When Davey met Davie over BBC bias

Ed Davey had a meeting with BBC director general Tim Davie over Liberal Democrat complaints that the corporations’s political coverage claim is weighted in Reform UK's favour at our expense

PoliticsHome says the meeting took place at Westminster in June:

“Previously, the BBC had always said: ‘We will cover you more if you get more MPs, but right now, you’ve only got 11,” a Liberal Democrat source told PoliticsHome.

“Now it really feels like they've moved the goal posts and they're just giving Reform massive amounts of coverage based on their poll rating, whereas we were always told it’s number of MPs, not poll rating.”

The insider – how many insiders does this party have? – also pointed to the number of times BBC News alerts feature Nigel Farage.

This reminds me of the BBC News analysis of the local election results in Shropshire this May. 

The Lib Dems gained 29 seats to take control of the authority, but that report mentioned Reform twice before it mentioned us and was topped with a photograph of Nigel Farage and some of his supporters.

I flagged this up on Bluesky, and the photograph was later changed to one that featured the Liberal Democrats. This may not have been due to my influence at Broadcasting House - it may be that someone noticed it was sheer bad journalism.

But I do think we should complain about this and often. The tone shouldn't be a whingy “It's not fair!” so much as “I love the BBC, but they need to raise their game” or “They've only gone and done it again!”