Pressing the BBC to commission Interruption Rate Studies

< Deborah Turness

I have written several times to Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, since February, and she has been ghosting me, so I hope that friends will join me in writing to her, and will keep pressurising her in various ways until she sets up Interruption Rate studies.

The pro-Tory bias of Laura Kunessburg, Fiona Bruce and others is legendary. We have been grumbling about it for ages. Enough grumbling already; let us do something about it.

I hope that friends will copy what I have written to her, add and amend as you wish, and consider other actions.

I am considering a pledge to stop paying the licence fee until the BBC complies, but this is a big step, and the Tories would actually covertly love it, because they would actually like it if the BBC crashed, so that they could privatise it and sell it off to one of their mates.

Anyway, please, at least, write to Ms Turness to try to get her to engage.

_____________________________________

Deborah Turness
CEO News and Current Affairs
BBC Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London W1A 0AA


*Testing BBC Impartiality by Measuring Interruption Rates*

Please respond to the points made below.

1. You must agree that democracy is absolutely vital to the health of Britain as a nation, and that the BBC has a hugely important role to play in the democratic process.
2. Voting can only be meaningful if the electorate has access to clear and impartial information.
3. It is of paramount importance that the BBC should have no political bias and should present news and commentary in an even-handed way as far as is possible, as is written in the BBC Charter. It is your responsibility as CEO of BBC News and Current affairs to ensure that this is the case.
4. You will be aware that the BBC is criticised from both ends of the political spectrum, and this fact is commonly used to maintain that it is therefore steering a correct and moderate course.
5. This argument is too simplistic. It sets aside questions of the content and quality of com-plaints made against the Corporation, but even if a study were to be made of these factors, the result of that study would still be a matter of judgment and opinion.
6. What is needed therefore is an objective measure of the presence or absence of political bias in BBC political and current affairs programmes.
7. One way of obtaining such an objective measurement would be for the Corporation to com-mission an arms-length retrospective study by a respected academic group of the Interrup-tion Rate (IR) on BBC political news and current affairs programmes.
8. The term Interruption Rate is self explanatory: it is the rate at which an interviewer interrupts his or her interviewee.
9. Interruptions can be assigned a grade, from cutting in on the last few words of the interviewees’ sentence (which in itself interferes with the audience's assimilation of a point) to cutting across the middle of an important point, and to non-verbal vocalisations and even body language. [contd.
10. The result of this study would be to demonstrate in a robust way how interviewers treat in-terviewees of different types; not just speakers for different political parties, but also of gender and race.
11. Hopefully the results will demonstrate that the BBC has in fact been living up to its aims and claims of impartiality, but this is not a foregone conclusion.
12. Interviewers who show clear bias in their IR analyses should be retrained, and all interview-ers should be told that their IR will be assessed on an ongoing basis.
13. If it is argued that the BBC cannot afford the financial cost of such studies, the answer is that Britain as a nation cannot afford the threat to its democracy posed by politically partial broadcast media.

I look forward to discussing with you the details of how the BBC will implement the Interruption Rate studies when the campaign has generated sufficient pressure on yourself and on the Corpora-tion.


With best wishes for the recovery of public confidence in the BBC

Yours sincerely 
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