Just been reading Anthony King’s report on the BBC network news coverage of the four UK nations for the BBC Trust. It’s a very well written, engaging and sometimes rather amusing document. In the main it doesn’t stick the knife in and there is much about the BBC to be praised, but here are some highlights for you to enjoy where that’s not the case. Firstly:

[In the main the BBC is unbiased] … However, there was one exception. Others drew it to our attention – an article in the Scottish edition of the Daily Telegraph was headlined ‘Fibs about Scotland on the BBC’ –and we could observe it for ourselves. It concerns the question of whether or not a group of people collectively called ‘the English’ – and, in particular, people called ‘English taxpayers’ – do, or do not, ‘subsidise’ a group of people collectively called ‘the Scots’. We were not in a position to monitor the BBC network’s entire output on this issue, but some of the coverage could give viewers and listeners the impression that there is a known and settled answer to this question and that the known and settled answer is that the English do, indeed, subsidise the Scots.

There is a very real and strange assumption that there is a subsidy as the BBC has asserted in various media several times. Perhaps no small part of the reason for the arguments to fail to advance towards anything resembling a resolution is down not just to Treasury intransigance but also a misinformed electorate, and possibly also politicians. Just remember, that’s the Daily Telegraph (scots edition admittedly) pointing out to the BBC how to be fair and accurate in reporting on Scotland. Questions of BBC bias are not as simple as Tory or Labour anymore, as my MP would do well to learn (p.s. Greg as you ask more written questions than the average MP, perhaps best not to lay into a journalist for asking questions themselves).

A second gem:

The events in Wales were important. They were obviously important for the people of Wales; the Welsh National Assembly has a wide range of devolved powers and controls a budget of £14 billion … However, the BBC’s UK-wide network, as distinct from BBC Wales, had little to say about any of these developments … Network news did, however, take considerable interest in another story emanating from Wales during the same May-July period. It concerned Shambo, a six-year-old Friesian bull.

It’s noted elsewhere that many in the BBC audience believe that often their local area was more likely to be covered as a quirky local interest story than anything of genuine note.

My favourite:

To be fair, there are millions of people in the UK, most of them in England, who have also failed to grasp, or even to notice, the scale of the changes that have taken place. To judge by what they say on television and radio, some of them sit on the green benches at Westminster, including the front benches.

Indeed, King notes that Ministers at Westminster are deliberately failing to append (of England (& Wales) (& Northern Ireland) to their job titles. He reckons journalists should do their best to make such things clear, though he also notes that our devolved system could hardly be more complicated and he reckons only a “select few” understand the Barnett funding formula, for example.

And a final shocker:

In our travels, we noticed, for example, that not all of the newsrooms we visited had maps of the UK on their walls.

My workplace is littered with UK Maps, indeed it seems you can’t be a director without having one somewhere. Personally I sit typing this with a large map of Scotland behind me, but I’m just a tad biased, and I have some London maps as well.

All in all, a great review, and now we must hope that good things come from it.

If you’ve been following the (ahem) coverage of the recent controversy about The Scottish Parliament investing in Scotland and trying to make it a better place you may be under the misapprehension that Scotland is some pampered area of the UK in receipt of money far in excess of that it brings in.

Ian MacWhirter, as ever calls it almost exactly right in his analysis of the performance of the SNP government, five months on.

The reckoning will come, of course, over next month’s budget. That’s when the opposition hope the SNP will be brought down to earth with a bump, now Gordon has pulled the financial rug out, and Scotland will return to the politics of disillusion and decline. How they’ll laugh as Salmond is forced to eat his manifesto, clause by clause. Yah-hah – see, they’re just as useless as us! Let’s wait and see. I suspect the voters will watch how Salmond copes with the financial situation before withdrawing support.

He also has a nice bit in The Guardian talking about The Herald’s investigation into the alleged subsidising of Scotland.

Of course, Scots could go it alone within Europe tomorrow and thrive, but they don’t because of a sentimental and increasingly anachronistic sense of filial obligation to England. They don’t want to break things up, risk bad feeling, let emotions get out of hand. Like Robert Tressell’s ragged trousered philanthropists, they feed London their wealth and skills; keep quiet about the oil, put up with people like Kelvin Mackenzie and Simon Jenkins because, well, they think its the right thing to do.

He’s not normally an SNP apologist or anything of the sort, indeed most of the time by far the majority of Scots journalists have had much to argue with the SNP as they’ve come from the innate Labour majority. However, much like the ordinary folk they’re starting to think a bit more independently and even if they’ll only vote for the SNP and not for independence it is enough of a shift to change the whole make up of the UK in the longer term. Now if only someone down here in London would start asking for my vote to push Federalism and Proportional Representation into both houses at Westminster. Until then I’m a bit lost on why I vote at all down here, the politics in Scotland at least seem alive.

OK, I admit that I’m a pedantic fellow and a bit sick of coverage of Scottish politics in the “national media” in general, but I think the BBC surpassed themselves in picking their news agenda for tonight’s 10 o’clock news.

Tonight at 7PM on BBC Scotland, a BBC investigation found that the election which got the SNP into (sort of) power which featured an “utter total guddle” (as Brian Taylor had it) was even more of a shambles than previously thought. There was an assumption, which had as yet been unchallenged that the somewhat ludicrous delays caused in counting votes were to an extent caused by the requirement to manually check spoiled papers in contested seats. However, it appears that tens of thousands of the 140k+ votes which were counted only as spoiled had been seen only by the counting machines. Pretty troubling given the performance of the counting machines overall.

So, having seen that I’d missed this I figured I’d watch the 10 o’clock news and see if they bothered to cover it, given the pretty good national coverage given to the postal voting scandal from earlier elections got covered rather well. I was rather surprised to find they had a live OB to the dark surrounds of Scotland’s Parliament, and looked forward to seeing how they covered it. But no, they were instead going live to talk to nobody and talk (if not whistle) in the dark about how the Scottish Executive is to be renamed the Scottish Government, whilst also prattling on a little about the discussions on further devolution and independence. Somehow they covered two very interesting topics without talking to anyone whilst clearly pointing out the change cost £100,000. Clearly, spending the money of the UK renaming a governing administration to a government is a waste of money. Going live to a presenter in the dark to do so, is however great value for money.

There’s a very good developing story going on in Scotland, which is worthy of a couple of good reports a week from a Nick Robinson like figure able to explain in detail whatever is going on really means. Intriguingly the (Rather good) white paper Scotland’s Conversation document issued by the Scottish Government (gives me joy to type that, I admit) suggests that two areas which are ready and waiting to be devolved further are broadcasting and the conduct of Scottish elections[1]. The BBC has firmly convinced me tonight that both of these are eminently sensible ideas. Now if only they could devolve the coverage of Scottish Politics to BBC Scotland, give them a few minutes in the national news and their fair, balanced and incisive coverage would be far less inflammatory and maybe even help save the union.

Incidentally, the post on Brian Taylor’s blog about renaming the Executive has almost entirely positive comments. And it was the Lib Dem’s idea anyway, though they quibble the cost.