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Tuesday 21 October 2008

Now does the BBC tactic make sense?

I have blogged before how the BBC have moved away from denigrating David Cameron and the Conservative party to denying them the oxygen of publicity. Mike Smithson on his Political Betting website postulates:
"As site regulars will know I have theory, based on nearly three years of records, that the single most important driver in the CON-LAB poll numbers is the amount of media coverage that Cameron gets. If he’s been making the headlines or leading the bulletins then his party’s ratings go up - if he’s been blanked out of the news agenda then there will be a decline.

This is about the quantity of coverage not the quality.

So if I am right a big factor behind the recent moves back to Labour has been that the economic crisis has been so overwhelming that the Tory leader has found it hard getting a look in. He even missed his weekly opportunity last Wednesday when at the last minute Brown decided to go AWOL from PMQs - a move that I feel we have not heard the last of."

1 comment:

John M Ward said...

One of the long-standing techniques used by the BBC is to allow a Conservative response (to be quoted by a newsreaders) of one word only, thus satisfying their legal/charter obligation of including a "response" but at the minimum possible.

We've all heard in BBC news items the bit at the end that includes this. Well, that's why.