The BBC Trust has revealed it will inspect the impartiality of the BBC’s coverage of rural areas.
Set out in the Trust’s Charter, it must ‘do all it can’ to ensure the BBC’s impartiality, and this year’s annual work plan includes a review of rural area coverage in the BBC’s output.
The independent review is due to begin this summer, and will look at news, current affairs, and factual programming.
BBC trustee and chair of the trust’s editorial standards committee Alison Hastings said, “More than two thirds of the UK’s landscape is rural, and rural issues affect many areas of all our lives.
“The BBC exists to serve the whole of the UK and we’ll be looking for evidence that the BBC is reflecting these communities and their issues, and that it is achieving the high standards of impartiality which audiences expect.”
This will be the sixth impartiality review the Trust has carried out, though it was the Trust’s predecessor, the BBC Governors, who carried out the last review of the BBC’s rural coverage in 2003.
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