Prof Stephen Cushion
Professor at Cardiff University. He is co-author of Reporting Elections: Rethinking the logic of Campaign Coverage (2018, Polity), and PI on an ESRC project about the rise of Alt-Media and PI on an AHRC project about Countering Disinformation.
Email: CushionSA@cardiff.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 7: News and journalism
73. Why the press still matters (Prof Steven Barnett)
74. When the Star aligned: how the press ‘voted’ (Prof Dominic Wring, Prof David Deacon)
75. Visual depictions of leaders and losers in the (still influential) print press (Prof Erik Bucy)
76. Towards more assertive impartiality? Fact-checking on BBC television news (Prof Stephen Cushion)
77. The outsize influence of the conservative press in election campaigns (Prof Dan Stevens, Prof Susan Banducci, Prof Ekaterina Kolpinskaya and Dr Laszlo Horvath)
78. GB News – not breaking any rules… (Prof Ivor Gaber)
79. Vogue’s stylish relationship to politics (Dr Chrysi Dagoula)
80. Tiptoeing around immigration has tangible consequences (Dr Maria Kyriakidou, Dr Iñaki Garcia-Blanco)
81. A Taxing Campaign (Prof David Deacon et al)
82. Not the Sun wot won it: what Murdoch’s half-hearted, last-minute endorsements mean for Labour (Dr John Jewell)
83. Is this the first podcast election? (Carl Hartley, Prof Stephen Coleman)
84. A numbers game (Prof Paul Bradshaw)
85. Election 2024 and the remarkable absence of media in a mediated spectacle (Prof Lee Edwards)
86. 2024: the great election turn-off (Prof Des Freedman)
Election campaigns have always involved political parties trading claims and counter-claims about which policies best serve voters. But, over recent years, a new era of ‘post-truth’ politics has shaped election campaigning, with parties increasingly making dubious, misleading or even false statements.
To help understand the many conflicting claims of political parties, many people continue to invest their trust in broadcast news above other media during election campaigns. Unlike most online sites and social media platforms, broadcast news is legally required to be duly impartial. But as politicians have become more underhand and deceptive with their electioneering, singling out the egregious claim of one party or campaign group and not another has proven uncomfortable for impartial broadcasters.
Our research at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, found the UK’s television news bulletins interpreted impartiality as balancing Remain and Leave perspectives during the 2016 EU referendum, rather than regularly assessing campaign claims on both sides of the political debate. During the 2019 UK and 2020 US election campaigns, our research also discovered that BBC broadcast news adopted a ‘he said, she said’ style of reporting. While this led to politically balanced reporting, it did not provide robust scrutiny of claims and counter-claims. Yet the BBC’s fact-checking service questioned and, when necessary, challenged the false and misleading claims of UK and US political leaders, as well as dubious statements during the EU referendum.
The BBC enhanced its fact-checking in 2023, beefing up its goals and resources, and re-naming the service Verify. Launching it, the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, claimed it would “be fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and – crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth…They will contribute to News Online, radio and TV, including the News Channel and our live and breaking streaming operation, both in the UK and internationally”.
In order to assess whether the BBC’s fact-checking service has become a more prominent part of BBC broadcast news, we monitored how Verify informed its flagship bulletin, The News at Ten, since the start of 2024. We examined over seven months of News at Ten coverage, including during the six-week general election campaign.
Between 1st January and 3rd July 2024*, Verify was referenced as fact-checking 26 stories. Of the issues covered, 17 of them related to international conflicts, such as events happening in Ukraine or Palestine, while the remaining nine were about UK domestic politics. Apart from one item about the UK government’s budget in March 2024, domestic politics was only fact-checked by Verify during the election campaign.
The findings demonstrate that the BBC’s flagship bulletin has not routinely used its new fact-checking service in 2024 and, when it did, Verify largely covered matters of international dispute, rather than regularly assessing the claims of politicians from UK parties. However, after a general election was called, the number of UK domestic political items fact-checked by Verify increased in June, with policy claims in areas such as migration, taxation and economy subject to close scrutiny.
The most prominent Verify fact-check that appeared on the BBC News at Ten involved a contentious Conservative claim that a future Labour government would cost households £2,000 more in tax. The day after the Prime Minster, Rishi Sunak, had repeatedly claimed Labour would increase taxation during a prime-time televised debate, the BBC Political Editor, Chris Mason, described the claims live on air as “misleading” and “dubious” – a departure from the typically cautious language adopted by broadcasters during the 2019 general election campaign. A BBC Verify reporter then broke down the Conservative Party’s alleged figures and identified where its political advisors had influenced the calculations of the civil service. This decisive approach to fact-checking specific party policies was displayed in other BBC News at Ten stories over the campaign.
Compared to our analysis of previous UK election campaigns, including the EU referendum, making explicit judgements about the veracity of party claims on a flagship evening bulletin represents a break from cautiously balancing competing political perspectives. It points towards the BBC adopting a more assertive approach to impartiality on television news during the 2024 general election campaign, reflecting the forthright and fact-driven way of debunking claims that BBC journalist, Ros Atkins, has championed over recent years.
But while the BBC ramped up its use of Verify on the BBC News at Ten, the fact-checking service still only appeared in six out of a possible 35 programmes during the campaign period. For the public service broadcaster to fully embrace the value of fact-checking and maintain an assertive approach to impartiality, BBC’s Verify service could become a more regular part of reporting during and after election campaigns.
* 6 February transcript was unavailable
