THE BBC’s “soft touch” News at Six has left the broadcaster with a “serious credibility gap”, according to the SNP’s Independence Unit director.
Michael Russell, the SNP president, made the comments as The National revealed data demonstrating the different approaches to covering political stories for the BBC’s UK-wide and Scottish audiences.
Last week the News at Six covered 11 political stories, with just one of them (9.1%) framed negatively towards the UK Government. Reporting Scotland presented 20 political stories, with eight of those (40%) framed negatively towards Holyrood.
READ MORE: UK ministers get easy ride from ‘softball’ BBC News At Six , research finds
The research was carried out between August 2 and August 6 and follows on from a similar July data collection exercise. August’s findings show a more drastic difference between the two programme’s approaches.
Between June 28 and July 2 the data showed three out of 11 political Reporting Scotland stories had a negative framing towards the Scottish Government, while not one News at Six story out of the total nine was negative towards the UK Government.
Russell (above), the former constitution secretary, said the August data is “further evidence of an ingrained structural bias within the BBC”.
“The network News at Six’s soft touch on the UK Government leaves a serious credibility gap for the BBC,” he told The National.
“The SNP and Scottish Government expect and receive scrutiny from BBC Scotland News – but there are two governments with powers in Scotland and by any standard, the UK Government are not subject to the same level of scrutiny.
“The BBC has a raft of talented journalists, both in Scotland and across the UK. But editors and bosses should do more to ensure output is balanced – otherwise increasing numbers of the Scottish audience will just switch over.”
From August 2 to 6 political stories produced for the Scottish and UK-wide evening programme were monitored and categorised based on their framing towards each government – either positive, negative or neutral.
BBC News at Six and Reporting Scotland political stories by framing, August 2-6
“Negative” stories typically lead with one of the governments being accused of something, them being forced to defend a position or facing criticism for something.
During the period Reporting Scotland presented eight stories with a negative framing focused on the Scottish Government. Those including questions over continuing Covid restrictions beyond August 9, a new drug policy being announced following demands from opposition parties and alleged confusion over “vertical drinking” rules.
The programme also covered one story with a positive framing of the Scottish Government, on the boost to early years education which saw provision expanded from 600 to 1140 hours. There were also nine neutral stories, primarily focused on Covid-19 and vaccination changes.
At the same time, the News at Six largely avoided criticism of the UK Government. Their sole story with a negative framing towards Westminster was that a UK Government minister had commented on fears over grade inflation in England.
The News at Six also ran a positive UK Government story on families reuniting following changes to travel rules, and five neutral stories.
A spokesperson for BBC Scotland said: “Journalists across the BBC always strive for fairness, accuracy and impartiality in their reporting of news stories for our audiences across all our platforms.”
The BBC is facing increasing pressure to cover Westminster through a more critical lens as a result of Peter Stefanovic’s viral video highlighting Boris Johnson’s many misleading claims The lawyer and filmmaker’s video, which has now been viewed more than 30 million times and was referred to by Dawn Butler when she was kicked out of the Commons, has been picked up by Sky News and ITV but not the BBC.
Stefanovic has questioned how the BBC could fail to report on the clip. Commenting on The National’s new findings, he said: “As somebody who grew up with the BBC there is much about the BBC that I love, and this saddens me but does not shock me.
“The reason it doesn’t is because of the reaction that I have seen on the part of the BBC to my video.”
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