MediaWatch 2024 Crowdfunding Campaign

A healthy media is the cornerstone of a functional democratic society. Unfortunately, Britain today doesn’t have one. That’s why Byline Times is launching a new project – Byline Media Watch – to monitor and tackle disinformation in broadcast and social media and take on misleading bias in the press.

From the old tabloids to new digital platforms, our media has become more polarised – and less concerned with facts – than ever before. Right-wing papers wield fear as a political weapon, stirring up animosity and violence. Even BBC headlines warp news stories to obscure culpability. Billionaires thoughtlessly amplify hateful conspiracies that quickly spiral out of control. Hostile foreign powers amp up social division and hate.

The media system, as a whole, is meant to hold power to account. But who’s watching them?

Byline Times has a proven track record when it comes to scrutinising the media. We’ve spent years investigating the press monopolies, the political circles they operate in, and the partisan pundits who routinely fail to uphold their duty to the public.

Whether it’s the Murdoch empire or GB News, the Telegraph or the Mail, regulatory failures or Russian disinformation campaigns, phone hacking or illegal cash bungs, we’ve been there to call it out. (You can view the “Crisis in British Journalism” tab on our website for a taste of the kind of work we’ve already done on this).

MediaWatch will take this digging a step further. As with our successful user-assisted journalism project, VoteWatch2024, we want to include you – members of the public and the Byline Times community – in our reporting. At the May and July elections, our readers sent over a thousand tips and story leads, sounding the alarm on voter suppression and foul play.

Now, we want to direct that power at the concentrated media monopolies warping our political debates, pundits who punch down rather than up, and partisan agendas that obscure the truth.

With the help of our subscribers and readers, we can expose the worst of Britain’s media today, and demand something better.

But to do that we need your help. All this takes resources, and we’re a small outlet punching above our weight. 

We want to formally launch this month, but to do so we need to raise £20,000. Can you help us get this project off the ground?

Thanks for your support. Together we can change the media for the better.

(or copy the url https://subscribe.bylinetimes.com/mediawatch/ and share it wherever you’d like to)