Thread by @jrschlosberg

Some thoughts about #BBCBias. First, I don't believe there's any kind of conscious, intentional favouring of 'the right' by BBC journalists or editors. But they do over-represent a metropolitan, liberal elite demographic 1/

That translates into an institutional paranoia of being seen to be 'anti-right' and creates a degree of over compensation in both the sources and issues that gain most prominence, and sometimes in the relative treatment of sources 2/

And most importantly which sources are 'trusted' or seen as inherently credible (eg senior Tories or rt wing Labour versus 'the left') 3/

That paranoia/pressure is hugely intensified by hard right government and a predominantly hard right press, poised to jump on the BBC and threatening the license fee at every turn 4/

Another issue is that journalists just don't understand how to implement impartiality in a post consensus world. In the EU referendum they adopted a 'X claims A, Y claims B' approach to balance which proved to be disastrous in allowing falsehood to spread unchecked 5/

in GE19 they took the approach of 'scrutinise claims on both sides equally' but ran into a problem. The vast majority of falsehoods were spread by the Tories and Lib Dems but 'presentational' impartiality meant that Labour had to be presented as equally culpable 6/

But the biggest problem is a herd-like group think about 'what the story is'. When IFS attacked Labour manifesto, that was a far more of a 'story' than the equally scathing IFS response to Tory manifesto. It just somehow 'made sense' 7/

When antisemitism allegations surfaced in the Tory party it just didn't seem like much of a headline (in spite of ticking every box of news value criteria) 8/

None of this meant that the BBC was wholly or explicitly towing the Tory line. But then explicit, conscious propaganda is never that effective 9/