BBC coverage helped Brexit win 2016 referendum: Journalist

A senior British journalist and political commentator has accused the BBC of ignoring the principles of impartial journalism during a campaign before the 2016 Brexit referendum, saying the unfair and irresponsible coverage by the British Broadcasting Corporation helped the Leave side to emerge victorious.

Robert Peston, the top political editor at the ITV, a main British television channel, said Saturday that it was the BBC that confused the British voters with giving equal opportunities to the two sides of the Brexit debate in the run-up to the referendum.

Peston said respecting the principle of equality was in fact impartial journalism that the BBC, as the dominant British media outlet, was supposed to respect.

“Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people one of whom says the world is flat and the other one says the world is round. That is not balanced, impartial journalism,” said Peston while addressing the Cheltenham literature festival, in Gloucestershire.

The senior journalist, himself a former business editor and economics editor at the BBC, said that the tax-payer-funded channel failed to enlighten the British voters about who was really right and who was wrong in the debate about Brexit.

Peston said that BBC "put people on with diametrically opposed views and didn’t give their viewers and listeners any help in assessing which one was the loony and which one was the genius."

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On June 23, 2016, Britons voted with a slight majority for their country to leave the EU. However, the vote proved to be very divisive with many still urging the government to consider a second referendum that could allow people to vote for Britain to stay in the EU.

Both the government and the opposition have ruled out such an option, saying they would respect the results of the original vote.

Peston was a fierce opponent of Brexit who consistently said on air before the referendum that the UK economy would be worse off under Brexit. He became even subject of a legal action by supporters of the Leave campaign although Ofcom, the British media regulator, dismissed the complaint.

Paston said chances for a second referendum on Brexit were very slim despite government hardships in securing a deal with the EU that has caused widespread concerns among the public. He said a re-run of the Brexit vote would cause people to lose their confidence in Britain’s parliamentary democracy.  

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