News-watch

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Not to be confused with BBC Newswatch.Wikipedia
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Today's media has enjoyed an easy ride, and thinks it can get away with murder. But, from now on, it will have to think twice.
—Barclay Thompson[1]

News-watch (previously known as Minotaur Media Tracking) is a right-wing anti-BBC watchdog and webshite founded in 1999 by former BBC/TV-amWikipedia publicist David Keighley and former TV-am features editor Kathy Gyngell to expose perceived pro-EU bias at the public service broadcaster. Minotaur Media Tracking was dissolved in 2006 and its succeessor Newswatch UK Ltd co-owned by Keighley and managemant consultant Barclay Thompson was dissolved in 2009. Somehow News-watch returned and now focuses on areas of public policy such as the EU, immigration and climate change which it describes as politically controversial. It has received over £200,000 of funding from conservative charity the Institute for Policy Research and has had donations raised by Arron Banks and Richard Tice's Brexit campaign group Leave.EU.Wikipedia Its reports have been covered by various right-wing sources including think-tank CivitasWikipedia and Tory broadsheet The Telegraph.[2][3]

Criticism[edit]

Tom Mills, lecturer in sociology at Aston University and author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, told openDemocracy:Wikipedia[3]

News-watch and other pro-Leave lobbyists are obviously trying to influence debates around Brexit in certain interests, and they are doing that 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.

If the evidence makes one side of an argument look worse, then what is it the duty of the BBC to report? There’s a tension here between accuracy and balance. And that is a grey area that lobby groups are always trying to exploit. News-watch do analyse a lot of reports, which is good. But 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.

Commissions[edit]

The following organisations and individuals have comisssioned media reports:

Key People[edit]

David Keighley[edit]

David Keighley is the co-founder and Managing Director of News-watch.

Keighley worked as a publicist first for the BBC and later for TV-amWikipedia where he befriended the Managing Director Bruce GyngellWikipedia and his wife Kathy who was the co-founder of Minotaur Media Tracking.

He also serves on the editorial board for Kathy Gengell's The Conservative Woman for which he has contributed the regular BBC Watch column and climate change denial articles.

Others[edit]

  • Barclay Thompson: former co-owner and Managing Director of News-watch.
  • Andrew Jubb: senior researcher for News-watch.
  • Kathy Gyngell: co-founder of Minotaur Media Tracking, former assosiate director of News-watch, and founding editor of The Conservative Woman.

References[edit]

  1. Media bias is in the eye of the beholder by Roy Greenslade (Feb 3, 2018) The Guardian
  2. News-watch DeSmog
  3. 3.0 3.1 Who's paying for these 'reports' on BBC Brexit coverage? by Adam Ramsay and Peter Geoghegan (23 October 2017) openDemocracy