My point is that whatever rules were in place for the referendum clearly didn't work, they were simply ignored or worked around by the government by e.g. huge spending before the limiting period began. If one side clearly doesn't care about the rules at all and they aren't even enforced, then attempting to enforce them on the other side obviously opens up all sorts of suspicions of bias.
I hadn't seen the BBC article you link to, but it looks like exactly what I mean. Someone who made a donation to the Leave campaign shipped some tyres to India in 2009? OK, how does that compare to Remain using the entire resources of the civil service in its attempt to win? It doesn't at all, the sums involved are trivial in comparison.
Regarding the euromyths site, do you really find the newspaper's protrayal of EU foreign aid/development fund spending to be honest?
Yes - what have they said that's false? The EU's "rebuttal" doesn't even claim the newspapers are wrong about anything. They just claim it's perfectly reasonable spending instead.
Your last paragraph misses the point entirely I'm afraid. I don't care about foreign aid myself. We were talking about the euromyths site. This particular story is interesting because it shows that the EU is willing to lie to you in order to undermine the press.
One of the purposes of the press is to hold government to account. Publicising spending that looks wasteful is a key part of that. This is civics 101. Does the British government complain that the press is "lying" when they question government spending? No, it doesn't, because it's run by people who know that this is part of the job of the press. Only the EU complains about the press doing their job and attacks them by asserting they're peddling "myths".
But hey, if you want another dodgy Euromyths post, here it is:
https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-eu-is-a-supporter-o...
This is about EU plans to eliminate per-region movie licensing. The EU's response adds nothing to the Independent's article, which is basically a selection of quotes from British movie producers saying they depend on per-region licensing to fund indy/arthouse movies, and if they couldn't do that anymore they feel they wouldn't be able to fund these movies.
Now, maybe these producers are all wrong, maybe they're right, I am not an expert in movie financing so I don't know. But clearly there are some who feel this way. The "myths" response simply re-iterates the EU's position that it'll all be peachy and wonderful. The truth of the underlying article isn't challenged, the EU Commission is just saying they disagree.
Lots of the articles are like that.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's fine for a government to respond to press stories in a candid way and defend themselves. But the EU oversteps the line wildly here, by claiming they're revealing systematic lying by the British press, when just clicking through posts shows they often can't identify anything false about the stories. They just find them inconvenient.