribution footprint in TV, radio and online. Keeping in mind the differences in the way we calculate figures across the sectors, expenditure on TV news is the next biggest category, £461m or 22% of the total, of which the BBC contributes c65%; radio news constitutes just 7% of spending and online 5% (the BBC represents more than 80% of radio news expenditure). In terms of market share in each category, the BBC leads in TV, radio and online, with News Corporation generating the highest share of both spend on news provision by player type (2011) revenues and readership across the print media; on its own, the BBC represents 21% of all expenditure on news provision.”
It is time to scrutinise the impact of the BBC on political coverage for a debate that comes anywhere close to being fair. Finally, the biggest lie, spun by the right wing media, is that the BBC shows “left wing bias”. I will now end this article as I am choking with sick. And who’s the head of the Tory-led BBC? Lord Patten I believe, a favourite of the Thatcher ‘administration’.
