In the news

The boat race was on ITV from 2006-2009

And back then it was all Burberry baseball caps and bottles of MD20/20 and WKD.

Nothing like the Hackett/Pimms/Champagne fest it is now.

/s

From the New Statesman in 2014
No, the media didn’t ignore your anti-austerity march – it just wasn’t that interesting

Although for balance, there's this on the Beeb just a month ago -
Austerity protest: Thousands rally in London against cuts

Which, bizarrely, people were criticising the Beeb for not covering
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peoples-assembly-protest-50000-demand-conservative-leader-david-cameron-resigns-1555219

April 16, 2016. i remember it not going unremarked upon during the event that there seemed to be shit all mention of it on the big british castle. when i got home i took a screengrab of their homepage.

What, this one?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36063743

I'd say a march of thousands was more newsworthy than "Kate and William pose on bench", personally. Now of course you might contest that point - but to me, and I suspect others, it is a conspicuous absence, and one that makes it impossible to trust the BBC to accurately reflect what is going on in the UK.

^^Yep, there was nothing about it at the time it was happening, or directly afterward.

You could see it live on Twitter, on the BBC - Wills and Kate.

Edit as you posted as I was posting

That story went out that afternoon. You're complaining that they didn't interrupt the TV scheduling with live footage from the protest? or that the journalist who wrote the web story didn't file their copy quickly enough?

Oh look, there's a story about a march of thousands on the BBC News page dated 16 April.

It may be dated the 16th but it wasn't on the site during the day on the 16th, they added it some 7 or so hours after the event. And when it first appeared it (I think) said "Hundreds rally..."

That IBTimes piece says it went up at 16:30. Okay, it's not live rolling coverage, but it's still coverage. You can't send camera crews to everything just on the off chance.

Hundreds has been revised to thousands - so clearly they realised they'd underestimated the size.

If you're a single journalist on the ground, how do you gauge the size of a large crowd infallibly? Any tips?

Can you tell the difference between hundreds of people and over 100,000?

How many people can you see at once, when you're in a crowd? It's not easy, estimating the size of a protest. Especially if it's moving - you may not realise how many people are behind you. I've certainly found that difficult when I've gone on marches, I'm surprised at the turnout figures after the event.

Anyway - clearly they corrected it when they realised they had it wrong. But yet it's still being used as an example of systematic bias?

Given the boat race got about 6m viewers you can see why they show it.

The BBC homepage is shit, you can rarely see any interesting stories on there without clicking through to the specific section.

i also recall sitting in the car on the day in question and listening to the news on bbc radio 4. not a fucking peep. plenty about prince soppy bollocks and his dead mum's favourite arse resting spot.

So, you don't like the news priorities. That's fair enough. I can't stand the royal obsession either. But it gets high viewing figures, and the BBC thinks it has a duty to cover it accordingly.

I get it, you disagree.

But me and many others think they chose not to report on a story that had massive significance, and then under-reported it when they did eventually cover it, and then took too long (in my opinion and the opinion of many others) to correct it.

And I think you're taking something which looks like some journalistic failings for which the BBC could be fairly criticised and spinning it into a conspiracy of grand proportions. It's not the criticism of the coverage I have an issue with - it's the insinuation that it's the result of conscious bias that I disagree with.

(Also - a delay of a few hours to file a story gathered on the ground is hardly 'deciding not to cover the story and then finally deciding to'.)

Edit to add - I notice that we've moved from 'the BBC didn't cover the protest' to 'well, I don't like how they covered it' with nary a hint of cognitive dissonance from those previously asserting that it wasn't covered at all.

(Also - a delay of a few hours to file a story gathered on the ground is hardly 'deciding not to cover the story and then finally deciding to'.)

The protest wasn't a flashmob. They could easily have pencilled it into their diaries and done a quick guestimate of attendance a lot earlier and updated the article with further details later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VK96xXFf3o

I can't imagine they do live coverage of something as contentious as a rally. Once the story is written there would be at least one editorial check and possibly even legal checks to ensure balance and impartiality. That sort of stuff takes time. Especially at the weekend.
I can't imagine two poshos sitting on a bench requires the same level of review and sign off before someone can hit the publish button.

The flyers said "assemble at 1pm". The story went up at 16:30. You can't really write and file a news story while you're in the middle of a march. So - three and half hours to do some marching, find somewhere you can write, write the story, file it, the subs look at it, make sure it's formatted correctly for the web and post it - I mean, it's not super speedy, but its definitely not a turnaround I'd think was abnormal for that kind of news environment.

They did exactly what you suggest - they estimated the numbers and updated later - but that's got everyone's knickers in a twist because the first estimate was too low!

My expectations of the BBC are quite low to be honest. I simply don't trust it as a news source any longer.

I would say I don't trust it more than any other news source. I stopped trusting it in the 80s when I saw the way it reported Stonehenge and the miners strike.

However, people are comforted by Radio 4 and its lack of overt advertising.

first estimate should always be 1 billion

Or 1

They think it's biased against them which is hilarious really given the reality.