The Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee has spent six months considering reform of the BBC in connection with the imminent renewal of its Royal Charter. Its report – published last week with little fanfare – contains some half-decent proposals, such as abolishing the current Trustees and replacing them with a regulatory Board with real teeth, including checks on …
Evan Davis: helping to spread the pro-EU message?
(This article was first published by Is the BBC biased?) If you were wondering where the BBC’s Evan Davis was on Saturday (and why wouldn’t you be?), well he was in Paris at a conference for UK school children (sixth formers) called Your Future in Europe. (I stumbled across this by accident, so, no, I’m not stalking Evan!) I was …
Ofcom: Europhile content board head Bill Emmott ‘will not rule on EU issues’
This is a guest posting from Craig Byers of the Is the BBC Biased? website. Further to an earlier post… Newswatch‘s David Keighley has received a statement from Ofcom in response to his post about the appointment of Bill Emmott, the ultra-pro-EU co-creator of the biased BBC mockumentary The Great European Disaster Movie, as Chair of Ofcom’s Content Board, …
BBC anti-Brexit rhetoric continues with alleged lies over ‘Norway option’
Anti-Brexit group Britain Stronger in Europe has started its propaganda push with a £1.5m leaflet drop. It focuses – with hackneyed predictability – on threats that outside the Single Market, three million UK jobs will be at risk. News-watch research shows that for years, BBC presenters and reporters have been allowing Europhiles to get away with these totally unfounded claims …
Ofcom appointment ‘threatens fair coverage of EU referendum debate’
Opinion polls at the weekend gave the EU ‘out’ camp the edge. But it has now emerged that supporters of Brexit will be fighting the battle to win hearts and minds as the EU referendum approaches with their arms tied behind their backs. That’s because new developments at the BBC and the independent sector regulatory body Ofcom mean that complaints …
News-watch submission to the BBC’s EU Consultation on EU Referendum Editorial Guidelines 15.1.2016
The BBC Trust recently embarked on an eight-week consultation on draft Editorial Guidelines for its coverage of the EU in/out referendum. This is News-watch’s submission. The proposed guidelines are here. Preamble News-watch has been monitoring the BBC’s EU-related output for 16 years. Detailed research based on systematic analysis of relevant BBC programming using established academic principles has shown that …
BBC Brexit programme shows strong pro-EU bias
With the campaigns to secure exit the EU now launched, the BBC knows its EU coverage is under unprecedented scrutiny. Before Christmas, Rona Fairhead, the BBC Trust chairman, appeared before the Commons European Scrutiny Committee and swore blind that systems were in place to ensure impartiality in the run-up to the EU referendum. And – pigs maybe do fly! – …