ON Monday, Reform UK held a press conference to say they will deport prisoners to El Salvador and open pop-up prisons in "very out of the way places" in the UK in a bid to address prison overcrowding.
It was the sort of emergency policy announcement from Nigel Farage’s party you’d expect the BBC to broadcast live. After all, the corporation has been blasted in the past for giving “lengthy” coverage to a Reform UK press conferences on immigration.
But at 11am on Monday there was no sign of it on the BBC News channel.
Could it really be that the broadcaster has taken on board the words of Green Party leader Zack Polanski at the weekend?
He criticised “absurd” editorial decisions from the BBC while appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe, suggesting that the broadcaster gives Farage ’s Reform much more coverage than his party.
In an interview with Iain Dale, he said: “On Wednesday I called a press conference, an emergency press conference.
“It was a bit of a tactic that I've seen Nigel Farage do over and over again, where he says, ‘I'm having a press conference, I'm not telling you what it's about’.
“The media get very excited when Farage does it. An hour before, the BBC will spend an hour having lots of talking heads speculating what it might be. They'll then stream it in full, including the Q&A, and then hours afterwards, probably including Newsnight, they'll be talking about what happened.
“The BBC this week, when I held a press conference – including a firefighter, a medic, someone who used to serve in the army, and Chris Packham, so I'd say it was definitely newsworthy and interesting – the BBC completely ignored it. They didn't stream a single thing about it.”
In this case, at least, the BBC seems to have listened.
Whether the broadcaster will continue in this vein or not remains to be seen, but many have been crying out for someone to put the BBC on the spot for failing to show key political events.
In September 2023 it was asked to explain why it had not reported on a large-scale anti-Brexit rally in the centre of London.
The year before in May, former head of news at the BBC Stewart Easton criticised the broadcaster’s coverage of Nicola Sturgeon’s US trip saying reports had been "noticeably and wrongly absent". Previous visits to America undertaken by Sturgeon had been covered online by the corporation, including in 2015, 2017, and 2019.
In May 2021, the BBC was accused of “double standards” after it cut away from Sturgeon’s Covid press conference despite having shown Boris Johnson’s in full not 24 hours before.
In July 2020, Newsnight failed to cover the resignation of Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw, but did cover rising crime in the US city of Chicago.
The list goes on, but finally there seems to be a small sign it may be reflecting on its approach to Reform.
Of course, Media Watch will be keeping a beady eye open though to check this isn’t just a one-time move to appease Polanski.
