I've just watched a piece by political editor Nick Robinson on the 6 o'clock BBC evening news about Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Conference, and one of Robinson's concluding sentences stuck out:
'Do you want five more years of him as PM?'
Does that strike you as particularly impartial? Surely a simple: 'Now the public must decide whether Brown will stay at the helm' would suffice.
The Robinson example is in fact extremely common when you make an effort to listen carefully to the phrasing of sentences or intonation in voices in news programmes or even the otherwise brilliant Newsnight.
The latter is perhaps a stronger example, as when Jeremy Paxman, to quote The Thick Of It, 'pulls that horse face of mock incredulity' the audience surely can't help but be swayed one way or the other about what they are witnessing.
This ties in with my last post about the media's power to sway opinion so easily. Watch out for any stories regarding the Labour party at the moment for example. Not because I am a paranoid Labour supporter you understand, but because in the current climate anything remotely Labour party related is treated by the media as if it is diseased.
Another side to this that may be interesting to note is that Robinson and omnipresent political commentator Andrew Neil have pasts that may have a bearing on their outlook. Robinson was national chairman of the Young Conservatives for a year, following a period during his university days where he was Chairman of the Oxford University Conservative Association, facts he chooses to omit from his blog biography on the BBC website.
Neil was editor of the Sunday Times newspaper for 11 years, and has in his career worked closely with Sky, The Spectator and The Daily Mail. A balanced political slate there? I'll let you be the judge.
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