Daily Mail accusations of leftwing bias at the BBC are par for the course – and Wednesday’s paper appears to have the stats to back them up.
The headline trumpets “BBC lefties spend £2.5k a week on the Guardian”, with the story revealing the corporation spent £127,643 last year on the “left-leaning newspaper” compared with £40,482 on the Mail.
However, one number the Mail fails to include is how much the Guardian cost, which at £1.60 was nearly three times the cover price of the weekday Mail. (The Guardian has since gone up to £1.80.)
The Mail also fails to specify how many copies of the Mail the BBC actually buys. That figure – according to the BBC’s own stats – was 78,463, not exactly far off the BBC’s 80,679 copies of the Guardian.
As a BBC source put it: “We know accusing the BBC of bias is a favourite pastime for some people, but given we bought nearly as many copies of the Mail as the Guardian it’s difficult to see how these figures are evidence of it.”
Monkey suggests the Mail could have put those numbers in its article and let its own readers decide.
