Thread by @ExcelPope

Come on, then. As it's 8am Sunday, and you're all still in bed, let's do this.

If you can summon up the strength to click through to the article it opens with these two lines.

We'll come back to the 1st sentence in a bit, but the 2nd one is important.

This study is measuring bias by counting how often Tory- and Labour-supporting newspaper stories are reviewed on the BBC.

There is no analysis of the stories themselves, not even the topics covered. The base assumption is that reviewing a story in a right-leaning newspaper is endorsing the Tories.

This becomes problematic when you look into the study and see how the newspapers have been classified.

43% of sources are classified as Tory, 19% as Labour and 38% as neutral.

And that's including the Morning Star, with its tiny circulation as a Labour source.

Take out the MS (which has never been reviewed by the BBC) and papers they've classified as "Tory" outweigh "Labour" sources 3:1.

Does the study account for this, you ask?

Funny you should ask that, because if you click from the story into the details of the study, you find that the study is just an on-going thread from this guy…

Hmmmm

Now, of course, people can put aside their personal views when conducting a study, but the very basis of an independent study is that you set out to test a hypothesis, not that you start out deciding what you want to prove.

So, for example, adding #BBCBias hashtags = bad.

The study consists of nothing more than a numbers count. According to my O-level maths, with those sources you should get, assuming random selection, no stories from Labour sources on 32% of days.

And, in that one tweet, I've done more maths than this entire study.

Why, then, is this being pushed as a credible, independent study?

Back to the article…

Ah, right, it's not a story, it's just a soft-ball being thrown to the Corbynites for them to paste all over social media.

God, it's depressing.

Right, I'm done. Everyone back to bed.