Saturday 4 November 2017

An opinion poll the BBC wants you to believe


The BBC Press Office has been eager to promote a poll which it commissioned from Ipsos Mori - and one of its findings in particular:


Of course that slide is the most dramatic-looking. Others, however, are less dramatic:


It's no surprise that the spin-friendly BBC preferred the top one.

That said, both are excellent news for the BBC. Over 7 out of 10 here say that they trust the BBC as a news source and well over half say that go to the BBC first for trustworthy news.

Can you believe it? After all our hard work and people still trust the BBC!

Well anyhow, I'm off for a long lie-down with a very large bottle of gin. For some reason, the words of Honest Abe are springing to mind: You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. It's a nice positive thought to cling on to. How true it is I'm not sure.

Meanwhile, just for the sake of it, here's another reaction to the BBC Press Office from an eminently fair-minded-sounding individual on Twitter:

3 comments:

  1. What springs to mind is why the BBC felt the need to publish the poll?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The 57% figure was cited in the Cardiff report you posted yesterday.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're right. That's weird. The BBC Press Office labelled this finding "new research" and the IPSOS Mori download is dated November 2017 but, yes, there's no question that Cardiff Uni had access to it before then. The answer (via Cardiff's report) is that it's not 'new research'. Rona Fairhead, last head of the BBC Trust, was talking about it in March - and there's no doubt its the same polling data.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/speeches/2017/oxford_media_convention

      The IPSOS Mori poll does say though that the poll was carried out in Jan to Feb this year, so it's getting on for a year old.

      How odd that they waited some nine months to publish it.

      Delete

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