News-watch

News-watch in Freedom of Information battle with BBC

BBC Bias, News-watch | 3rd February 2022 | by Andrew

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 ruling on the matter is expected within 28 days.

The process began in March 2020 when News-watch requested further information about a survey contained in the BBC’s annual reports and accounts for 2018/19 showing that 52 percent of respondents to an IPSOS MORI poll commissioned by the BBC thought the Corporation provided ‘impartial news’ but only 44 percent turned to the BBC if they wanted impartial news.

The extra information requested under FoI included the details of the brief given to IPSOS Mori, the nature of the sample who were asked and the details of how the results were collated and interpreted. This was considered by News-watch to be a matter of major public interest because such data is used by BBC as proof that its output – despite claims to the contrary – is indeed impartial.

In parallel, News-watch also asked for the release of all complaints made to the BBC from 2015 to the present about impartiality on the ground that the Corporation only makes public the topics of those which it deems fit to do so.

The BBC refused the application point bank, principally on the ground that it has a derogation from the FOI Act which allows a refusal if the material involved is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature’. News-watch appealed to the Information Commissioner against the ruling, but he broadly upheld the BBC’s stance and it was at that stage that News-watch appealed against him.

David Keighley, Managing Director of News-watch, commented:

“The BBC claims to be making efforts to be more impartial, so it is a matter of huge concern to licence-fee payers that it is so secretive about how it gauges that it is not biased, and also will not tell the public the content of the majority of complaints it receives about impartiality.

“News-watch has demonstrated that the BBC complaints process as it currently operates is not fit for purpose and stonewalls the vast majority of audience concerns. The purpose of this legal action is to force the Corporation to become more open and to stop this absurd claim that this sort of data should be confidential.”

Justice closes its eyes to BBC bias

BBC Bias, News-watch | 27th February 2020 | by Kathy Gyngell

It is very disappointing to have to report that three judges (two in the High Court, one in the Court of Appeal) have thwarted David Keighley’s application for judicial review to challenge the impartiality of the BBC.

Very frustratingly, they have acted without calling a full oral hearing to consider evidence put forward by David and his legal team, relying instead on written submissions to the court. That shows an almost casual disregard for the importance of the need to make sure the BBC meets its main Charter obligations – and leaves no line of redress except through Ofcom, which is itself stuffed full of ex-BBC staff of the same mindset.

Judges lined up to assist Gina Miller in her manic efforts to stop Brexit, but faced with extensive evidence of the need to stop the BBC’s negative reporting of Brexit, they have performed the judicial equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and closing their eyes.

Last summer TCW’s readers helped support the crowdfunding effort get this judicial review in motion.

As David reports on the crowdfunding site, Lord Justice Singh in the Court of Appeal has refused to grant leave to appeal against the decision of Mr Justice Supperstone who on 14 November 2019 rejected his application for judicial review to challenge the impartiality and performance measures of the BBC. This hearing was a review of the refusal of Mrs Justice Lang to grant leave for the judicial review (on the most cursory of grounds).

You can read about the rejection of the appeal in detail, with links to both rulings, here.

David Keighley is left with considerable costs – approximately £18,000 – to shoulder, on top of the £57,000 very generously donated in the crowd-funding appeal, which paid the considerable costs of taking the case through its various stages.

The brick wall nature of the judgment is extremely worrying and frankly raises nearly as many questions about our judiciary as it does about the BBC.

It seems extraordinary, too, that Mrs Justice Lang has decreed this level of costs. She might as well have said: ‘This is a warning to anyone who has the temerity to challenge the action of the nation’s monopoly broadcaster – you will pay for it.’

Neither judgment, of the High Court or the Court of Appeal, took into account the inability of the BBC to exercise its judgment, analyse its performance and properly measure it. There’s no doubt, as David writes, the lack of impartiality of the BBC continues to be a matter of grave public concern – the recent raft of negative newspaper reporting of BBC bias supports that. You would be forgiven for believing there was no current debate about the BBC or the anachronism and inequity of the Licence Fee.

The BBC remains its own judge and jury – which we pay for. As David has written repeatedly, the ‘supervision’ of OFCOM has made no difference. Its October 2019 review of BBC News and Current Affairs content and elsewhere demonstrated that it is not prepared to tackle this issue.

David has not stopped in his endeavours. This judicial review case is over, but with the support of other like-minded individuals, he will carry on trying to make the BBC accountable and comply with its Charter obligations.

Civitas paper lays bare 18 years of BBC anti Brexit bias

BBC Bias, News-watch | 25th January 2018 | by David Keighley

Readers of this site will need little persuading that the BBC’s coverage of Brexit is biased. The Corporation vehemently denies it of course, but since the referendum vote, they have been seemingly on an all-out mission to find every reason why leaving the EU is disastrous for the UK – and to avoid reporting the benefits.

Hillary Clinton, on a book plugging visit to London, claims the Brexit result was based on a ‘big lie’? Immediately it’s a BBC headline. Wages aren’t rising in pace with the cost of living? Another ‘hold the front page’ moment ‘because of Brexit uncertainty’.

What is surprising, however, is the sheer scale of the Corporation’s failure to meet its Charter requirement of impartiality. A paper by News-watch published today (January 26) by Civitas, based on a collation of research conducted into the BBC’s EU coverage over the past 18 years, chronicles the immense problems for the first time.

The report, The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation? – How pro-Brexit views have been marginalised in the BBC’s news coverage, can be read in full here: http://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/brusselsbroadcastingcorporation.pdf

The paper also demonstrates that the Corporation’s complaints process is not for purpose. It is a self-serving mechanism for kicking impartiality issues into touch rather than dealing with them honestly, independently and robustly. The only remedy, it is argued, may be a judicial review or a public inquiry.

News-watch has been monitoring BBC output since the European Parliamentary elections in 1999. This work is based on rigorous academic principles followed by university media schools around the world. There are 38 reports covering hundreds of hours of EU output and 8,000 programme transcripts, and it is believed to be the largest systematic study of the media ever undertaken.

The key findings, which show that supporters of withdrawal from across the political spectrum have been severely under-presented, include:

Of 4,275 survey-period guests talking about the EU on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme between 2005 and 2015, only 132 (3.2 per cent) were supporters of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
In 274 hours of monitored BBC EU coverage between 2002 and 2017, only 14 speakers (0.2 per cent of the total) were left-wing advocates for leaving the EU, and they spoke only 1,680 words.
In the same period, Tory pro-EU grandees Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine made between them 28 appearances, with contributions totalling 11,208 words – over nine times the amount of airtime allocated to all left-wing supporters of Brexit.
In Today’s business news covering the six months after the EU referendum, only 10 (2.9 per cent) of 366 speaker contributions were from supporters of withdrawal from the EU. https://news-watch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/News-watch-Business-News-Survey-.pdf
More recently, in October-November last year, of 68 non politically allied speakers in the Brexit-related coverage on on Today, 52 were anti-Brexit or pro-EU, and only 16 were pro-Brexit or anti-EU, an imbalance of worse than 3:1 – despite the Leave vote.

Of course, measuring bias is not solely about numbers. They are one factor among many in News-watch assessment methodology. https://news-watch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/News-watch-Methodology.pdf

The News-watch reports also include detailed textual analysis which confirms that these blatant numerical imbalances are indicators of across-the-board bias against EU withdrawal.

Equally as disturbing is the BBC’s attitude towards this work. Over most of the 18 years, successive figures from the senior hierarchy have refused point blank to even consider the News-watch work. The one exception, in 2007, was a travesty https://news-watch.co.uk/today-programme-survey-and-response-to-bbc-independent-advisors-findings-winter-2007/

The Corporation’s stone-wall excuse boils to that they are the wrong kind of complaint because the internal BBC process deals only with issues arising from single programme editions.

The most recent dismissal of a News-watch report – about coverage of the EU and Brexit issues in last year’s General Election https://news-watch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/News-watch-2017-General-Election-Report-1.pdf – was derisory. Without providing any evidence, the BBC press office claimed that it ‘would not pass basic academic scrutiny’. The speed and content of their response suggested that they could not have properly read it http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/22/bbc-invited-third-pro-eu-eurosceptic-speakers-appear-election/.

Another key point in the equation is what the BBC have not covered in the Brexit terrain. The News-watch work has been championed in Parliament by a cross-party group of MPs which includes Kate Hoey and Kelvin Hopkins from Labour, Philip Davies and Philip Hollobone from the Conservatives and Ian Paisley from the DUP.

Sir David Clementi, the BBC Chairman and his predecessors, and Lord Hall, the Director General of the BBC, have refused to meet the group to discuss the bias issues – and have been unable to supply to it a single BBC programme since the referendum which has examined the opportunities of Brexit.

News-watch has been scouring the schedules to spot one – but in vain.

Photo by Ashley Pollak

Soros and the BBC attack News-watch reports

2017 General Election, BBC Bias, News-watch | 27th October 2017 | by David Keighley

News-watch released last weekend a pair of meticulously-researched reports that exposed yet again the BBC’s continued serious bias in the reporting of Brexit.

One survey showed that during the General Election, there was a heavy imbalance towards anti-Brexit opinion; the other, that over 18 years, the Corporation has covered left-wing views in favour of withdrawal at only derisory levels – thus effectively ignoring the views of at least 3.5m Labour voters who supported Brexit.

The BBC’s response? In a word, abuse. The Press Office – utterances from which have to be sanctioned at the highest level – claimed, in effect, that the News-watch work was not worth the paper it was written upon.

They said:”We do not recognise the allegations made by News-watch and to describe this as a ‘report’ would be a gross overstatement for what is a defective and loaded piece of work which wouldn’t pass basic academic scrutiny”.

Their evidence for this unpleasant ad hominem attack? Zilch. News-watch has been trying to get the BBC to engage with News-watch reports for 18 years, but they never have. The Corporation claims with bull-headed obstinacy that the so–called complaints procedure precludes consideration of such detailed analysis – complaints must be confined to single programme issues.

In addition to the Press Office attack, BBC personnel, including the editor of the Andrew Marr show, then also engaged in a twitter storm of insults against the News-watch reports (h/t Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased?).

The next stage in the saga was that on Monday, the website Open Democracy – a principal funder of which is George Soros – added more ‘ad hominem’ vitriol about News-watch, its methodology and its funding. A full-scale hatchet-job.

Was this coincidence? Or the BBC co-operating, or working in tandem with, attack dogs who share the Corporation’s views about Brexit?

Whatever the chain of cause and effect, it is certain that Open Democracy and the entire Soros empire are engaged in a full-scale battle to prevent the UK leaving the EU. Its contributors include Roland Rudd, the brother of Amber Rudd, who was a major figure in and behind Britain Stronger in Europe, the designated Remain organisation.

Mr Rudd is the UK lynchpin in the aggressive £13.7 billion drive by Soros – the amount he has just donated to his ‘charitable’ interests such as Open Democracy – to achieve EU integration, allow fully open borders, and smash the nation state.

And what was the evidence for the Open Democracy attack on News-watch in terms of the BBC bias ? Open Democracy canvassed the opinion of an academic called Dr Tom Mills, who works at the University of Aston and is linked to group which seriously believes that the BBC is right-wing.

He said:

‘News-watch and other pro-Leave lobbyists are obviously trying to influence debates around Brexit in certain interests… through what looks like a rather crude coding framework. The problem with dividing everything into pro and anti camps is that it makes a substantive and informed discussion of the issues at stake very difficult… what’s lacking is a clear and transparent methodology that can deal with how the underlying issues are dealt with, rather than the question of how much time is given to two sides of a political argument.’

Like the BBC, it seems he had not read the reports properly before commenting. Every News-watch survey contains a clear outline of the methodology. His point about ‘a rather crude coding framework’ is utter tosh. Even a cursory reading will reveal that the classifications involved in the surveys are complex, nuanced and highly detailed. They are most definitely not – as he implies – binary or simplistic.

Perhaps what Dr Mills is actually trying to say rather crudely that putting on fewer supporters of Brexit than those who oppose it doesn’t matter.

The reality of News-watch funding is that it is a minnow. Costs amount to the tens of thousands. Donors include a charitable foundation, individuals from a variety of backgrounds (and political affiliations) but none of them have any influence (or have ever had) on the content of reports.

By contrast Open Democracy, according to its website, receives millions of pounds from a variety of left-leaning trusts and Soros-related sources, all of which clearly want to subvert democracy by reversing the Brexit vote. And as noted above, this is all part of an £13.7 billion effort by George Soros and his many-tentacled empire to reinforce and expand the European Union. And to topple democratically-elected governments.

Aided and abetted by the BBC?

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Talk Radio’s Julia Hartley Brewer slams BBC post-Brexit bias

BBC Bias, EU Referendum, News-watch | 13th September 2017 | by David Keighley

Transcript of Talk Radio, Julia Hartley-Brewer interview with David Keighley, News-watch, 13 September 2017, 12.03pm

JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER: First up, a fascinating story that I wanted to get to, because it was something that did concern me at the time, this is something that went back all the way to the end of August last year, a couple of months, of course, after the Brexit vote. Now, Nigel Farage, one of the keen, leading figures of the Brexit campaign was somebody who was accused of having ‘blood on his hands’ after, we were told, there had been an increase in violence against EU migrants and indeed migrants from other parts of the world in the wake of the Brexit attack (sic) this was reported repeatedly on the BBC, and in particular, on August 31, news broke that a Polish immigrant in Harlow had been killed. Rumours circulated that it was a gang of feral youths who were responsible, and that it could have been a racist attack, because he was Polish and triggered by Brexit. This was reported on by the BBC repeatedly. But, last Friday we had the sentencing at Chelmsford Crown Court of the youth responsible for that man’s death, and now we know the full story, and it’s really rather different. So I’ve invited David Keighley on, he’s the managing director of the media monitoring company News-watch, and himself a former BBC producer who has written about this. Now, and to tell us the full story, David – thank you very much for joining us.

DAVID KEIGHLEY: Good morning and thank you very much for having me on the programme.

JHB: Well, thank you very much for talking to us. I saw your article you wrote on this online yesterday and I wanted to ask you about this, because it is something . . . it was a report that, I suppose, I accepted on face value when I heard the reports but talk us through what happened and what the reporting claimed. And then, if you could outline for us what actually were the real, objectively true events that have now been proven in a court of law?

DK: Right, yes, basically, this man, Mr Jozwik who was a Polish man living in Harlow, well-liked by all accounts, was killed in a . . . after a fracas of sorts, late night, few days before the reports broke out. He banged his head and a couple of days later the story broke. Basically, what the BBC said that evening, very excitedly and very sensationally was that he had died after what some were saying was ‘a frenzied race hate attack’ following, or ‘triggered by’ – was the exact phrase – the Brexit vote. Now . . .

JHB: But was this just the BBC claiming this, or did other news outlets claim the same.

DK: Yeah, no, other outlets also took that line, though to a lesser extent than the BBC. And of course, the BBC has got extra responsibilities as a public service broadcaster to check out the facts before reporting something quite so sensationally. Now, to be fair, the report, the main report on the 6 o’clock news did have the alternative theory that this was youths and nothing to do with Brexit, but the overriding impression in the reports, the sensationalist side of it was that this was a race hate attack. And that was added to by John Sweeney, later on in the evening, on Newsnight, and he actually interviewed a friend, or someone who was said to be a friend of the killed . . . the dead man, who said, as you said in your intro, that Nigel Farage . . . he said, ‘Thank you Nigel Farage, you now have blood on your hands.’ Now this wasn’t a live interview, it was a package, it was recorded, so John Sweeney deliberately included that in the report that he presented that evening, and there were lots of other lines about the level of race hate going on.

JHB: And we have discovered since that a lot of research into what was now considered to be these supposedly race hate crimes, but actually that doesn’t even have to have been even a police investigation, there doesn’t even have to have been a complaint from the person who was supposedly the victim, it is an entirely subjective view of a person who may have just been an onlooker, an exchange between two friends where there was a . . . perhaps there was a word used that perhaps most of us wouldn’t use in our daily lives, someone else might say, ‘Well, I thought that was racist’ – they can report it to the police, whether there’s an investigation, any conviction or anything at all, any charges brought, that now stands as a race crime that has been reported and there stands in the stats?

DK: Absolutely, it’s a self-report crime, which is almost unique on the British statute books. For the police to record such a crime there has to be . . . there need not be any evidence whatsoever, it’s just that somebody perceives there’s been an offence. Now, what’s happened subsequently is that, first of all the police . . . the point was on the day, the police said they hadn’t ruled out race as a motive, but any journalist knows that if you ask the police when they’re opening an investigation if they’ve ruled anything out, they will routinely say, ‘No, we’re looking at all possibilities’ – they don’t know, so they’re cautious. The BBC weren’t cautious in their approach . . .

JHB: No, but what’s emerged when it came out in court with the actual sentencing, and a 16-year-old has eventually been sentenced to 3 years in a youth detention centre, not for murder, but for manslaughter, but it’s also emerged, categorically accepted in court by all sides that the gang, so-called gang involved, didn’t instigate this incident which led to the punch, but they, the defendant and his friends were provoked, and that this man, the man who sadly lost his life was very drunk and very aggressive with a bunch of his friends, and had actually started the fight, very taunting, very aggressive towards this bunch of young youths, and they had made, themselves, racist remarks to the youths and invited violence from the youngsters, and that was when the punching, the punch happened and then very sadly this Polish man died. So, in no way was this a racist attack on a Polish immigrant because of anything to do with Brexit, it wasn’t a racist attack at all, on the contrary it was a youth who felt that he was under attack himself.

DK: Yes. That sums it up very neatly. And the point was that however you look at this, it was nothing to do with what the BBC actually reported. Now, as I say, the BBC has responsibilities as a public service organisation, special responsibilities to do with impartiality and getting balance in their reporting, and yet when the sentencing hearing happened on Friday and all these final facts emerged, that it was the polar opposite of what had been said, what did they do? They had, basically, one piece on their website which was on their Essex section, so it wasn’t even the national part of the website, and it didn’t mention their role in their reporting. This was surely a case where they should have done a full apology, they should have outlined that they’d got it wrong, that this was not anything to do with race hate. People are saying that what they did last August amounted to racial provocation by them and yet . . .

JHB: But . . .

DK: . . . and yet, they’ve just glossed it over as if they’ve done nothing . . .

JHB: (speaking over) But this is the interesting thing, the attempts to get newspapers to make sure that they give correct reporting and that they correct mistakes and they apologise when they get things wrong would require a newspaper that’s signed up to that plan, post-Leveson, for them to give exactly the same prominence to that story, to do the correction, not a small, little ‘news in brief’ on page 16, it would have to be a full page apology, effectively, in a newspaper, on the front page, probably, equivalent. And I remember, certainly, how prominent that story was and its been brought up in debate after debate in the last year, when people say, ‘Well, yes, but, you know, all those racists who voted Leave and how they all started being more racist because of the Brexit vote, and isn’t it your fault?’ – I mean, I personally have had tweets from people saying that I’m partly responsible for Joe Cox being murdered. I know Nigel Farage has had those, because I’ve spoken to him about it. Now he has actually asked for an apology on this himself, hasn’t he?

DK: Indeed, yes, he . . . on his show on your rival station – perhaps not rival, your . . .

JHB: (speaking over) We don’t know who they are!

DK: Yes, he actually said he wants an apology from the Director General of the BBC, Tony Hall. And it will be very interesting to see now how the BBC reacts, because of course, they so often just brush off complaints, they pretend that they have done balanced reporting when they haven’t, there’s loads of evidence of that on the News-watch website. And, it’s just an endemic, systemic problem in the BBC. They are incapable of admitting their own errors, and the bias seems so deeply entrenched now in their Brexit coverage.

JHB: Well, I mean, there’s been lots of complaints about this recently, haven’t there, and there’ve been, you know, formal complaints from the Conservatives, because we know during election periods, during referendum periods, I mean, there are strict laws. I don’t work for the BBC, I’m allowed to give my own opinion but not during election campaign periods, I mean, I quite, absolutely . . . as much as it’s tying my hands behind my back, I completely agree with it as someone who believes in democracy, that we shouldn’t be having bias, but I mean, it is something . . . and I say as someone who loves the BBC and does a lot of work for the BBC as well, freelance, that I am stunned on a daily basis by their reporting on this issue. But then, is it that ‘I would say that wouldn’t I, because I’m a Brexiteer, and you would say that, wouldn’t you, because you’re a Brexiteer, and Nigel Farage would say that, wouldn’t he, because you’re a Brexiteer’ – isn’t it the case that everyone sees bias against their own personal viewpoint?

DK: Of course that’s true to an extent, but again, if you go to our News-watch website, the way we measure bias is not just on an impressionistic basis, we look at coverage over a long-term period, we do it properly and academically. And basically, what we’ve looked at is, for example, the Today programme’s Business News coverage after Brexit, and . . . for the six months after Brexit, every single edition, and transcribed every single word that was said, and the amount of . . . the number of people who have appeared on the programme who were pro-Brexit was minuscule, the numbers are so small as to be vanishing. They just are not taking into account properly pro-Brexit opinion.

JHB: Well, we shall see, David Keighley, thank you for talking to us, managing director of the media monitoring company News-watch, he’s a former BBC producer himself. I wanted to highlight that because, you know, I was as horrified as everyone else, I think, at the thought that there could be an increase in violence and certainly racist violence, violence against EU migrants, that wasn’t . . . that wasn’t what the Brexit campaign was about, that’s got nothing to do with Brexit, nothing whatsoever, and I really object to any racist hijacking [of] a cause for democracy, to carry out such crimes. It would appear that they just haven’t been those crimes, and claims that there have are just totally unfair. I absolutely, if I was the Director General of the BBC, Tony Hall, I would issue that apology, because I think, you know, you’ve got to admit when you get it wrong, and we don’t always get it right.

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News-watch survey of BBC Article 50 survey shows deep anti-Brexit bias

EU Referendum, News-watch, Today Programme | 15th May 2017 | by David Keighley

The latest News-watch detailed analysis of BBC output, covering the UK’s Article 50 letter and its aftermath, shows heavy bias against the case for Brexit. The report, which included more than 73,000 words of programme transcripts, can be found in full here. Coverage of the survey’s findings is in the Daily Express here.

In the week of the filing of the UK’s Article 50 letter (March 29 – April 4, 2017), BBC Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast six editions which contained almost five hours of material about the letter and its aftermath. This was almost half of the available feature airtime.

The programme coverage was strongly biased against Brexit and made special efforts to illustrate the extent to which leaving the EU could have catastrophic consequences for the UK. There was, by contrast, only minimal effort to examine the potential benefits.

A measure of this overwhelming negativity was that only eight (6.5%) of the 124 speakers who appeared over the six editions were given the space to make substantive arguments that the future for the UK outside the EU would yield significant benefits.

The overall gloom was buttressed by the programme’s editorial approach. Presenters and correspondents, for example, pushed at every opportunity to illustrate potential (and existing) problems. At the same time, they were strongly adversarial towards Brexit supporters, but much less so to guests who advocated that the UK was, in effect, now staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Problems that were deliberately pushed to the forefront included the wealth of City of London being under threat, the creation of a ‘legislative soup’, the EU not agreeing with the UK’s preferred path of negotiations, and the possibility the of exit talks extending up to 10 years.

BBC ‘fact-checking’, though presented as objective, was anything but. Chris Morris, the ‘fact checker’ was most focused on choosing topics that showed Brexit in a negative light, and failed at even the elementary level of pointing out that ‘EU money’ was actually provided UK taxpayers.

A series of reports from Sunderland, purportedly to explore both Leave and Remain perspectives, focused most on this negative fact checking. It also gave most prominence in its framework to the possibility of Nissan leaving the area and negative business developments since Brexit and the possibility of arts funding drying up. Local voices supporting Brexit were included, but in vox pops with only soundbite points.

Special effort was made throughout to show that the City of London was under pressure as a result of Brexit. A story that Lloyd’s of London were establishing a Brussels ‘headquarters’ was elevated to major significance in the bulletins, and across several mentions in Business News slots, even though the chief executive admitted that ‘only ‘tens’ of jobs were involved.

By contrast to this blanket negativity, a News-watch report from 2002 covering the introduction of euro notes and coins across the EU was strongly positive about the prospects for the new currency and strained editorial sinews and resources to show that its advent had been joyfully received in the relevant EU countries.

The BBC strongly defended its post-Brexit coverage during the survey period (through a high profile article in Radio Times by Today presenter Nick Robinson) as being in accord with its own rules of ‘due impartiality’. The evidence of this survey is that its assessment methods are seriously skewed against Brexit and in favour of the EU.

The full report is here:

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IEA BOOK SLAMS BBC BIAS

BBC Bias, News-watch | 28th April 2016 | by David Keighley

A book published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) about the future of the BBC contains a chapter in which research carried out by News-watch takes centre stage.

The key areas of output investigated included the daily religious/spiritual segment Thought for the Day, broadcast as part of the Today programme. News-watch analysed almost a thousand editions and found that its tone was overwhelmingly against business, economic enterprise, and capitalism.

This is the full version of the IEA press release about the book:

The BBC is no longer fit for purpose. Its market power – especially in terms of news provision – coupled with its compulsory funding method and its closeness to the political process is hugely problematic. Significant examples of bias undermine it further, whilst commercial competition risks rendering the BBC irrelevant.

In a new IEA report, authors call for the commercial privatisation of the BBC. The case for this is multi-faceted: technology and a changed commercial landscape have demolished the economic and practical arguments for the licence fee and the BBC’s privileged position, whilst the case for public service broadcasting is weaker than ever given increased competition through the internet.

New analysis of a number of case studies suggests the BBC exhibits relative biases in a number of areas. Though all media outlets are likely to have biases, the BBC’s is likely to be more problematic and change public opinion, given its trusted reputation, the inability for customers to withdraw payment and the fact it provides 75% of all televised news.

Problems with the BBC:

Bias by omission:

· Voices favouring Britain’s exit from the EU have tended to be under-represented on Radio 4’s Today Programme. From March 2004 to July 2015, there were 4,275 guest speakers on EU themes. Just 3% of these were explicitly in favour of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Seven in ten of these speakers were from UKIP, and over a third were Nigel Farage alone.

· During the official 2015 General Election campaign, 25 business speakers discussed the EU referendum on the Today Programme. Over three-quarters of these speakers saw the referendum as a worry or a threat to business, despite polling finding two thirds of businesses back the holding of a referendum.

Bias by selection:

· In a sample of 976 separate editions of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, 167 included discussions on economics, business and finance. Two thirds (65%) expressed a negative opinion on capitalism, markets and business, whilst just 8% gave any sort of positive perspective. Negative commentary outweighed positive commentary by a factor of more than eight to one.

Bias by presentation:

· Value judgements: A BBC journalist described OBR forecasts that spending levels as a proportion of GDP would likely fall to levels last seen in the 1930s as a ‘book of doom’ and ‘utterly terrifying’. Not only have these figures been heavily criticised, but even if they were comparable, the forecasts would see the UK government spending the same proportion of GDP as Australia.

· Misinformation: A third (24 of 78) of stories on the BBC website between 2012 and 2015 that mentioned ‘Amazon’ and ‘tax avoidance’ conflated corporation tax paid by companies with sales revenues – which has nothing to do with the tax base for corporation tax which is profit.

· Health warnings: Think-tanks associated with conservative and free-market analysis are much more likely to receive ‘health warnings’ on the BBC News website than think-tanks associated with more left-leaning positions.

Declining justifications for the licence fee and public service broadcasting:

· Technological transformation means it is now straightforward to exclude non-payers from receiving television signals.

· Multiplicity of platforms and devices means there is no longer a clear relationship between owning a television set and watching programmes, which are now available on computers, phones and tablets.

· Televisions are now portable and used for a variety of activities. The notion of a definable tax base for the licence fee has broken down.

· The justification behind public service broadcasting is also declining. In reality there is a wealth of channels, programming and other content. Maybe people don’t watch as much educational content as others think desirable, but this that cannot be solved by simply subsidising the creation of more such content. The main channels of public service broadcasters have seen their share of viewers nearly halve since 1991.

Bringing the BBC into the 21^st Century:

· The government should uncouple itself from the BBC and remove compulsory funding. In the era of programmes such as House of Cards, arguing that commercialisation leads to dumbing down is unconvincing. The BBC will also struggle going forwards without commercial freedoms; with just half of BskyB’s income, privatisation is needed for it to flourish on a global scale.

· Privatisation could not eliminate biases, but could lead to the viewing public becoming more appropriately sceptical. A privatised BBC would also bear a considerable commercial cost if its reputation were impaired.

· The BBC is fast becoming a minnow in international broadcasting, communication and entertainment world taken as a whole. If it remains nationalised it could become irrelevant. Already, the income from subscription to television broadcasters is twice the income from the licence fee received by the BBC.

· Other options include the BBC becoming a members’ organisation such as the National Trust, with members becoming licence fee payers. Alternatively it could be set up with a large trust fund and operate with a corporate governance structure. The Guardian, for example, is one of the most successful online journalism sources while being supported by a charitable trust.

Commenting on the report, Mark Littlewood, Director General at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:

“The BBC needs a business and ownership model more appropriate than the one designed the best part of 100 years ago. Keeping a publicly funded broadcaster, with a Charter drafted by politicians, risks seeing the BBC eclipsed by new technology in the same way that Royal Mail has been eclipsed by email.

“The ending of the licence fee and the privatisation of the BBC would permit the BBC to compete freely and aggressively with other global media businesses.”

The links to it are here and (BBC bias chapter ) here. Iain Martin, the editor of web news and comment service, CapX has noted that the IEA research about Thought for the Day shows a deep anti-capitalist bias.

Kate Hoey welcomes new BBC complaints website

2015 General Election, BBC Bias, News-watch | 10th March 2016 | by David Keighley

A new website, BBC Complaints – www.bbccomplaints.com – has been launched by News-watch.

Its purpose is to help hold the BBC to account: to ensure that, as is required by law (expressed in its Charter and Public Purposes), it is properly impartial in its coverage of news and current affairs; to fill an important gap by creating a new, independent conduit for the thousands of complaints about BBC programmes such as Today and Question Time.

There are two primary reasons why it is needed.

First, the BBC’s own complaints procedure is not fit for purpose and stacked to an unjustifiable extent against viewers and listeners. Between April 2005 and August 2015, the BBC received 2.1 million complaints from viewers and listeners. However, only 3,335 were considered by the Editorial Complaints Unit, and 88% of these were rejected, usually on spurious grounds.

It boils down to that the Corporation is so locked in its own bubble that it cannot see the problems that taint especially its EU coverage, and also severely distort reporting of topics such as climate change and immigration.

It has constructed a hugely complex complaints procedure that is designed largely to protect the Corporation and its journalists. In the same vein, editorial guidelines have been fashioned around the false yardstick of ‘due impartiality’, a concept that allows BBC editors and executives to in interpret balance in controversial areas entirely on the Corporation’s own terms.

Under ‘due impartiality’ for example, those who oppose climate alarmism are virtually banned from the BBC airwaves because in the BBC’s own judgment – arrived at on the basis of a so-called ‘expert’ appointed by the Trustees – the case for catastrophic global climate change is proven. The Corporation has thus adapted the role of a self-appointed censor.

Second, the area where BBC bias is moist acute is in its coverage of EU affairs. News-watch has chronicled those problems for almost 17 years and its many reports – based on the highest academic principles – can be viewed on this website.

Because of this, during the build-up to the EU Referendum, News-watch has mounted an unprecedented monitoring exercise. Using the latest technology, it covers all the main news programmes and channels, ranging from Newsbeat on Radio 1 to From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4, and from BBC1’s Breakfast to Newsnight on BBC2.

BBC Complaints has been launched as a vital part of this effort. It’s impossible to keep track of everything that the BBC does, so this is a new conduit where listeners and viewers can register the examples that they hear and see.

Everything noted on the site will be carefully scrutinised and the flow of extra intelligence will enable the team at News-watch to both cross-reference and extend the reach of its own efforts.

Throughout the referendum campaign, News-watch – using the evidence gathered by this detailed monitoring – will be exerting as much pressure on the BBC as possible to improve the quality of its output and to ensure its Charter obligations.

Kate Hoey MP, the former Labour minister who supports exit from the EU, said:

‘In the ensuing referendum it has never been more important that the BBC is absolutely unbiased in its coverage. Unfortunately, in the past this has not always been the case with a form of institutionalised pro EU bias prevailing in the organisation. This new website will ensure all complaints will be publicly aired and should be welcomed by the BBC.”

Ryan Bourne, head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), has recently noted that, according to News-watch research, of 4,275 Today programme guest speakers on EU themes between 2004 and 2015, only three were left-leaning supporters of EU exit.

BBC NEWS CHIEFS CLAIM THAT MONITORING FOR POLITICAL BIAS ‘IS VERY UNHELPFUL’

BBC Bias, European Scrutiny Committee, News-watch | 25th October 2015 | by Craig Byers

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 media’s reporting of it:

The first was that “all BBC journalists” will be sent for “mandatory training” so that they become “as well-informed as possible of the issues around the workings of the institutions of the EU and its relationship to the UK”.

(So that’s John Humphrys, James Naughtie, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, Katya Adler, Jeremy Bowen, etc?)

The second concerned the meeting’s most heated moment – when Jacob Rees-Mogg confronted David Jordan (director of editorial policy and standards) over EU funding for the BBC – the reporting about which has been somewhat confusing (to my mind).

Mr Jordan began by replying that the BBC “doesn’t take money from the EU” and that the organisation that does take money from the EU (£35 million), Media Action, is “owned by the BBC” but “independent”.

On being pushed further (over a FoI request by The Spectator into EU funding for the BBC), however, things got murkier and Mr Jordan and Mr Rees-Mogg began to fall out:

David Jordan: There are two things you were referring to – the question that you asked last time, which was in relation to Media Action, so I answered…

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Well, I wasn’t actually. Last time I was asking about EU funds broadly, not Media Action.

David Jordan: Well, it’s that £35 million figure which you quoted which relates to the Media Action…

Jacob Rees-Mogg: But you replied about Media Action when I was asking about all EU funding….

Having watched their earlier exchange again, Mr Rees-Mogg is correct. He didn’t ask about Media Action or “quote” that £35 million figure earlier. Here’s how their discussion started:

Jacob Rees-Mogg: I just want to go back to a question we came to the last time you came to the committee, on the money that the BBC receives from the EU, which I know isn’t huge in your overall budget but which is still some tens of millions. One of the standard contractual terms when the EU hands out money is that those receiving money won’t say or do anything damaging to the interests of the EU. Does the BBC agree to those standard contractual terms and will they take money from the EU between now and the referendum?

David Jordan: The BBC as a public service broadcaster doesn’t take money from the EU. The organisation to which you’re referring that take money from the EU is an organisation called Media Action and that’s an independent part of the BBC with independent trustees……..

The committee’s chairman, however, only added to the confusion here by wrongly ascribing that “quote” about the £35 million to Mr Rees-Mogg himself shortly after, so maybe Mr Jordan’s apparent confusion on that point is more understandable:

William Cash: Why do you need to receive the £30 million I think that Jacob referred to…?

The disagreements continued, however, and David Jordan, in answer to pushing on that Spectator FoI request, said that independent companies who make programmes for the BBC also receive some EU funding and that the EU also funds some other things, such as translating programmes made in English into other EU languages (as seemed to have been the case with the highly controversial pro-EU mockumentary The Great European Disaster Movie).

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Look, you are now giving me a really different answer from the one you gave before. I never mentioned Media Action. I only mentioned EU funding. You gave an answer about overseas aid and now you’re saying the BBC does receive money to help with some of its programming and does receive money to translate some of its programming and you are therefore signed up to the contractual agreements from the EU that require you not to damage its interests. Why didn’t you give the full answer the first time.

David Jordan: I gave a very full answer about Media Action and now I’m giving a very full answer about how other funds are occasionally available for other programmes to make use of…

Jacob Rees-Mogg:…which you denied in response to my first question.

William Cash then told them to calm down and moved the discussion on – which is unfortunate, I think, as many issues were still left dangling in the air over the EU money that isn’t spent on Media Action. Mr Rees-Mogg still seemed unclear about that. I’m certainly unclear about it.

And does the BBC sign up to that contractual agreement with the EU when it accepts the funding for innocuous-sounding tasks like translations and those other aspects of programming (whatever they may be exactly), apparently always involving independent companies?

And what if those independent companies only produce pro-EU programmes for the BBC (like The Great European Disaster Movie?) How would that free the BBC from charges of pro-EU bias? Does their independence’ and the apparent fact that the EU money they get goes on things like translations really get the BBC off the hook here?

Such questions need a lot more scrutiny.

Why the BBC doesn’t monitor itself for bias

One of the less-reported things about the European Scrutiny Committee’s encounter with the three top BBC bosses was that it discussed something close to our hearts: monitoring bias.

What I took away from it was that after the Wilson Report into the BBC’s (pro-) EU coverage, the BBC had pledged to put some form of monitoring into place but that, having tried doing so, has now abandoned monitoring again and won’t be re-introducing it in the run-up to the EU referendum.

Sir Bill Cash, repeatedly citing News-watch’s close monitoring of the BBC’s EU coverage, argued that the BBC ought to be carrying out such monitoring and making its finding publicly available for people to check. He wants a Hansard-style logging system, comparable to News-watch’s extensive archive of transcriptions, and, given its huge budget and sheer size, wanted to know why the BBC isn’t doing so?

The most concise statement of the BBC’s position came from David Jordan, the BBC’s head of editorial policy and standards:

I think we gave up the monitoring that the chairman is talking about at the time because we found it to be actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all in even deciding and defining whether we were impartial.

And I think in the context of other appearances and elections we’ve discovered the same thing. For example, if you’re covering an election how do you define somebody who’s on a particular party but it opposing something that party is doing at the time they were appearing on the radio? Are they, as it were, in that party’s column or are they in another column that tells you what they were doing? It becomes very, very confusing and doesn’t necessarily sum up the nuances and differences that exist in election campaigns in our experience.

So that was the reason I think why we gave it up.

It was also very, very expensive and time-consuming too.

And we thought that allowing editors to be essentially responsible for impartiality in their output and having an overall view which we get through a series of meetings and discussions which take place in the BBC, were a better way to ensure we achieved impartiality that through simple number-counting.

I have to say I laughed when he said that such monitoring had proved to be “actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all”. Cynically, I thought, “I bet it wasn’t – especially if it came up with the ‘wrong’ results” (a bit like the Balen report?)

I didn’t buy his example either. For me, it’s hardly rocket science to, say, note in one column that Kate Hoey is a Labour Party representative and in another column to note that she’s anti-EU. I can’t see why that would be “very, very confusing”.

Also, I don’t buy the it’s “very, very expensive and time-consuming too” argument either. If a small number of people at News-watch can monitor and transcribe every EU-related interview on major BBC programmes over many, many years then surely an organisation of the size and resources of the BBC can run something similar for its major news bulletins and flagship programmes too. It’s not that difficult. I work full-time and still managed to monitor every political interview on all the BBC’s main current affairs programmes for nine months (in 2009-10) – and at no expense whatsoever!

Also, if you simply rely on editorial judgement – on both the small and large scales (in individual programmes and at senior editorial meetings) – then many individual biases could result and multiply. In an organisation containing so many like-minded people as the BBC, those biases would doubtless head in the same direction and become self-reinforcing. Therefore, they probably won’t be spotted as biases at all – merely sensible, impartial BBC thinking. Who then would be able to point out that it isn’t being impartial after all?

Given that many people think that this kind of groupthink the problem and that, as a result, the BBC are blind to their own biases, asking us to trust the judgements of BBC editors en masse isn’t likely to reassure us….

….which is where what David Jordan derisively calls “number-crunching” comes in.

If over a year of, say, Newsnight there are 60 editions that deal with the UK-EU relationship in some way. Say 55 of those editions featured a pro-Stay guest but only 35 featured a pro-Leave guest, then number-crunching surely would surely raise a serious question about the programme’s impartiality?

If, say, 9 of those pro-Leave guests came from UKIP and the other 26 came from the Conservatives but no pro-Leave Labour or Green guests appeared then that would also surely indicate a serious bias?

Is it really beyond the ability of programme editors to count and record such figures – and to then make them publicly available?

If their figures show exceptional impartiality (45 pro-Stay, 45 pro-Leave guests), then they will surely win more people over, wouldn’t they?

What would they have to lose?

The full transcript of the committee meeting is available here.

Latest News-watch survey Published: More BBC Pro-EU Bias

BBC Bias, News-watch, Reports, Statistics and Surveys | 29th April 2015 | by Andrew

As the BBC’s coverage of the general election gathers pace, the latest News-watch survey shows that reporting of European Union affairs by the Corporation continues to be deeply inadequate and biased.

In March, the House of Commons EU Scrutiny Committee – which had heard evidence from News-watch as well as senior figures from the BBC – strongly attacked the BBC’s EU-related output. It said that Charter requirements to provide audiences with balanced and wide-ranging coverage of EU affairs were not being met, and that, especially, eurosceptic perspectives were not being properly reflected.

In its latest survey, independent monitoring organisation News-watch monitored four BBC programmes for an eight-week period between Monday 27 October and Saturday 21 December 2014. The programmes were: The World at One and PM on BBC Radio 4, BBC1’s News at Ten, and BBC2’s Newsnight. This equated to approximately 131 hours of broadcasting. This analysis, based on complete analysis of a range of flagship news programmes makes the following findings:

Coverage of the issues surrounding withdrawal was both minimal and inadequate.

The vast bulk of news about Conservative handling of EU affairs was through the lens of party splits, which, it was emphasised by BBC correspondents, had been raging since Maastricht. There was disproportionate effort to cover these divisions, exaggeration of the scale of the problem and a corresponding failure to scrutinise policies; rows took precedence over informing audiences about the bread and butter issues of EU membership.

There was relatively little analysis of Labour policies towards the EU. Party members were afforded regular platforms to attack Conservative and Ukip policies, but their own controversial approach towards limitation of immigration or the potential threat posed by Ukip was seldom featured or analysed. Members of the party who are strongly eurosceptic occasionally were asked for comment, but their quotes were too brief to give a true indication of the debate within the party about EU membership

The main theme of coverage of Ukip continued to be (as has been noted in earlier News-watch reports) that both individually and as a party, it was inept, confused and potentially both venal and racist. There was a heavy focus on its shortcomings, but very little coverage or analysis of key issues such as withdrawal and the limitations of the EU. And the main editorial reaction to Ukip’s victory at Rochester was to ask Conservative MP Phillip Davies if he would not defect to Ukip.

Another problem was that, while it was frequently said that the EU opposed reform of matters such as the Free Movement of Peoples Directive – and platforms were often given to EU figures to say that – there was no editorial effort to scrutinise why such policies could not be changed or reformed.

The full report is available to read or download using the link below.

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