The race for arguably the most influential media role in British politics is hotting up as we get towards the April deadline. External interviews were held last week and now the internal interviews are starting for the position of the BBC’s political editor. Despite the bookies having him as a front runner, Guido understands Amol Rajan has not applied for the position…
Surprisingly, given he has no broadcasting experience, the FT’s Sebastian Payne (50/1) fancies himself for the role and does not deny having applied. He also has, Jess Brammar style, deleted hundreds of tweets this weekend – as did Pippa Crerar last week. Is this the “tell” that reveals you have applied to Portland Place, or are they pulling Twitter’s leg?
Guido thinks if the Mirror’s Pippa Crerar were to become the BBC’s political editor, Nadine Dorries would present a government Bill to privatise the BBC the next day. It is noteable that Sky’s Sam Coates is refusing to be drawn on the issue and when Guido asked him point blank if he’d applied, he would only say “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stay out of it all.” Which is not exactly a Heseltinian denial.
Canvassing Coates’ Lobby rivals, most think he is a serious and strong possibility for the role, though they think the fact he is a middle class, white heterosexual male might be held against him. Paul Brand doesn’t have all those drawbacks, though given he has been built up by ITV executives as their new star, it would be ungrateful for him to switch channels off the back of his partygate scoops. Newsnight’s Nick Watt shouldn’t be forgotten, though like Sam Coates he too unfortunately is a middle class, white heterosexual male. Alex Forsyth, a BBC internal candidate, remains the favourite at the bookies…
From The Times on Saturday:
“Rajan was sent to write a “colour piece” (a feature setting the scene) about Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal, and not knowing what that meant, filed a piece with references to a “magenta sky, lilac walls and terracotta brickwork””
Amol Rajan, the BBC’s media editor, absolutely spanked the BBC in this report for BBC News.
No one has been more critical of the BBC this week than the BBC…
Amol Rajan reminds us…
“… Twitter is the industrialisation of confirmation bias. Its super-rich engineers always aimed to make us addicts, by incentivising/rewarding outrage. For them, disgusting abuse, conspiracies, conflict and fury are lucrative wins.”
Yesterday Peter Oborne continued his onslaught on the Lobby’s tendency to relay anonymous “Downing Street sources” and how it shapes their commentary. His campaign is working as hacks are noticeably straining to avoid using the “Downing Street source” phrase in their reports. Oborne went on Radio 2 with Amol Rajan yesterday. It got quite tasty, in the excerpt above he starts laying into Amol for his “client journalism” during his tenure as editor of the Independent. Enjoy…
You can listen to the whole interview here (starts 1 hour 10 minutes in). At one point he calls one leading member of Her Majesty’s Lobby “sewage”…
Last night’s News at Ten had a report about the “under the radar influence” of the Skwawkbox website which apparently produces viral stories on social media which get shared by millions. Guido can understand why Buzzfeed are interested in this area, their whole business model is based on going viral on social media platforms. Though their politics team don’t seem to have got the knack of it…
So let’s look at how Facebook’s insights measures who among our peers got the most engagement last week. Turns out post the Manchester attack the political website which is most focused on the jihadi threat did particularly well in terms of engagement – Breitbart.
As you would expect during an election campaign Guido’s doing well, our site traffic is healthy – over quarter of a million hits yesterday. PA does quite well on Facebook, with the Speccie and the Staggers not far behind. You then go a long way down the table to find out how well Skwawkbox does engagement on Facebook. What about Twitter? Skwawkbox has some 11,000 followers to Guido’s 229,000. Seems oddly low if they are really the “under the radar” social media powerhouse that Amol Rajan reported…
UPDATE: We missed off The Canary Says and it is the most super viral by far…
That might be on the back of their now deleted fake news story about The Sun…
