22/01/2016 Newswatch

awards next month. Those are the latest headlines. Now, we will have

a full round-up of the day 's news but before that, news watch...

Coming up, Dame Janet Smith has been looking into how the BBC handled

reports of abuse by Jimmy Savile, but does every news broadcast

on the subject have to feature his grinning face?

And the pay of junior doctors is just one statistic that has been

Does the BBC report the numbers in a clear and impartial way?

The abuse committed by Jimmy Savile and the circumstances surrounding it

have been extremely difficult for the BBC to report

More than three years ago the corporation set up a review

headed by Dame Janet Smith into its culture and practices

This week a draft of the report was leaked and that led

to an objection we have heard before from viewers.

Another fraught issue cropped up again this week

when the Prime Minister again criticised the BBC for referring

to the organisation known as Islamic State rather

Here he is clashing with Sarah Montague

on Monday's Today Programme on Radio 4.

Can I say again that I think Muslim families around the country

would have held their heads in despair this morning when,

once again, you just called it Islamic State.

You didn't even say "so-called" Islamic State.

David Cameron is not the only one who thinks that changing

the terminology is due, as this email from a viewer

One subject we will be hearing a great deal about this year

We won't know until November who is going to be following

President Barack Obama into the White House,

but the business of voting gets going in little over a week

when Republicans and Democrats both hold a caucus in Iowa,

the start of the process of selecting candidates.

This week, the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump received

the endorsement of someone who has been absent from the American

She's still a darling of the Tea Party right

and the evangelical wing of the Republican Party.

But she is gaffe-prone, as was seen when she ran

They say the difference between a hockey mom and pit bull?

You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.

Rather like Donald Trump today, Sarah Palin has always been widely

mocked by sections of the British media.

No, as several viewers pointed out, including Peter Jackson

Numbers are at the heart of much news reporting but their use

is proving increasingly controversial.

Take the disputed figures for what the Government has been

spending on flood defences or its claim that stroke victims

are 20% more likely to die at a weekend, which has been

challenged by some in the medical establishment.

And then there is the argument over how much junior doctors will be paid

under the proposed new contract, which Home Affairs Editor Mark

The Government calculates that three quarters of junior doctors

will actually be better off, many will see no difference at all

They certainly do, and on Tuesday, viewer Stephen Lochear spotted

And Martin Green had this to say about a report on high levels

of Omega 3 fatty acids being associated with a 70% increase

Well, the BBC Trust has set up a review to look into this whole

area of the use of statistics on BBC news and current affairs.

It will be overseen by an independent panel

which includes Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute

of Fiscal Studies, and he joins me now.

From a journalist's point of view, it can feel that there is a lot more

data out there available for analysis.

Do you think that is the case, there is almost too much

There is a vast amount of information or rather

there is a vast amount of data and turning that into useful

trustworthy information is incredibly difficult.

You really need people who are experts in understanding

There are a number of difficulties here.

One is that Government departments and statisticians have access

to that data a little bit before everyone else they can put it out

and put their particular spin on it and if you need to respond

immediately, it is often very difficult to know quite

where the spin ends and the facts start.

And because we are in this 24-hour news cycle, the data comes out

at nine o'clock in the morning and people are responding

It would be nice at least to leave it until the one o'clock news,

to give it time to understand it and one my frustrations

is when we have the Budget or the Spending Review,

we at the IFS put information out the next day but two days later,

everyone has forgotten about it, by which time you might actually

have done more serious looking at what was it was about.

Let us look at some specific complaints we have had.

We have had this email from Stuart Orange from London.

He feels that the BBC misuses graphs online.

He points to a recent graph on climate change.

Do you have a particular concern about graphs?

It is a classic problem about graphs because where you set the origin

and the bottom of the vertical axis makes a huge difference

to whether a change looks big or small.

If you do this in the context of climate change, people worry

about whether the climate will increase or temperatures

will increase by 2 degrees above preindustrial times and 2

degrees on a chart which starts at zero and goes up to 30,

it is a tiny change and in some sense that is one way of looking

at it but 2 degrees is very important and maybe it is important

to put that within a small amount of space so it does look big and it

does look very different according to where you put the axis

In many ways it is an editorial judgment about what is big

And the problem is you can show things that are not very big

as being big, so unemployment, from 6% to 8.5% can look huge

if the graph only goes between 5.7% and 6%.

We have another e-mail from Jeff Simmons.

It is a good point about what analogy people

I think analogies are very important and that is a good example.

I have no idea what 10,000 square metres looks

like but I have a pretty good idea of what a football pitch looks

like so if you say that something is 12 hectares,

it is actually quite helpful to see how many football pitches or how

many bits of Wales or whatever area is often used that relates to.

In many aspects of measurement, if you cannot bring that analogy

so that people can visualise it, it is very difficult if they are not

working all the time with measures of area, for example.

It is interesting that after the Autumn Statement,

we had complaints that the BBC described George Osborne as lucky

and that this was biased and of course you are an economic

data expert and you used the word lucky to talk about the statistics.

What is your view on how data issues are reported and do you have

concerns that sometimes they are misreported?

The forecast changed a tiny bit and in a way it was helpful

it was a little bit so if I have concern about the way

it was reported it was reported as a much bigger thing than it

actually was and that is partly because the Chancellor talked

about ?27 billion, that's a big number but it was cumulative over

seven years and by the end of that period it was ?4 billion.

Out of ?800 billion of spending, that is tiny.

We'll look out for that review for the BBC Trust which will be

Thank you for all of your comments this week.

If you want to share your opinions on BBC news and current affairs

or even appear on the programme, you can call us or email us.

You can find us on Twitter and have a look at our website.

We will be back to hear your thoughts again next week.