Scratch the surface of almost any BBC statement about ‘impartiality’ or ‘bias’ and you unearth a rather an unpleasant smell. The BBC says no EU money was used in the making of its Sunday night pro-EU extravaganza The Great European Disaster Movie, which depicted in ludicrous, extremist terms the total disintegration of civil society across the continent, if, God forbid, …
Brexit the Movie – a perspective not on the BBC
This month marks the 17th anniversary of tracking by News-watch of the BBC’s EU-related output. The first survey was commissioned by a cross-party group of peers who were concerned that the case against the EU was not being aired by the BBC. It covered the build-up to the European Parliamentary elections on June 10, 1999. The findings can still be …
David Keighley: So who did pay for the BBC’s latest blast of pro-EU propaganda? 04/03/2015
As steps towards an EU referendum progressed in 2015, the BBC showed a film called the The Great European Disaster Movie, which depicted in ‘ludicrous, extremist terms, that if the EU did not exist, there would be a collapse of civil society across the continent. In this blog, News-watch established that the makers of the film had a huge axe …
Bias Archive 2014-21
Welcome to a brand new News-watch feature – an archive of more than 200 blogs (running to 200,000 words!) written by News-watch MD David Keighley since 2014. All were first published on The Conservative Woman website, and they appear here with kind permission of Kathy Gyngell, who founded the site. Each of the blogs highlight separate items of BBC …
Pro-EU zealot quietly dropped from Ofcom content board
Hallelujah! Quietly, a significant positive development in the broadcasting establishment may have occurred. Might it be that the government is at last waking up to that the liberal figures who occupy the key regulatory posts are a menace to Brexit? The current deluge of anti-Brexit propaganda emanating primarily from the BBC, but also from Ofcom-regulated services such as Channel 4, …
For Europe, Against the EU
The case for leaving the EU has never been put by the BBC in a programme wholly dedicated to the ‘out’ case. By contrast, the Corporation has, over many years, broadcast an unbalanced barrage of pro-EU material – as is documented on this site – and in March 2015, presented in prime time The Great European Disaster Movie, made by …
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 NEWS CHIEFS CLAIM THAT MONITORING FOR POLITICAL BIAS ‘IS VERY UNHELPFUL’
This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased? One of the big BBC-related stories of the past week has been the appearance of Lord Hall, James Harding and David Jordan at parliament’s European Scrutiny Committee discussing the BBC’s policies in the light of the upcoming EU referendum. Two parts of the discussion have dominated the …
Referendum Blog: May 26
BREAKFAST BIAS: BBC1’s Breakfast programme examined, with glitzy but highly misleading graphics, the UK’s contribution to the EU budget. The peg for the analysis is a claim by Brexit campaigners that membership of the EU cost the UK £350 million a week. Emphatically wrong! said presenter Charlie Stayt. That figure is the headline UK contribution figure but is actually substantially …
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 …