Demonstrating that they are becoming rather short on material for their piss-poor website, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog yesterday fell back on one of their old chestnuts, bashing the BBC over its Brexit coverage. Only this time, the added ingredient was that there were no ingredients at all, not that The Great Guido was letting on to his dwindling band of faithful readers.
Under the headline “BBC Flagship Shows Still Have Remain Panel Bias”, the Fawkes massive tells “Brexiteers always like to complain about Brexit bias on the BBC, so Guido has crunched the numbers on the BBC’s three flagship panel shows, Question Time, Politics Live and Any Questions to see if they have a point. They certainly do”.
They do? How so? “Since the start of the political season in September, 72% of the official panel guests across the three shows have been Remainers, while a mere 28% have been Leavers. A whopping 87% of the panels had a Remainer majority – only 13% of shows had a panel equally balanced between Leavers and Remainers. Not once have Leavers outnumbered Remainers”. And there was more.
“Eight shows since the start of September have seen Brexiteers outnumbered 4 to 1 by Remainers, while two shows in the last two weeks managed to feature four Remainers and no Brexiteers at all. No-one is disputing that the Remainer elite are the majority in the Westminster politico-media bubble, the Beeb should however try to reflect the majority of the country”. The response was swift in coming.
Rob Burley, editor of BBC Live Political Programmes, asked “Am I right to assume that you are counting as Leave or Remain based on where a guest stood over two years ago on 23/06/16? You do know that political programmes have to by law reflect party support not the position of guests on a vote in 2016?” But Rob had not been looking closely enough.
The Fawkes post has no citation supporting it. None. Not one. Which means one thing.
There may not be any real world “Guido Data” underpinning the claims. And even if there is, for some reason the Fawkes rabble is either unable, or unwilling, to pony it up publicly. The deception even extends to missing out programmes like The Andy Marr Show™ and This Week. Why? Aren’t they “Flagship Shows”?
Without the raw data from which The Great Guido has derived his assertions, the post is utterly worthless. Burley’s question of whether that data is based on how the panel member voted in 2016 is also highly relevant - it would class Tories like Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt as Remainers, which is not their stance right now.
All of which shows that Rob Burley got his response wrong. He should have simply told the Fawkes massive to pony up the data, and if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do so, then they could just take their sneering and dishonest attitude and shove it.
“Guido Data” - when there isn’t any data at all. Another fine mess, once again.
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