An outsider arrives at the BBC

 

Sometimes an anecdote speaks volumes. In her Sunday Times interview, departed Today editor Sarah Sands recalls her first day at the BBC:

“It’s rare to get an outsider in the building,” she says. “And so I think there was a tremendous suspicion that I was basically a spy.”

A BBC press officer had visited her three times within three hours with queries about apparent sins she had committed that her new colleagues had leaked to The Guardian. “It was things like I’d had [the columnist] Matthew d’Ancona in the building, and so I’d been fraternising with a journalist with right-wing credentials,” she recalls. “It went on and on.”

Initially she felt like a governess whose new charges kept putting spiders in her bed.

So people on the Today team leaked their criticisms of her to The Guardian (it had to be The Guardian of course!) and they didn't like her being friendly with right-wing journalists. Very BBC!