_{Photo credit: News-watch.}

News-watch

Background

News-watch is a media monitoring group whose reports on alleged bias at the BBC have been covered by major newspapers such as The Telegraph and published by thinktanks including Civitas.¹ ²

The News-watch website also regularly publishes articles rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change and criticising the BBC’s reporting of the issue.³

News-watch has ties to various right-wing, pro-Brexit organisations, including Leave.EU — led by Arron Banks and Nigel Farage — which solicits donations for News-watch on its website.⁴

A report published by News-watch in 2017, which claimed that BBC correspondents “one-sidedly emphasised the difficulties of Brexit,” was commissioned by a group of Leave-supporting MPs, including Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, and Ian Paisley.⁵

News-Watch also runs the website “BBC Complaints” that aims to “stop BBC bias against Brexit.” The site offers a complaint submission form, and features selected complaints on the site.⁶

News-watch’s senior researcher is Andrew Jubb, who has worked for NewsWatch since its inception in 1999 and claims to have overseen more than six thousand hours of broadcast monitoring. Jubb has provided “statistical evidence” for papers published by the Centre for Policy Studies and MigrationWatch. Jubb is also a psychotherapist.⁷ ⁸ ⁹

News-watch should not be confused with NewsWatch, the BBC’s own monitoring service which examines and responds to complaints from viewers.¹⁰

David Keighley & Ties to The Conservative Woman

News-watch’s managing director is David Keighley, a media consultant and former BBC news producer who also runs a property management firm and “human health” consultancy.¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Keighley is a contributor to Brexit Central, whose editor-at-large is Matthew Elliott, former CEO of the anti-tax campaign group the Taxpayers’ Alliance, as well as the official campaign to leave the EU, Vote Leave. The news site has been accused by whistleblower Shahmir Sanni of holding regular meetings with other right-wing thinktanks and lobby groups based on Tufton Street in order to coordinate campaigning efforts for a “hard” Brexit.¹⁴ ¹⁵

Keighley has published over 200 articles in The Conservative Woman, including a regular “BBC Watch” column. As well as rejecting mainstream climate science, Keighley has written articles opposing the development of wind energy in the UK, praising the work of Matt Ridley, an advisor at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. John Constable, Energy Editor at the GWPF wrote an article about the same subject – Rampion wind farm – the year before in CapX, a pro-free market news site launched by the centre-right thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). CPS and News-watch have received funding from the Institute for Public Policy, a charity that supports many right-leaning and pro-Brexit organisations.¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

In 1999, together with Keighley, The Conservative Woman’s editor Kathy Gyngell co-founded Minotaur Media Monitoring, a research group from which News-watch was created in 2007. Gyngell is the widow of Bruce Gyngell, described as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite broadcaster, who led TV-am, the company that broadcast ITV’s breakfast programme in the 1980s/90s, before being replaced by GMTV. Keighley was director of public affairs at TV-am during this time.²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴

The Conservative Woman regularly publishes articles denying climate science, including by Harry Wilkinson from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.²⁵

Keighley spoke at an event in 2017 organised by the Traditional Britain Group, a far-right thinktank which previously called for the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence and “millions of others” to be “requested to return to their natural homelands,” and has hosted figures such as Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, white nationalist Richard Spencer, former UKIP candidate Anne Marie Waters and former BNP activist Mark Collett.²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹

Keighley has also trained as a psychotherapist and is managing director of the Mindful Policy Group, a group which advocates “attachment theory” and is chaired by Eurosceptic Conservative MP Tim Loughton, who also chaired Andrea Leadsom’s Conservative party leadership campaign.³⁰ ³¹

Stance on Climate Change

October 16, 2018

Referring to Australian climate sceptic Joanne Nova in an article for The Conservative Woman, Keighley wrote:³²

“…despite all the IPCC’s posturing, politicking and blustering – the study of the workings of the globe’s climate is in its infancy, not least because measurement of variables is so unreliable and incomplete.” ³³

“Those who question alarmism are not ‘deniers’, as the BBC so insultingly calls them. Rather, it is they, the ‘deniers’, the anti-alarmists, who are heroes and heroines fighting to smash the deeply corrupt alarmist scam, which, on some estimates, is costing taxpayers trillions of dollars a year.” ³⁴

Funding

News-watch received £210,000 in grants from the Institute for Policy Research between 2013 and 2018, according to Charity Commission documents.³⁵

The Institute for Policy Research (IPR), an opaque charity with no apparent website, funds numerous pro-Brexit, right-wing organisations, including:³⁶

Centre for Policy Studies (Tufton Street)
New Culture Forum (Tufton Street)
Taxpayers’ Alliance (Tufton Street)
Bruges Group
Global Britain
MigrationWatch
Open Europe
CapX
Eurofacts
Politeia
Manifesto Club
Commonwealth Exchange
Young Britons’ Federation

The IPR’s trustees include Simon Webley, Nicholas Finney OBE and Eric Koops. Nicholas Finney was the conservative political commentator Iain Dale’s boss at the British Ports Federation in the 80s when they persuaded Margaret Thatcher to scrap a key piece of employment legislation. Finney describes himself as “proud to be CO2 denier” on his Twitter profile. Eric Koops stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative Party candidate for Wakefield in 1974.³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰

The IPR is based in the same Westminster office, 24 Greencoat Place, as the Institute for Business Ethics, a charity set up by a group of business people concerned about the “Big Bang” financial deregulation initiated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, according to its website.⁴¹ ⁴²

The Institute for Business Ethics’ president is Sir Tim Melville-Ross, who began his career at BP and is now chairman of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Simon Webley, one of the Institute for Policy Research’s trustees, is the IBE’s Research Director, as of 1998. The IBE’s advisory council includes:⁴³ ⁴⁴

Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a director of Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Saudi Aramco
Simon Thompson, chairman of the Africa-focused oil and gas company, Tullow Oil
Richard Wiseman, a Shell lawyer
Rachel Lomax, a non-executive director at Heathrow Airport
Sir Richard Olver, formerly deputy group chief executive at BP
Sir Douglas Flint, previously a non-executive director at BP
Lord Green, CEO of HSBC while the bank was being used for money-laundering.⁴⁵

The IPR in turn receives funding from the Nigel Vinson Charitable Trust (NVCT), set up by the Conservative peer Lord Vinson. The NVCT directly funds numerous free-market thinktanks and lobby groups, many of which are based at the same offices on Tufton Street and have played leading roles in the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. Organisations funded include:⁴⁶

Institute of Economic Affairs
Adam Smith Institute
Civitas
Open Europe
Politics and Economics Research Trust (founded by Matthew Elliott, former CEO of the anti-tax Taxpayers’ Alliance group and the official pro-Brexit campaign, Vote Leave.)

The NVCT also funds the UK’s premier climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), and the anti-wind power campaign group the Renewable Energy Foundation, whose research output was previously directed by the GWPF’s Energy Editor John Constable.⁴⁷

The Trust has also donated to the UK’s only private university, the University of Buckinghamclimate science denying, Koch-funded Spiked magazine; and the Hampden Trust, part of the libertarian Freedom Association pressure group. The Freedom Association organised a “Climate Week” at the University of York in 2009 promoting climate science denial, with speakers including Nils-Axel Mörner and David Holland, who took the University of East Anglia to an information tribunal over the “Climategate” controversy. The pressure group also ran the “Better Off Out” campaign during the EU referendum and currently runs an anti-BBC campaign called “Axe The TV Tax,” calling for the licence fee to be abolished. Ruth Lea, a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, spoke at a fringe event chaired by UKIP politician Roger Helmer and organised by the Freedom Association at the 2008 Conservative Party Conference.⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹ ⁵²