I wrote a column for the London Evening Standard this week about the BBC's alleged political bias. It concerned a study by Cardiff university's Justin Lewis in which he argued that the BBC, far from being left-wing, was tilted towards the right.
Lewis lays out his reasons in a chapter of the forthcoming book, Is the BBC in crisis?*
Hunting for bias in BBC news reporting has long been a popular sport and yet another example arrives today in an article about the Scots referendum by John Robertson on the open democracy website.
He and a group of researchers at the West of Scotland university studied news reporting about the independence referendum on BBC and ITV, within Scotland and in the overall UK broadcasts, during the period September 2012 to September 2013.
His report on the findings is long and detailed and requires careful reading. Here is a very short summation: the anti-independence arguments got more airtime than pro-independence arguments; "bad news" about independence preceded pro-independence responses; and jibes aimed at Scotland's pro-independence first minister, Alex Salmond, outweighed his own jibes at his rivals.
It is suggested that political editors framed - or possibly narrowed - the independence debate in order to suggest it was all about the economy.
There are bags of details before Robertson concludes that on the basis of "the objective evidence" in his study "the mainstream TV coverage of the first year of the independence referendum campaigns has not been fair or balanced.
"Taken together, we have evidence of coverage which seems likely to have damaged the Yes campaign."
*Is the BBC in crisis? Edited by John Mair, Richard Tait and Richard Lance Keeble (Abramis, 1 March) RRP: £19.95, but £15 to Guardian readers via richard@arimapublishing.co.uk
