Shush!

GB News, reviewing the MoS front page story last night

We've been doing this so long now that we can just guess what the BBC will do sometimes.

Before going to bed last night I was reading The Mail on Sunday's scoop about a leaked intelligence report showing that nearly 4 in 10 people illegally crossing the English Channel come from Albania - i.e. from a peaceful country and, therefore, economic migrants not refugees, despite what the BBC insists. The leak was passed to the paper via Reform UK leader Richard Tice.

My instinct, based on past experience of the BBC and these kind of 'unhelpful' stories, is that the BBC would downplay it. So the first thing I did after logging on this morning was to check the BBC News website's daily The Papers section to see if they've included The Mail on Sunday or not.

This is where it gets interesting. They have mentioned it but are downplaying it.

There show full screenshots of all the Sunday front pages, except one: 

The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Observer, The Sunday Express, The Sunday People, The Sunday Mirror, The Sun on Sunday and The Daily Star on Sunday are all there, but not The Mail on Sunday.

But scroll down and - in a classic example of 'watertight oversight' in action - you'll see that the BBC has mentioned it.

To my mind there's only one reason for them NOT showing the Mail on Sunday front page and that's because they deliberately chose not to draw attention to it because they don't like the story.

Isn't that a fair assumption?

Update: Checking TVEyes...GB News has been showing that front page and discussing it since around 10.30pm yesterday. Neither of the BBC News Channel's paper reviews at 10.30pm and 11.30pm even mentioned it, neither showing it nor discussing it.