For more than 15 years, Newswatch has been investigating BBC output using a systematic process of transcription logging and detailed analysis. The answer, in certain key respects – especially with regard to the EU – is a resounding and disturbing ‘no’.
Especially prominent in the data is a consistent and systematic failure to investigate or allow or even facilitate the articulation of the arguments in favour of withdrawal from the EU.
Yet the corporation refuses to engage with the research, or to conduct truly independent assessments of its own. Its tactics are rather to attempt to shout down or ridicule those who disagree with it.
The purpose of this site is to provide an internet platform through which issues of BBC bias can be properly aired and understood.
Emphatically, it is not a ‘bash the BBC’ platform, and it has no political axe to grind.
But the corporation must also recognise that in this area, it is often its own worst enemy.
This is because there is a collective refusal, from the Trustees downwards, and across the entire complaints process, to allow genuinely independent investigation of bias claims.
The only exception to this came in 2004/5, when in the interregnum between Labour-appointed chairmen of the then Governors, Lord Ryder, the Conservative peer, as acting chairman, commissioned a report from Lord Wilson of Dinton, the former cabinet secretary. Lord Wilson’s Commission was made up of leading figures with a cross-section of views about the EU. It found extensive evidence of bias and warned the Corporation that it must radically improve carry more, and more varied news about the EU.
