News-watch monitors public service broadcast programmes to examine whether – as required by law – they deliver impartiality and political balance.
Our focus has been some of the most politically controversial areas of public policy such as the EU, immigration and climate change.
We work by logging, transcribing and analysing representative programmes over extended periods, and producing longditudinal analysis based on statistical findings.
By necessity, this is a detailed and very thorough process that over the past 15 years has involved the line-by-line analysis of millions of words and the writing of dozens of detailed reports, most of which are archived and accessible through this site.
News-watch was founded and is is run by media professionals with extensive direct experience of the issues that face a busy newsroom.
The principal is David Keighley, who is a former newspaper and BBC journalist. He was the senior publicist of BBC news and current affairs programmes before joining the breakfast television company TV-am, where he was director of public affairs for almost a decade. He subsequently ran his own consultancy business with clients that included news broadcasters across the world. He was also the originator of the world’s first international conference and marketplace for news broadcasters which ran annually.
The senior researcher is Andrew Jubb, who read English and Media studies at Sussex University, with a strong focus on media bias, politics and representation. He has worked for Newswatch since its inception in 1999 and has overseen more than six thousand hours of broadcast monitoring.