The BBC has appointed ‘impartiality champions’ amid criticism of allegedly biased coverage.
Their job is to ‘call out’ examples of bias across the corporation’s work to bolster ‘trust’ among viewers.
Hayley Valentine, the BBC’s boss in Scotland, yesterday said the idea had been tried out in Scotland and will be rolled out across the organisation in the UK.
Speaking at Westminster, she told MPs: ‘It is incredibly important to me that we are impartial and that audiences trust us.
‘We are still, by some distance, the most trusted news provider but we are not complacent. We run impartiality training and we monitor impartiality.’
Ms Valentine said the ‘impartiality champions’ are ‘placed within [BBC] teams and are able to call stuff out’. She added: ‘We have our particular challenges in Scotland but we have a brilliant team of journalists.
‘It is absolutely possible to improve the way people see us.’
In 2022, Alistair Bonnington, the corporation’s former in-house legal counsel in Scotland, claimed the BBC was flouting its duty of impartiality because of pro-SNP bias.
Mr Bonnington said that the broadcaster was ‘slavishly biased’ in favour of the SNP Government.
The intervention came after former Labour MP and ex-UK Government minister Tom Harris warned in the Mail that the BBC had ‘no understanding of the existential threat to Britain’ posed by the SNP.
The BBC previously faced pressure from SNP supporters and other Nationalists over its coverage of the independence debate. Days before the referendum in 2014, Yes supporters held a demonstration outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow over alleged bias in its coverage of the poll.
Some protesters held aloft a banner calling for the BBC’s then political editor Nick
Robinson to be sacked after he had clashed with Alex Salmond at a press conference.
The following year, Mr Salmond claimed that biased reporting by the BBC in the lead-up to the 2014 referendum vote was a ‘significant factor’ in the country deciding to remain part of the Union.
Last year, more than 100 BBC employees accused the corporation of providing favourable coverage toward Israel and called on the broadcaster to ‘recommit to fairness, accuracy, and impartiality’ over its reporting on Gaza.