*sigh* Have people nothing better to do? I’m sure the Tories will be only too happy to deliver us from ever having to worry about BBC bias ever again, if you catch my drift…

You know, I feel you’d get a lot more traction with this if you complain about Nick Robinson on the grounds that he’s not very good.

They already have his replacement, glorious news matriarch Laura Kuenssberg ready to roll anyway. What are they waiting for?

Holy mother of Mary, I agree with Mr Coxall.

Agreed that he is biased – but he is probably the least biased of the lot!

if a journo like nick robinson is pro tory,tories see that as impartial reporting.

This is so hilarious.

I remember when Sunny had a JPEG on all his blogs saying ‘I trust the BBC’!!

Funny how back then there could be no question of left wing bias, but as soon as the political wind changes then of course there must be Tory bias!

Anyway Sunny you wanted the Tories in power, that’s why you endorsed the Liberal Democrats.

Would this be Nick “toenails” Robinson, so named for being so far up Gordon’s posterior that only his toenails protruded?

Funny how differently this is perceived on the other side of the fence. Robinson got his nickname ‘Toenails’ among right-of-centre lobby journos on the grounds that he seemed to them to be so far up Gordon’s arse that his toenails were all that was left visible to the viewers at home. I’d bet the BBC has an equal number of complaints on each side and has therefore concluded he’s doing a fine job.

Creator Peter Tennant lsists five examples of Robinson’s Tory bias during the election:

f) The clear pleasure on his face when the Tories returned to power.

a) So? Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were compared favourably to past PMs at various times in their premierships too. Besides, it’s not like he’s being compared to everyone’s favourite eugenics-loving PM Winston Churchill.

b) Erm… it is?

c) Aye, him and EVERY OTHER journalist in the land. This is a collective fault with our media, not Robinson in particular.

d) See point c)

e) See point c)

f) The man is a political journalist, stuff like this is what he lives for. He’d have had the same glee on his face if Nick Clegg had somehow become PM. Whether you like the Tories or not (I don’t), the fact remains this has all been very big news, and journalists LOVE big news.

Concentrate on Tom Bradbury, Adam Boulton and the horrendous Kay Burley – they’re far more worthy of people’s hate and really cannot deny their blatant pro-Tory bias.

(Incidentally, that’s SIX examples, not five. Nick Robinson wouldn’t make that mistake…)

He’s not biased, he’s just a fawning sycophant. He never, ever attacked Labour in power, but as soon as the Tories looked confident he was wetting himself to be near them.

Not to mention that he only got his BBC gig to shush the persistent whinge of tories convinced that Auntie’s biased against them.

The only complaint of any real substance here is that we know Nick Robinson is a Tory supporter. It seems to me that all the other grips stem from that background knowledge. Personally, I’ve never found his political allegiance overly apparent, either watching him on TV or reading his blog (although I’m sure others may be able to cite more damning instances than those on the charge sheet above). There are certainly far worse culprits. (And I would add Jeremy Paxman to the latter list. He has consistently rubbished any anti-war points of view on the very rare occasions that they have been aired on Newsnight, and been blatantly rude towards anyone expressing anti-war views. I think he has been far more guilty of shutting out debate than Robinson.)

I would kind of expect that anyone who gets a job as the BBC’s political editor would probably be interested enough to hold political views of some sort. Would you prefer listening to some clueless ‘a-political’ hack who reported on political leaders as though they were just another category of celebrities?

“Labour lost the election because of the evil Murdoch empire bias hggghhhhghghhgh”

Also, you don’t know much if you think this:

Former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and one-year National Chairman of the Young Conservatives

is unique at all in broadcast media. Jon Snow is a massive Labour supporter, but doesn’t show it at all. It’s a riff off the old “they went to public school” dumb line.

And FFS I’m sure Sunny or other main writers on LC were complaining about him being too deferential to the government (when Labour were in power).

The worst of all this is we have a choice about paying for Sky but we have no choice but to pay the TV licence, even if we don’t ever watch the BBC. It is a piss take to allow Nick Robinson this sort of leeway and it has to stop.

Considering they both get many more complaints from the Conservative side for allegedly being biased against them I guess they are probably doing their jobs!

Piss off lefties and righties in equal measure.

Alex, I think you rather miss the point. Personally, I wanted the Lib Dems to do a deal with Labour to form a minority coalition government. Whether that happened had a lot to do with momentum and perhaps the public mood. The BBC was very quick to declare the contest over after May 6. Certainly it did not seek to inform the public that it was quite normal and acceptable to take a week (or even a month in some countries) to form a solid coalition – instead, it fretted constantly about “dithering” while the politicians engaged in “horse-trading”, “wheeler-dealing” and “stitch-up”. I noted in the small hours of May 7 that David Dimbleby in particular seemed to have mislaid the words “negotiation” and “compromise”.

Robinson did not say that the public might regard a Lib-Lab government as “a coalition of losers”, he said that the public “would not accept a coalition of losers”, which prejudged the issue. Some of his colleagues insisted that such a government would have “no moral authority” – even as a very informative page on the BBC News website informing us about New Zealand’s post-1996 experience of PR (http://ow.ly/1IwdG) told us that the “Cabinet Manual” drawn up by its civil servants “stresses that [if no party gets a majority of seats] there should be a level playing field. That is to say, silver and bronze can band together to beat gold, and the party with the biggest number of seats does not get to go first in attempting to form a government.”

Robinson and co kept repeating the canard that a “progressive left” coalition would have to involve the nationalists and even the Ulster unionists – it took Sir David Steel to point out the obvious, that it was very difficult to imagine any circumstances in which the SNP or Plaid would try to bring down a Lib-Lab minority government.

Robinson kept referring to Brown as an “unelected” prime minister. The fact that the rest of the media did the same is irrelevant – the BBC has a public duty to inform, not to disinform, and the plain fact is that the British electorate does not choose the country’s prime minister (and half a dozen of our 20th-century PMs, including Churchill, had taken office “unelected”).

Meanwhile, every day as the Lib-Con negotiations (sorry, horse-trading) went on, we were assured that tomorrow the markets would take fright and the pound would go into freefall. The BBC never went out of its way to point out each time that its dire warnings had not been fulfilled.

All in all, there was an overwhelming sense that the BBC wanted, as much as the right-wing press, to bounce us all into a Tory government without further delay. Robinson and co certainly did not restrict themselves to observing and interpreting. They were spinning like mad.

Personally
I agree with Coxall, (aHHHHHHH)

Sunny you sound like those BBC biased right wing drones.

Sky, ITN and the BBC are covered by OFCOM.
Complain to that organisation.
Like the 400 who complained about Boulton

Sunny 90 % of the press journos and broadcasters are right wing bigotted shits. They have always been and always will be.
The profession attracts these numpties.

There are two types of above
Those who admit it and the second type, like the odious Nick Cohen, who will not.

Burley is horrendous, but as for Robinson… I’ve spent quite a few years listening to right-wingers lying through their teeth about the BBC being biased against them, so I’m wary of getting involved in this sort of thing, even if it might contain a grain of truth.

@ Pilcher 11

we know Nick Robinson is a Tory supporter.

No we don’t.

All we know is that he was 24 years ago (when he was in his early twenties).

By that standard Peter Hitchens is a Trotskyite.

Tom Bradbury looked as though he might explode with disappointment and anger when the Lib-Lab coalition briefly looked like a runner. I had to turn over to BBC, where I thought Robinson was much more measured and dispassionate.

e) Talking about a rainbow coalition as a ‘coalition of losers’;

Erm… unlike this website?

He’s not biased, he’s just a fawning sycophant.

Quoted for truth. He’s a brown-nosing suck-up with no identifiable ideology whatsoever. Presumably his organs of opinion were surgically removed, as I believe is standard practice in the BBC.