Grade’s Herculean task to tackle the biased, woke BBC
MICHAEL Grade – Baron Grade of Yarmouth – becomes chairman of Ofcom today. He takes over days after Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries published Up Next, her White Paper on the future of broadcasting. Main points include that the current BBC licence fee funding regime will eventually come to an end, Channel 4 will be privatised and that ‘TV-like’ content will be subject …
News-watch in Freedom of Information battle with BBC
News-watch is battling the Information Commissioner and the BBC about the Corporation’s refusal to release basic information about how it collects data about impartiality and the subjects of complaints made by the public about programmes. The long drawn-out fight was the focus this week (2 February) of an appeal before a first-tier tribunal by News-watch against the Information Commissioner. A …
News-watch Survey – The Nationality and Borders Bill
News-watch monitored the 18 hours of original programming broadcast by GB News between 6am and midnight on 6 July 2021 and compared its coverage of the government’s Nationality and Borders Bill on eleven of the BBC’s main television and radio programmes, along with the BBC News Channel, amounting to 27 hours and 10 minutes of BBC airtime. The survey set …
News-watch Survey of BBC Ideas – April 2021
In October 2020 News–watch began reviewing, cataloguing and fully transcribing all content published online by BBC Ideas. By the survey’s end, on the third anniversary of the service’s launch, 11 January 2021, this amounted to 599 individual films with a combined running time of 37 hours 13minutes, generating over 371,000 words of transcription.
News-watch Survey – Summer 2020
News-watch monitored ten BBC news and current affairs programmes for eight days, from Monday 6 July 2020 to the launch of the government’s ‘The UK’s New Start: Let’s Get Going’ campaign on Monday 13 July. The BBC Radio 4 broadcasts in the survey were: Today; The World at One (including The World This Weekend on Sunday); PM; The Six O’Clock …
General Election Report – December 2019
News-watch monitored Radio 4’s Today programme in full from the dissolution of Parliament on Wednesday 6 November until the eve of polling on Wednesday 11 December 2019, an interval of five weeks and one day. This coincided with the period in which the BBC’s Election Guidelines were in effect, applicable to all the Corporation’s outlets, which set out its obligation …
European Election Survey – Summer 2019
News-watch monitored all editions of Today over a seven week interval, starting on the day campaigning for the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections began, Friday 12 April 2019 and culminating on Thursday 30 May 2019, a week after the UK vote. The 42 consecutive editions of Today were recorded and listened to in full, and a detailed running log was compiled …
News-watch Survey – The ‘Meaningful Vote’, January 2019
News-watch monitored and logged three complete editions of Today between 14 and 16 January, to coincide with the ‘meaningful vote’ scheduled in the House of Commons on the evening of 15 January. All reports pertaining to Brexit, the European Union and its relationship with the UK, or the ‘meaningful vote’ on Theresa May’s Brexit deal were full transcribed.
News-watch Survey – Salzburg and Brussels European Councils, Autumn 2018
News-watch monitored and logged every edition of Today between 17 September and 20 October, a period of five weeks or 30 editions. Detailed monitoring was undertaken for the weeks of the European Council meeting in Salzburg (17-22 September) and the Informal Meeting of Heads of State and Government in Brussels (15-20 October). This involved the full transcription of all reports …