The United Kingdom has no dedicated public news monitoring instrument. There are, however, a modest range of monitoring services conducted by some news organisations, some of which are explicitly for the benefit of the public, and the newspaper industry’s self-regulatory bodies provide periodic information on standards compliance (so therefore only indirectly about content). There is a significant number of external organizations in academia and in civil society that operate different content monitoring instruments.
Content monitoring and accountability mechanisms are operated by some news organizations, though these tend to be reactive and based on audience feedback, or periodic releases of information. In broadcasting, the BBC produces a ‘Newswatch’ programme, broadcast weekly for most of the year, which addresses listener and viewer complaints about its news coverage, offering a right of reply for both audiences and BBC News personnel. The Guardian newspaper employs a readers’ editor to address audience concerns and report on issues with news content. Members of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the self-regulatory body set up by several newspaper publishers, are obliged to publish data on the extent to which their reporting complies with an agreed standards Code (Independent Press Standards Organisation, n.d.), in theory a process of continual – if periodic – oversight, but in practice the reporting criteria do not oblige them to publish sufficient data for audiences to obtain a clear picture of qualitative trends in news content (Media Standards Trust, 2019).
Various academic institutions conduct systematic media content monitoring. Some examples include the Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture collects and analyses audio-visual news content as well as online news, producing empirical content analyses of broadcasters’ adherence to impartiality guidelines (Cushion, Lewis & Ramsay, 2010) as well as analyses of media coverage of election campaigns (Cushion & Thomas, 2016). Election coverage monitoring is also regularly conducted at Loughborough University (Deacon et al., n.d.), at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University (Levy, Aslan & Bironzo, 2016) and at the Centre for the Study of Media Communication and Power at King’s College London (Moore & Ramsay, 2015), and elsewhere. These are, however, generally episodic analyses of news content at important political moments, rather than continual monitoring and health-checking of trends in coverage.
Various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have provided episodic media monitoring. The Media Standards Trust is a media policy think tank that has, among other things, conducted content analyses of news media coverage of regulatory issues and during election campaigns (Media Standards Trust, 2015). The BBC is also subject to monitoring by an organization called News-Watch, which is extremely critical of the Corporation and focuses on news and current affairs coverage of the European Union. Other organizations focus their monitoring operations on the performance of media regulators, rather than on news content itself, though often publicize problematic trends in news coverage in the course of their advocacy work. Organizations of this type include Hacked Off, a campaigning organization pushing for reform of press regulation, and Tell Mama, an organization assisting victims of anti-Muslim hatred that addresses coverage of Muslims in the UK press.
Overall, therefore, there is a significant amount of news content monitoring that takes place in the UK, though it is decentralized and scattered across a number of organizations rather than provided by a dedicated public entity.
