MPs attack BBC for its ‘biased EU reporting’: Corporation accused of ‘falling down severely’ in its obligation to provide impartial coverage
‘The BBC has a ‘deeply concerning’ pro-European bias and has ‘fallen down severely’ in its obligation to provide impartial coverage of the issue, MPs say today.
The European Scrutiny Committee says the corporation does not give enough airtime to those who believe Britain should leave the European Union or that there should be a referendum on membership.
The MPs also criticised the BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall, for failing in his role as the corporation’s editor-in-chief, after he turned down an invitation to give evidence to the committee in Parliament four times.’
February 2014 – The millions in EU funding the BBC tried to hide
‘Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts, for example, these funds are simply referred to as ‘other grant income’.
Instead of making an open declaration, the BBC’s successful lobbying for this money had to be prised out of it using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator, proving that there was never any danger of the state broadcaster’s bosses volunteering it willingly.
The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified ‘research and development’ projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.’
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