"Keep the red flag flying, Auntie"

So Ed Miliband is concerned that the BBC isn't giving Labour the coverage it merits in its news programmes.   William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith doubtless felt similarly ignored as Tory leaders in the late 1990s and early 2000s.   

Does any of it equate to bias?   Hardly - just a simple, if harsh, political reality.    Leader of The Opposition is a tough gig when your party has been kicked out after more than a decade in power.   It is even tougher when the replacement government is a once-in-a-generation (so far) coalition, making decisions which are having such a direct impact on everyday life.   Competition for minutage in news bulletins is fierce.

Broadcast media will always gravitate towards the doers, rather than the would-doers.   That's hardly news.   And neither - sadly for Ed - is every policy announcement that comes out of Labour HQ on a wet Wednesday afternoon.   However, does the Opposition really have it all that bad when it comes to broadcast coverage?   Just this weekend, Miliband's declaration that Labour has a "very clear plan" duly appeared on bulletins on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.   In fact, all of the mainstream political parties know full well that making any kind of statement on a Saturday or Sunday virtually guarantees a packaged or live slot on the weekend television news.

The welcome impartiality of broadcast news in the UK means that even when Government policy is being reported, comment is usually afforded to the Opposition.   Then there are the set-piece party conferences, which command high profile coverage on television and radio for much of September, and the carefully-calculated quotas which apply to broadcast news to ensure absolute fairness of exposure in the run up to a General Election.   With specialist, well-staffed, political reporting teams across the BBC and commercial networks, the average citizen wants for little in terms of political broadcast coverage.  And neither - in truth - do the political parties themselves.

All of which makes it somewhat curious that Labour should turn its ire on the BBC, in particular.   With the breadth and depth of its political coverage (both within mainstream news bulletins and specialist programming), Labour must surely get more exposure via the Corporation than any other broadcaster.   Moreover, the party's recent themes of "too far, too fast" and "the squeezed middle" do seem to have found sufficient exposure somewhere to become part of current political discourse. 

Perhaps Labour's complaint against the BBC is born out of frustration at the coverage the party is receiving in the print press.   Whatever the reason, it gives the distinct impression that senior Labour figures believe the BBC is duty bound to follow, slavishly, every esoteric twist of its years out of power.   It isn't.   The path to greater exposure for any Opposition lies in having more to say that is deemed - by an impartial, public service broadcaster - to be newsworthy.   To that end, Labour knows exactly what it has to do.

To borrow (and conflate) a phrase from Private Eye - that's just how politics and journalism work.