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The 'Today' Programme's Coverage of the 2019 THE BBC AND BREXIT THE ‘TODAY’ PROGRAMME’S COVERAGE OF THE 2019 EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This survey assesses coverage by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme of the European Parliamentary elections between April 12 and May 30, 2019. The volume of EU material was 28.5% of feature time, indicating the importance of the Brexit debate on the news agenda. This amounted to a third of a million words of transcripts. Standout points include: Pro-Brexit opinion was overwhelmingly swamped by those who wanted to avoid ‘no deal’. Speakers had only minimal time to express their views and presenters were not much interested in exploring the potential benefits of Brexit, but rather alleged malpractice or prejudice by pro-Brexit parties and spokesmen. The treatment of anti-Brexit figures was generally much more favourable. After the results of the poll, for example, presenters barely challenged assertions by Remain parties that they had ‘won’ (on a combined basis) the election. By contrast, Sir William Cash – brought on the programme to justify why he had described the government’s negotiating approach as ‘appeasement’ – was questioned by Nick Robinson as if his behaviour was verging on the criminal. Business News – a significant daily chunk of the Today programme – was heavily dominated by contributors who were against ‘no deal’, determined to push as hard as possible the scale of the disruption that would ensue, and who saw almost every negative business development as being the outcome of Brexit uncertainty. The perceived opportunities of Brexit were scarcely explored Almost 500 speakers (487) contributed to the Today coverage. In line with the Brexit debate, News-watch coded them into seven categories, ranging from Remain and pro-EU to those wanting a decisive Brexit with ‘no deal’ or equivalent. An overwhelming proportion of the words spoken on Brexit (84%) were by contributors opposed to a so-called ‘no deal’. They either supported the government’s withdrawal agreement (WDA) or were against leaving the EU. Within the remaining 16%, not much was said by contributors about a ‘clean’ or ‘no deal’ Brexit. This was largely because the programme made minimal effort to explore these perspectives. Instead, most editorial inquiry directed towards supporters of a decisive exit from the EU was focused on perceived negatives, such as alleged irregularities in party funding or Islamophobia. This significantly under-reflected attitudes among voters. Polls show that, within margins of error, public opinion continues to be equally divided between Remain and Leave, with substantial levels of support for a ‘no deal’ Brexit. 2 During the campaign period (Friday 12 April and Thursday 23 May) specific BBC European Election Guidelines were in force. They required that parties standing in the election should be given ‘proportionate’ coverage. Despite this, the survey shows that the Brexit Party, which attracted the biggest vote share (31%) was allocated just 5.3% of the space on Today. By contrast, Change UK, the pro-Remain party, which attracted only 3.4% of the vote was allocated 4.8% of airtime. Change UK also had almost twice the space of UKIP, despite receiving only a 0.1% higher vote share. Thus coverage of the pro-Brexit parties did not meet the BBC guidelines. Clearly, the vote shares could not be known in advance, but they were not significantly different from the opinion polls taken regularly and publicly available during the build-up to the election. The disparity suggests that the BBC editorial system deliberately opted to under-report the ‘decisive Brexit’ perspective. Another disturbing statistic is that despite the referendum vote to Leave in 2016 – which confirmed for the first time definitively the level of pro-Brexit opinion – fewer supporters of withdrawal from the EU appeared in the 2019 European elections than those in 2014. In 2019 the figure was 15.4% of speakers; in 2014, it was 17.3%. News-watch’s surveys since the 2016 referendum – summarised in Part Two – have shown major imbalances in favour of anti-Brexit and pro-EU opinion. In its defence, the BBC has claimed that the Brexit debate has become more nuanced and no longer operates on a simple ‘Leave/Remain’ binary. News-watch has never coded solely on this binary, although BBC journalists themselves have continued to refer to politicians, members of the public and the regions of nations of the UK in terms of Leave and Remain, and did so on hundreds of occasions during this survey. Further, the BBC has argued that monitoring itself, because it involves counting, is ‘unhelpful’ and that achieving ‘due impartiality is resistant to simple quantification’. But in this survey, the Today programme had a clear and specific commitment: to provide listeners with ‘proportionate’ coverage of the parties, according to their profile and expected vote share. The only way of checking whether this was met was through the systematic techniques News-watch has deployed in this survey, encompassing guest appearances, word counts and detailed analysis of every word of the transcripts. 3 CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: ................................................................................................................ 2 CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................................... 4 PART ONE: MONITORING STATISTICS .................................................................................... 5 1.1 OVERVIEW ........................................................................................................................................ 5 1.2 THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND ..................................................................................................... 6 1.3 MAIN UK PARTIES IN THE 2019 EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS ....................... 8 1.4 THE TODAY PROGRAMME .......................................................................................................... 13 1.5 AIRTIME ............................................................................................................................................ 14 1.6 TODAY’S EU COVERAGE ............................................................................................................. 16 1.7 SPEAKERS AND CODING ............................................................................................................. 17 1.9 COMPARISONS WITH PREVIOUS EUROPEAN ELECTIONS .................................................. 27 1.10 THE CAMPAIGN PERIOD: ........................................................................................................... 29 1.11 CONCLUSION: ............................................................................................................................. 32 PART TWO: CONTENT ANALYSIS ........................................................................................... 37 PART THREE: PRO-BREXIT POINTS ........................................................................................... 43 PART FOUR: ANTI-BREXIT AND PRO-WDA INTERVIEWS ................................................... 64 PART FIVE: BUSINESS NEWS ANALYSIS ............................................................................. 104 PART FIVE: SUMMARY OF PRO-WITHDRAWAL CONTENT ............................................ 114 PART SIX: RUNNING LOG ..................................................................................................... 133 4 PART ONE: MONITORING STATISTICS 1.1 OVERVIEW The BBC is the world’s oldest national broadcaster and largest by number of employees.1 Its primary source of funding is an annual licence fee charged to all British households, supplemented by revenue from the Corporation’s commercial subsidiaries,2 generating an annual income of approximately £3.7 billion.3 In the UK, 91% adults engage with BBC Television, Radio or Online services each week,4 and the BBC also has a significant global influence: in June 2019 it was reported that World Service English and BBC World News TV had increased their joint reach to 426 million per week.5 The BBC is established under a Royal Charter6 and operates under an Agreement with the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.7 The 2017 Charter replaced the BBC Trust with the BBC Board8, and the Board is responsible for ensuring the BBC delivers its mission and public purposes, through setting strategy and assessing performance. The dissolution of the BBC Trust also saw regulatory responsibility for the BBC passed to Ofcom, the ‘first external, independent regulator’ in the Corporation’s history, responsible for 'holding the BBC’s performance and editorial standards to account.’9 The Charter sets out that the BBC’s mission is, ‘to act in the public interest, servicing all audience through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output’10 and defines the first of the BBC’s five public purposes as: To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them: the BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world.11 1 https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/tag/bbc 2 https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/licencefee 3 https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/annualreport/2018-19.pdf p.167 4 Ibid. p.4 5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/bbc-international-audience-record-high
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