Bias and bias
Sir: It takes three columns of pretentious and almost impenetrable tosh (The media, 6 October) for Mr Paul Johnson to bore us once again with his hobby horse about television balance. Here are a few things that he and the whingeing Weeford and the terrible Tebbit ought to know.
1. Complaints of bias from the general public are rare (boredom and bad language come top of the list).
2. All polls in recent years tend to show that, when asked, people think that televi- sion is more biased towards the Conserva-
tives than Labour. When a Labour govern- ment is in power, they think it even more.
3. There is bound to be more criticism of the Government than the opposition be- cause governments do things that affect our lives while the opposition can only talk about them.
4. The longer a government is in power, the more bitterly it resents any criticism of itself. The former Conservative MP Lord Hill, who was Chairman both of the BBC and the IBA once said that Conservatives think that a programme biased in their favour is impartial and one that is truly impartial is biased against them.
5. Even if there is concerted bias, which I dispute, so what? Do Mr Johnson and his friends know of anyone who has been influenced by something seen or heard on television against their better judgment? Have they ever been? My own experience, after more than 30 years in the business, is that people's readiness to reject a given view is no less strong than their readiness to accept it; and that while an item on television sometimes makes an initial im- pact, its effect, because of the essential ephemerality of the medium, is fleeting. The printed word, even the tosh Mr Johnson writes, is apt to stay longer in the mind.
Ludovic Kennedy
Ashdown, Avebury, Wiltshire
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