BBC bias 2: No checks on pro-Brussels views

THE BBC is refusing to monitor its network for bias during the EU referendum campaign.

Sir Bill Cash, who chairs the European scrutiny committee, has called on corporation executives to set up a system to log news and current affairs coverage.

This would allow the BBC’s output to be analysed to check whether the corporation is fulfilling its duty to be ‘impartial’, he said.

But yesterday the BBC Trust, which is the corporation’s governing body, rejected the suggestion, saying such a system would be both too expensive and ‘disproportionate’.

The row erupted after the trust published its guidelines for how the corporation will cover the referendum campaign.

The BBC has been told not to commission opinion polls during the campaign, after polls published during last year’s general election proved to be wildly inaccu- rate. It has also been told to treat polls published by others with caution.

Controversially, the trust said journalists were allowed to use the word Europe when talking about the European Union as long as the ‘context was entirely clear’.

Sir Bill said: ‘It’s just not good enough to say all this can be left to editors. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it badly wrong.’

A BBC spokesman pointed to earlier comments from James Harding, the corporation’s director of news, who said he worried monitoring systems would be ‘would be unreliable rather than reliable’. Such a system might ‘hem in’ the makers of programmes, he said.

BBC chiefs will not be obliged to make sure that the views of the two official campaign groups are given equal exposure at all times, but will be required to focus on finding ‘broad balance’ between the arguments.