The DIY test that proves BBC bias

Nicholas Boles demonstrates that although Auntie always gives the Tories equal airtime, she still leans heavily to the Left

Nvhen any aspiring Tory orator sits down to compose a speech for the Conservative party conference, there is one rule that he never forgets. One device that he knows can instantly transform him into the next Heseltine. One trick that never fails. Attack the BBC.

It is hard to remember a time when Tories didn't loathe the Corporation. After all, it's more than 20 years since the then director-general, Alasdair Milne, was called before the 1922 committee and savaged by outraged MPs for the allegedly unpatriotic tone of the BBC's coverage of the Falklands war.

It was the reporting of another military action, the 1986 bombing of Libya by American planes, that provoked the party chairman Norman Tebbit to lay into Kate Adie. Over the years Tebbit has returned to the fray on many occasions, often aided and abetted by the Tory tabloids. The enmity exists to this day.

Your average Conservative activist is convinced that the BBC is profoundly biased against the party. The airwaves are eagerly scanned for evidence to support this contention. If an edition of Question Time is broadcast without an official Tory spokesman on the panel, the switchboards are jammed with complaints from normally mild-mannered gentlefolk, often using extremely ungentle language.

A group of Tory supporters even set up a body called the Media Monitoring Unit to check transcripts line by line to ensure that the party wasn't being short-changed. The problem is that the whole thing is based on a false premise. In reality the BBC treats the Conservative party with scrupulous fairness. Reporters and producers alike go to considerable lengths to give the Tories a fair crack of the whip. Sometimes they even bend over backwards. On matters of equal airtime and coverage of party events, Auntie shows no favouritism.

Very occasionally the Corporation gets it wrong. I was a Tory-supporting talking head during the programme covering the 2003 local elections. I recall my incredulity as I sat in the studio fuming as mounting Conservative gains were ignored while the presenters banged on about the resignation of an obscure front-bencher and the deadly threat this posed to fain Duncan

Smith. It was an example of bad journalism, no question about it. Yet I do not believe that anyone was acting out of malice. It was simply a case of the herd mentality at work. Having initially decided that 'Tory leadership crisis' was the story of the night, the assorted broadcasters were reluctant to admit they had got it wrong. Later on, as the evidence of a very solid Conservative performance became impossible to ignore, they changed their tune and the justifiably sharp complaint by Central Office was quietly accepted.

Since then the BBC has faced an altogether more formidable adversary in the form of Alastair Campbell. Many commentators (including a number within the Corporation) have cited the Kelly affair as the ultimate proof that the BBC has no political bias. After all, they say, even Mrs Thatcher at the height of her unpopularity never clashed with the Corporation as violently as has this Labour government.

This argument doesn't wash. The behaviour of some within the BBC during the Iraq war gave the game away, as never before, as to where the real bias lies. The truth is that the BBC maintains a fastidious formal balance between the major parties while displaying a wider ideological bias to the Left. When a Labour government displeases socialists, the BBC is highly likely to articulate their criticisms, but when the same government upsets the Right, the Corporation tends to ignore any protests or even take Labour's side. This is why Conservatives assume the BBC is biased against their party. They see their values and opinions challenged and denigrated, and confuse pro-leftism with pro-Labourism.

Lest some who love the Corporation rush to denounce this assertion as merely a more sophisticated version of the old Tory paranoia, I will offer up a rough-and-ready but very serviceable analytical tool. In the era of the Internet anyone can use it.

A group of researchers at Cchange, the Tory pressure group, devised this test. And it works. First of all go to the website of the Daily Telegraph — www.telegraph.co.uk — and study a range of political stories. Note the way they are covered, the experts who are quoted and the overall slant. You won't be surprised by what you find. The Telegraph is the great broadsheet of the British Right, read by colonels and company directors of the more traditional kind.

Now visit the Guardian's website — www.guardian.co.uk — to see the same stories covered from a very different ideological perspective. Again the results are predictable. The term 'Guardian reader' is a synonym for left-winger, and many social workers and university lecturers wear the label with pride.

Finally click on to the BBC's excellent site, www.bbc.co.uk. It is a cornucopia of information. Not only can you get up-to-date news but it's also possible to read transcripts of certain bulletins and political programmes and even to watch past editions online. One might expect the BBC, with its compulsory levy and statutory duty of impartiality, to have none of the political bias of the other two sites. All programmes should be strictly neutral — but they're not. At the very least it would be reasonable to expect a balance of biases. If one edition of Panorama denounces greedy employers for exploiting downtrodden workers, then surely another will point out that small businesses are drowning in over-regulation and increasingly onerous employment legislation. Not a bit of it. The fact is that, on issue after issue, the BBC broadcasts the views of the Guardian and its readers as if they were gospel. This takes place across a range of programmes. As goes the Left, so goes the BBC.

If you want to try it yourself at home, then be sure to choose an issue that meets the criteria. It must be a subject that divides Left and Right. The Cchange team chose grammar schools. The Right loves them, the Left loathes them. The Telegraph believes they are a bastion of high standards and opportunity. The Guardian sees them as educationally dubious, socially divisive and unfair.

When the government legislated to allow ballots on abolishing grammar schools, both newspapers took predictable — and utterly irreconcilable — stances. This even extended to the sources routinely quoted in news stories. For example, the main anti-grammar school pressure groups, the Campaign for State Education (Case) and Stop the Eleven Plus (Step), were quoted in at least 30 per cent of the Guardian's stories but less than 20 per cent of the Telegraph's. On the other hand, the pro-grammar school National Grammar Schools Association (NGSA) is quoted in 25 per cent of Telegraph stories but in only 6 per cent of Guardian articles.

Was the BBC somewhere in the middle, seeking comment equally from both sides? On the contrary; it was considerably to the Left of the Guardian. The anti-grammar school groups were quoted in 35 per cent of BBC articles, whereas the pro-grammar school organisation was quoted in only 2 per cent of them.

This is not a nerdish piece of statistical chicanery. It is the tip of an iceberg. The fact is that there are many members of staff at the BBC — some of them in senior positions — who are so imbued with the assumptions of the Guardian that they do not even realise that they are biased.

Occasionally they are forced to confront their skewed reporting. There have been two issues in recent years where consistent bias to the Left in BBC programmes has led well-organised right-of-centre pressure groups to lobby the Corporation for a more balanced approach.

One of these was Europe and the other was hunting. There are left-wing hunters just as there are left-wing Eurosceptics, but both groups are broadly right-wing and are cordially loathed by Guardian readers. This was reflected in BBC programming. At one point, The Archers made no reference to the huge Countryside Alliance demonstration, but featured a storyline about a gay pride march. I'm gay and was brought up in the country, and I know which march the people of Ambridge would be more likely to attend.

What was interesting about the BBC's response to complaints of bias on both Europe and hunting was the similarity of approach. Initially the Corporation and its spokesmen refused to concede even the possibility of bias. Even when the lobbying became insistent and the evidence almost impossible to refute, they said very little by way of concession. All that happened was that slowly but surely the imbalance disappeared from the airwaves, as the message percolated down from senior policy-makers to editors and producers.

Sadly, most right-wing causes don't have well-funded lobby groups with large and vociferous memberships to lay siege to Television Centre, so the broader bias continues unabated. But perhaps not for much longer. One of the beneficial side-effects of the Hutton inquiry and the light it has cast on the BBC's unofficial doctrine of infallibility may be a new willingness on the part of people within the Corporation to re-examine the whole issue of bias.

It may be that the BBC's previously chronic inability to admit that there is any political imbalance within its studios and newsrooms may give way to a more open attitude and a rigorous determination to guard against ideologically loaded assumptions in programme-making.

There are welcome signs. Recently it has become known that the BBC intends to start advertising its jobs in the Daily Telegraph. As a result, it may attract recruits from a wider range of backgrounds and political sympathies. There's a lot of ground to make up, because for many years BBC vacancies have been advertised in only one national newspaper.

I don't need to tell you which one.

Nicholas Boles is director of Policy Exchange.