BBC Trust

It was acknowledged that references to Wales and devolved issues in the news were improving in some areas but it was felt that there is no consistency and that it was still difficult to judge where is being talked about when news items refer to 'the country.' There was a feeling that news items about the devolved nations are not made relevant to England through comparisons between different parts of the UK, and it is important to acknowledge what is happening elsewhere to avoid confusion.

It was felt that the coverage of some of the devolved news topics, like different approaches to tuition fees, could provoke hostility from viewers in nations where policies seemed less generous. It was felt that there needed to be a balanced representation of such stories to avoid causing antagonism between the nations.

It was said that short opt-out bulletins for the nations during programmes, particularly BBC Breakfast, weren't sufficient for providing people with their local news. 15 seconds was felt to be a very short time to convey news stories and the slots seemed to mainly feature sport updates rather than hard news which appeared not be considered popular enough for the audience at this time.

The subject of devolution was raised on more than one occasion and that more needed to be done to increase people's understanding. It was considered that broadcasters seemed to take the position of "how do we deal with devolution?" which identified it as a problem rather than as a positive development.

A question was raised as to whether BBC Parliament could be combined with Democracy Live, which was described as being a really useful tool for finding out about the latest political news in Wales. It was felt that it would be easlier to signpost viewers to where they could get more information if Democracy Live and BBC Parliament were more coordinated. Some felt frustrated that First Minister's Questions weren't broadcast live except on Democracy Live, and that perhaps there could be a red button on the BBC Parliament Channel for people to select what they want to see on Democracy Live and with the advent of IPTV it was thought that this was likely to be a natural development.

Members of the group also asked what was being done to push news stories from Wales to get them onto Network and they were told that following the Trust Nations Impartiality Report new systems have been put in place to ensure that these stories get through to Network and that there are regular meetings between Network News Editors to update them on upcoming stories and events.

It was felt that the results coverage of May's elections to the National Assembly for Wales had been slightly better on S4C than the results coverage in English on television. Coverage on Radio Wales was also praised.

With regards to the BBC's Network TV coverage of the elections, it was felt that there was a lot of filling time during the programme as new developments were taking place. When the programme had been cut in favour of a three hour session on the Scottish Parliamentary election results it had failed to mention any of the events taking place in Wales. It was felt that the coverage wasn't made as interesting as it could have been and the presenters didn't seem to be as engaged as the results came in.

Guests thought that the way the interview with the First Minister of Wales had been cut short to broadcast an interview with Alex Salmond lacked courtesy.

There was criticism that Wales Today had failed to lead with a story about the elections on the day before polling day but there was much praise for the coverage of March's Referendum on primary legislative powers for the National Assembly.

There was praise for the BBC Wales journalists who have to explain devolution as it is a difficult concept to summarize and explain to viewers with no prior knowledge of it but criticism of those who adopted a too adversarial approach.

There was criticism for the way that major news events are handled after the initial coverage, for example the earthquake in Japan. Whilst coverage at the time was felt to be good, members of the group felt that there wasn't enough follow up afterwards and that they would like to know what was happening weeks, months, even years after the event.

Some guests felt that there needed to be more collaboration between the BBC and S4C and they would like to see more encouragement for people to watch S4C with subtitles.

Many guests felt that a 7 day catch up service on the iPlayer wasn't long enough and that it was often difficult for people to be able to watch those programmes within the allotted time.

There were calls for Newsnight and Question Time to be on earlier and that there should be Welsh editions of the programmes.

There was some criticism for the way in which certain Welsh names and place names are pronounced on BBC Network News, especially as there is professional advice available to presenters on pronunciation.