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Balance and impartiality are central principles in journalism, but this study argues their conceptual application in news reporting should be subject to more academic scrutiny. In the UK, the way "due impartiality" has been applied and regulated by broadcasters has raised concerns about promoting a 'she-said-he-said' style of reporting, which constructs balance but not scrutiny of competing claims. In this study, we analyse how the UK's "due impartiality" was applied by journalists in different political contexts by assessing how the BBC dealt with competing party-political claims. We develop a nuanced quantitative analysis of BBC journalist interactions (N = 967) with claims made by the four main party leaders during the 2019 UK and 2020 US elections. Overall, we found BBC reporting robustly challenged claims by US politicians, whereas coverage of UK politicians often only conveyed claims and counterclaims with limited journalistic intervention, particularly on television news. We argue that impartiality should be viewed more as a fluid than fixed concept given that the context shapes how it is applied. As concerns about misinformation have grown over recent years, we conclude that more finely tuned studies are needed to understand how journalists apply concepts about balance and impartiality in political reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 vote to leave the European Union was one of the biggest developments in recent United Kingdom political history. Only one political party was wholly united for Brexit – the United Kingdom Independence Party. This research finds that in the years leading up to Brexit, the United Kingdom Independence Party presented itself as a rigid core-issue complete-populist party. Content analysis shows how pervasive the European Union was in much of the party output and in the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the party. The party also utilizes complete-populist rhetoric, with 'othering' populism as the most prevalent form. The consistent concentration on the European Union collocated with populist messaging, in both news releases and select newspaper coverage, may have helped afford the United Kingdom Independence Party issue-eliteness in the referendum campaign. But this same work may have also ultimately contributed to make them irrelevant by 2017, and possibly moribund by 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reflect on the question of whether there is an epidemic of admissions for surgical treatment of dental abscesses in Great Britain. They suggest that recent changes in dental care provision in the country have led to increased numbers of hospital admissions for dental abscess. They argue that access to routine and emergency dental care in the country needs to be reviewed.