When Theresa May lurched onto the stage yesterday to begin her closing speech at the Tories’ conference, the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg seemed a bit excited:
She proceeded to put out a series of tweets about the speech – and writer Thomas Pride noticed a certain contrast with the BBC’s reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s closing speech at Labour’s conference last week:
Not all of the tweets highlighted by Tom Pride were by Ms Kuenssberg, but both the tone and volume of her – and the BBC’s – Twitter output on the two leaders’ speeches were undeniably and markedly different, as the detailed graphic shows:
A search of Twitter for ‘Corbyn’ and ‘speech’ from the main BBC accounts shown above returns two tweets in October, but they’re both referring to mentions of Jeremy Corbyn in Tory speeches. Before that, apart from Ms Kuenssberg’s solitary tweet, you have to go back to August, well before conference season, for a hit:
Ms Kuenssberg has some ‘form’ in this regard, having been found by the BBC Trust to have misrepresented Corbyn’s position on ‘shoot to kill’ policies. The fake news about Corbyn’s views persisted for months and is still sometimes quoted by his opponents even now. So the question about her asymmetrical treatment of the two party leaders’ conference speeches is a legitimate one.
The SKWAWKBOX contacted the BBC for comment, but the Corporation declined to say anything on the record.
Laura Kuenssberg has also been contacted.
SKWAWKBOX comment:
Twenty-two tweets, some seeming to fawn over what was an embarrassing May performance, versus one flat notification in Corbyn’s case that his speech was about to start. And all this on a day when an independent left media outlet has been attacked by the ‘MSM’ for an article whose accuracy nobody appears to contest.
But the BBC’s bias is just a left-wing fiction.
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