Danmarks Radio - Ensuring Non-biased Reporting

Ensuring Non-biased Reporting

The Danish People's Party, a nationalistic political party, has criticized DR for being biased against the party in its political news coverage, attributing this partly to the party-political nature of appointments to the DR Board of Directors. In response, DR set up a "watchdog committee" intended to detect and report upon any anti-party bias. This criticism is only part of a decade-long constant opposition to alleged left-wing bias at DR. Very important was Aktive Lyttere og Seere, a watchdog group started in 1976 by the politician Erhard Jacobsen, who enjoyed a high level of public support. Erhard Jacobsen was at that time a member of Centrum-Demokraterne, a party he founded himself three years earlier.

The first large-scale scientific content analysis of political news coverage on DR published by the Centre for Journalism at the University of Southern Denmark, studying election news coverage in the years 1994-2007, did not document any persistent political bias, neither to the left nor to the right. Rather, news coverage of political actors and parties is largely similar to the news coverage on DR's competitor TV 2. The study concludes that political news coverage on both broadcasters was guided by journalistic professional criteria of newsworthiness of political actors and political issues, not partisan considerations.

In 2008 Mikael Rothstein, author and professor of religious history at the University of Copenhagen, was highly critical of DR when it issued a policy favoring Christian values, since he felt that Muslims would feel excluded.