Impartiality on Platforms: The Politics of BBC Journalists’ Twitter Networks

ABSTRACT

Research shows the prominence afforded to political actors in BBC journalism strongly reflects the balance of power in Westminster, with major political parties, and the ruling party in particular, tending to predominate. This article examines the extent to which these patterns of news access and exposure are also evident in BBC journalists’ following of and interactions with MPs on Twitter, using data from 90 BBC journalists’ Twitter accounts (extracted in February 2019). We find that MPs from centrist parties have the highest average number of BBC journalist followers, and are interacted with and mentioned more by BBC journalists than other MPs. MPs in parties exclusively representing constituencies outside of England are the least followed, mentioned or interacted with. Of the two main political parties, Conservative MPs have the highest average BBC following, and are mentioned more often. Current and former Cabinet members have a higher BBC following and more interactions and mentions than their Shadow Cabinet counterparts. Our findings confirm that elite patterns of news access and exposure have been reproduced on new platforms. Though lending support to claims that the BBC is orientated towards the political centre, they suggest more of an orientation towards the Right than the Left.

KEYWORDS:

• BBC
• bias
• impartiality
• MPs
• Twitter
• political journalism

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Dr Timothy Cribbin for providing us with Chorus 2, which was used for the data scraping. We would also like to thank seminar participants at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Journalism Studies for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Three sports journalists on the total list of 93 were excluded (Richard Conway, Dan Roan and Gordon Farquhar).

2 The date of extraction was 25 February 2019. Due to technical restrictions, the follow networks of six journalists were extracted directly from their accounts on 15 March 2019.

3 https://www.mpsonTwitter.co.uk/

4 These were Richard Bacon (Con), Jim Shannon (DUP), Keith Vaz (Labour), Mohammad Yasin (Labour) and Órfhlaith Begley (Sinn Féin). Information on these MPs’ number of Twitter followers was taken directly from their Twitter accounts at a later date (8 July 2019).

5 This is a tiny proportion of the overall number of tweets extracted (N = 245,199).