20160923_FB

Source: BBC Radio 4: Feedback

URL: N/A

Date: 23/09/2016

Event: BBC should be "better and braver" at providing guidance

Credit: BBC Radio 4: Feedback, also many thanks to Craig of http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.co.uk/

People:

Roger Bolton: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Feedback
John Humphrys: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
Paul Johnson: Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Different voices, both male and female: ... increased by almost a quarter... £130 million... by nearly a fifth... doubling in five years... £350 million... 71% of additional work carried out by...

Roger Bolton: Now, lies, damned lies and statistics - an expression coined by the Victorian novelist and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who knew all about all three.

Female voice: The focus of the EU Referendum campaign has shifted to immigration, after new figures showed that net migration to the UK had risen to the second highest level since records began in 1970...

Female voice: A major report has concluded eating even small amounts of processed meat every day can increase the risk of bowel cancer by nearly a fifth...

John Humphrys: I'm looking here at figures from the National Audit Office which show that 71% of additional work carried out by consultants who've opted out of weekend work is at locally negotiated rates sometimes costing four times more, at £200 an hour.

Male voice: That's an extreme example...

Roger Bolton: So, how can you tell which so-called facts are true and reliable? Well, it's the job of BBC journalists to help sort out the wheat from the chaff. How good are they - we - at it? The BBC Trust recently conducted a review of the impartiality of the BBC's reporting of statistics in its news and current affairs output. I spoke to one of the authors of the report, Paul Johnson from the Institute of [sic] Fiscal Studies.

Paul Johnson: We were looking particularly, of course, at the use of statistics, and in general the sense from most of the people we spoke to was the BBC does a pretty good job of reporting these things in an effective and impartial way, but there were two or three areas of particular concern. Some were about how the numbers are reported, giving them context - for example, what does a 1% increase mean, or what does an increase of 100,000 mean, is that a big number or a small number?

Roger Bolton: Well, of course politicians are, by their very nature, selective - they're going to give you the best case. So, do you think that BBC journalists are "tooled up", if you like, to put those statistics into context and be able to provide other statistics that perhaps might give a more complicated or perhaps fairer picture?

Paul Johnson: It's certainly important, when talking to politicians who are providing you with a particular set of numbers, for those who are interviewing them to understand what they mean and to be able to give the viewer or the listener some real understanding of whether the numbers that are being presented make sense, what the context for them is, whether they're disputed - I mean, all of these things really matter, and actually that requires quite a lot of expertise on the part not just of the specialist staff at the BBC but also of those who are doing the interviewing.

Roger Bolton: Does that mean that you don't think the BBC's tooled up for the job - they don't have sufficient expertise and it's not sufficiently widely available? So that if you have a younger journalist, a younger reporter, conducting an interview, they don't have the resources they need.

Paul Johnson: There's certainly no doubt that there is variable expertise and variable experience of the use of statistics across the BBC - some of the specialist editors particularly clearly have a very good grasp of what they're working with, day in, day out, but inevitably, when you've got people covering a whole range of things, you do see instances where they're not challenging figures or they're challenging figures in a less appropriate way than you could have done if you'd really been, as you say, tooled up.

Roger Bolton: But it's not just being tooled up, is it - you say the review supports the recommendation for the BBC to be "better and braver" in this area. Let's focus on the word "braver". There's often been the allegations all the BBC wants to do in general elections or referenda is to get through to the other side unscathed. What did you mean by "braver"?

Paul Johnson: There are lots of circumstances where different sides of an argument are putting different figures into the pot, and it's no good just reporting both those figures or both those claims without giving the audience a real sense of what the balance is, there. So when we were doing the work which was before the Referendum campaign, I think all of us had in our mind, for example, the doctors - the junior doctors' dispute, where continually one was told what the government says and what the doctors say. Only very occasionally was one given any guidance as to what the balance of that argument was, and people we spoke to came up with all sorts of examples where they - and listeners and viewers - were desperately frustrated about the fact that you'd hear one claim and you'd hear another claim and you were left none the wiser, essentially, as to which of them had the more truth.

Roger Bolton: But you'd go further than that - you said "braver", so it's not a question about being informed, to explain things, it's being braver. Some people would say that would mean you're going to editorialise - "Go on, tell us what you really think", that sort of thing - and that's not the BBC's job.

Paul Johnson: Well, you can be brave by saying that something is highly likely to be true, as opposed to not. So, if you look back at previous reviews the Trust have done, for example of the reporting of climate change, there was a period during which what was reported was, you know, "On the one hand, some scientists think this", and "On the other hand, some scientists think that", and the braver thing to have done would have been to say "Well, the vast majority of scientists think this thing, and there are these very tiny minority, on the other hand, who think the other, and therefore we're going to say, you know, on the huge balance of probability, one thing is true and not the other". And actually, there are quite a lot of things where that is terribly important, because simply telling people "Somebody says this and somebody else says that" doesn't help inform them.

Roger Bolton: Well, that's as some people have said, is the idea of "false balance". But I mean it's all right talking about that in theory, and maybe it's all right talking about science, but when in interviews you have politics such as the Referendum campaign and one side, for example, says, talks about the £350 million that we're going to get back, then, you know, the BBC journalists are thinking "Now what do I do, here?" Do you think they treated that issue properly?

Paul Johnson: Not in all circumstances, so - I mean, let's be blunt, the £350 million number was simply untrue. I mean, it's just straightforwardly untrue.

Roger Bolton: And you would have liked the BBC journalist to say "it's untrue".

Paul Johnson: And - and there are some -

Roger Bolton: Would you have liked the BBC journalist to say "it's untrue"?

Paul Johnson: There are some places where they come very close to doing that, particularly in the sort of fact-check part of the website, where it comes very close to doing that. More often, it refers to the number as being disputed or being uncertain, or what have you, and I think it should have been clear that this is not a number that is correct.

Roger Bolton: So, you want the BBC to be braver. You think it's doing reasonably well, but you want it to be further tooled up. So in practical terms, what do you think should happen and - what happens if it doesn't happen? Are you going to come back, as a review team, and say "Well look, we issued this report, we made some suggestions, you've done - or you haven't done - it"?

Paul Johnson: Well, of course the review was itself commissioned by the BBC Trust, so the review was asked for by them, and were they to come back, or the successor body to come back, in a few years' time and ask us to review where things had got to, we'd no doubt love to do that and look at progress against the recommendations that we made.

Roger Bolton: My thanks to Paul Johnson from the Institute of [sic] Fiscal Studies, whose statistics are always reliable.