Why does the Corporation operate as though the firm doesn’t exist?

Each month the BBC’s political research editor, David Cowling, “reviews the political opinion polls published in the UK”. It’s a moderately interesting piece but there’s one oddity – polls from the internet firm YouGov which put the traditional pollsters to shame in the London Mayoral race never seem to get a mention.

I’ve scanned through each of his pieces for every month this year and I cannot find any material from the Daily Telegraph’s and Sunday Times’s main pollster ever getting covered. Even the “Poll Watch Review” of the whole of 2007 did not feature the output of the firm at all.

This might have been an oversight but doing further searches on the BBC website it seems the corporation is happy to give big coverage to other pollsters even those, like the unregistered pollster that did the Glasgow East poll at the weekend.

The London mayoral race was extraordinary. There is a rule that BBC editors are not supposed to make any opinion poll the lead item of a story – yet that did not stop them giving big prominence to the one ICM poll of the mayoral campaign which had Boris and Ken neck and neck.

Maybe I am missing something and am not using the BBC’s news search engine properly but when I typed the word “YouGov” into the box it could come up with only five references to the firm over a period of six years. (see the search page reproduced above)

From my searching it does appear as though there is some sort of ban in place. Why? Doesn’t the apparent blanking of the out of the firm mean that they are not covering politics properly?

Mike Smithson