19/05/2017 Newswatch

Coming up at ten, a full round-up of the day's news. First, it's

Newswatch. Hello and welcome to Newswatch

with me Samira Ahmed. Coming up: the party

manifestos are all out. How well has the BBC

done on explaining their policies fairly

and impartially? And, are we hearing too many random

opinions from not always With the main parties

publishing their offers to voters, this week has seen the

general election campaign in full The BBC's political editor

Laura Kuenssberg was on hand and on Here she is on Thursday

reporting on the Conservatives' proposals,

and first on Tuesday reacting And remember not so long ago in 2015

Ed Miliband made a few little tiptoes to the left of where

Labour had been and he lost that Jeremy Corbyn is making a much

bigger step in the same direct of Middle England are really ready

for the policies that he believes And, of course, the

complications of Brexit means whatever else she is promising

could be derailed by that becoming extremely difficult,

and not just hard to deliver So, broadly, though, as with any

political idea leader for the mainstream, easier

to say than to prove. Some viewers object

to what they see as a running commentary on what politicians

are saying and doing during the campaign, with David Jowett

putting it like this. "It seems the news bulletins

are becoming the Laura Her pieces to camera

and the questioning of political figures are not the broad

unbiased approach that one should expect from the BBC but come across

as the presentation of personal The BBC should be providing

a broader approach with a considerably higher

factual content." Allegations of bias,

as we've mentioned before in recent weeks, have been rife with some

viewers feeling the BBC has given the lion's share of screen time

and prominence to the Labour Party. Tom and Jan Borland

profess themselves, "Bemused and somewhat annoyed,

to say the least, by the total airtime given over

to the Labour Party, and to Jeremy Corbyn in particular,

who is the lead story every time This amount of press

coverage is, to my mind, highly disproportionate, biased

towards a single person and his party and not conducive to a level

political playing field." For the majority of

those contacting the BBC, though, the bias

is in the other direction with Rav Dhillon speaking for many

who feel, "There is a sneering and condescending tone

in the interviewing and reporting Elsewhere, the BBC's

economics editor Kamal Ahmed also came under attack after his

piece on Labour's manifesto on Those earning above ?80,000

will pay a tax rate of If you earn above that amount

the loss will be around ?400. For those earning ?123,000

the rate rises to 50p. That could leave some

with a loss of up to ?23,000. Many viewers took to their

calculators and then to social media to point out that those sums

were wrong as the BBC later acknowledged, though not on-air,

those earning ?123,000 under Labour's

plans would actually pay an extra ?2150 in

income tax, not 23,000. You'd have to earn ?500,000 to be

taxed that much more. Philip Jones told us,

"I will assume this was a genuine error, albeit a gross one,

and not a deliberate ploy to mislead potential voters into

mistrusting the Labour Party." But Louis Mendee spoke for many

when he posted, "This It is wildly unacceptable for

the BBC to be reporting falsehoods Later that night there

were several examples of the BBC's efforts to get out

and about during this election campaign and hear the views

of so-called Here's Deputy Political

Editor John Pienaar soliciting opinions

in a gym in Bradford. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn,

what do you think? Well, I quite like his

policies but I don't I agree, yeah, I don't think

they're doable myself. Kenny Watt was watching

that and thought the views of the gentlemen

exercising there, and more generally vox pops like that, did not add

greatly to the sum of human He's got a journalist coming

in when he's in the middle of his work-out asking him questions

when he's probably just thinking, "Oh my god, when's this hill

climb going to end?" And that's the problem

with vox pops, because basically you're not getting a true

representation of the population. This is how we get into the position

of sound bites winning elections. Stick to having trained journalists

telling us about the facts in a story rather than the opinions

of the ill informed. Well, let's discuss some of those

issues with the BBC's editor of political news Katy Searle who's

in our Westminster studio. Katy, let's start with

the allegations of bias, mostly claiming that the BBC has

an anti-Corbyn bias You've seen the examples that

viewers have raised. We have very strong and clear

guidelines that we follow, editorial guidelines, and they're

in line with the Ofcom code of conduct as well,

which show that we have strict rules period and to reflect all parties'

positions and policies. And that's something

we do absolutely and we Labour supporters are

complaining that too much coverage is

attacking the party. Tory supporters are saying Labour

get more air time, so how is BBC News approaching that whole

issue of balance and fairness? What we have to do

is take our editorial judgments and that's always

going to have to guide our coverage. And that's why programme

editors across the BBC and correspondents on air,

as well as Laura, the political editor, have long and careful

discussions about what stories we're going to cover, what are the values

in the news terms of those stories, and then how do they fit in line

with the guidelines that I've just What's noticeable already in this

election campaign is that perceived errors, and indeed

some factual ones, amplified on social media when people

try to build a campaign around them saying, look,

the BBC's being unfair. How should the BBC deal

with those examples? Look, we're all human,

we do make mistakes. Look, you know, we're

working to tight deadlines with lots of information

coming in all the time In those circumstances you just have

to look and see where you can correct it as

quickly as possible. And just on the detail I think

it's worth adding that sometimes graphics actually

can not be as clear. You are trying to sum up quite

a lot of detail in one simple picture of

numbers and figures. What we need to do is be very clear

that our scripting goes around that and tells

the full story. We have seen a particularly vocal

campaign online against Laura Kuenssberg alleging

anti-Labour bias. Laura Kuenssberg is a first-class

political editor who has worked incredibly hard

to get her job right. Laura does the daily analysis

of all of the political parties and, of course, no personal views

are reflected in any sense on any party, and that's true not just

of Laura but across the BBC. So Laura's doing her job and she's

doing that brilliantly. More broadly, though,

viewers do complain that there's too much personal commentary

from political correspondents who are kind of filling airtime

and it is not fact-based, Wouldn't the BBC be better,

as at least one of our viewers has suggested, just sticking

to factual reporting? Well, I think analysis is really

important actually, as part Certainly in elections,

and as we saw in the referendum last year,

parties and campaigns have their own positions to push

and they will do that And really, an important part

of our job is to try and analyse and say to the viewer,

well, on balance this That's why we have very experienced

people from Laura down across the BBC working on that

and trying to give the audience something that means something

and not just slogans and numbers. We have to talk about vox pops

because they come up every election and the charge is two things,

one is if they are too gimmicky you're not going to get much

of an answer if people But also that they're not informed

and are representative, and shouldn't the BBC be more

careful about using them? -- But also that they're not

informed and are not representative, and shouldn't the BBC be more

careful about using them? Yeah, vox pops are tricky actually

because I have a bit of However, if we're doing

a lot of politicians, and we are at the moment, and it's

a very formalised way of presenting their views and opinions, I think

vox pops gives us a bit of colour. It also does the most important

thing which is to reflect the And in this campaign which goes

on for several weeks we want to hear from our audience

as well and try and, if you like, Vox pop is an unscientific

way of doing that but it's the best way that we

can do when we're dealing with tight Away from the cut and thrust

of the election but not entirely unconnected to it was

the coverage of last Friday's cyber-attack which use ransomware

to lock files in 150 different countries demanding

payment to allow access. Some viewers were unhappy

with the way the story was reported and one of them Alex McGill recorded

this video to explain why. Clearly the real story

was that businesses large and small across the world had

been attacked and damaged done. But from the initial reports one

could easily have concluded that This unbalanced reporting

is particularly bad in the middle of an election campaign and can only

heighten the perception of editorial Finally, the Moors murderer

Ian Brady died on Tuesday. The 79-year-old had

tortured and killed five children in the 1960s with his

partner Myra Hindley and buried them Some viewers objected

to the prominence given to the news. Why was it necessary for it to be

in the number one spot, to have so much time given to this story,

for the BBC to then try and find people that they could

interview on this story? By doing this all they were actually

doing was causing yet more distress to the families

of these children, who have to live with

this day in day out This could have been dealt

with with a simple one-liner Thank you for all your

comments this week. If you want to share your opinions

on BBC News and current affairs, you can call us on 0370 010 6676, or

e-mail [email protected] You can find us on Twitter

@NewswatchBBC, and do The address for that is

bbc.co.uk/newswatch. We'll be back to hear

your thoughts about BBC