Full year monitoring of Radio 4’s Today Programme September 2002 to August 2003

On Monday 2nd of September 2002, News-watch began a year-long investigation into the Today programme’s coverage of European Union issues. Over the next-twelve months every edition of the programme was monitored in its entirety, amounting to 313 individual programmes and a total of 818 hours of broadcast output. This project was the most detailed and comprehensive uninterrupted study of BBC news coverage ever undertaken. For purposes of managing such a large amount of data, six separate reports were compiled at various intervals throughout the year, looking at the Irish Referendum on the Nice Treaty, a Summit on EU Enlargement, the European Council meeting in Copenhagen, the European Constitution, a comparison of the Today programme’s output with coverage in the broadsheet press, and their treatment of Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.