The toxic BBC

There's a big headline news story on the BBC News website this evening using the word 'toxic':

 

It's a piece by Tom Symonds, BBC home affairs correspondent, and - following on from our earlier post on the subject - pursues what very much seems to be 'the BBC line' on the matter, basing most of its direct quotes on two people with a similar outlook: 

[1] Leroy Logan, founding member of the Black Police Association, who the BBC News Channel turned to first on Thursday night as Dame Cressida Dick's chucking-out broke and who the BBC News Channel then interviewed again just two hours later. 

[2] Shabnam Chaudhri, former detective superintendent with the Met, who the BBC has reported on before under headlines such as 'My 30-year struggle with racism in the Metropolitan police'. 

And Ms Chaudhri is the person BBC Tom pegs his front-page analysis piece around, extensively quoting her complaints about Met racism. 

The BBC News Channel interviewed her yesterday. 

[I've not checked her appearance elsewhere, but I'm guessing she's been elsewhere on the BBC too.]

It's a funny thing. Having largely left off listening to BBC radio, I'm now listening to other radio outlets. On stations like talkRADIO I get a very different sense of the many reasons why Dame Dick might have been worthy of the chop. There's a litany of non-'BBC' criticisms of her out there.

All this BBC focus on stuff about -isms and identity politics isn't what's getting those people's goat.

And that increases my sense that the BBC is trying to speak to [a] people who already think like it and [b] people it hopes to persuade to think like it. 

Tom Symonds, BBC home affairs correspondent, needs to broaden his horizons.

Friday Night Smorgasbord

I

During last night's Newsnight, while interviewing Greg Hands MP, Kirsty Wark asked: 

Before we finish Michael Gove is reported to have said "the decision to leave the EU was on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall and East Germany's quest for freedom". What's your response to that? 

It now turns out that by 'reported' Kirsty actually meant 'rumoured on Twitter by pro-EU partisans'.

Douglas Murray has the whole fascinating story of this Twitter-facilitated, politically-motivated fake news story over at the Spectator - and, even better, he's released a recording of the whole Michael Gove speech to prove it. 

The guilty parties are ex-BBC Labour MP Ben Bradshaw and one of the BBC's favourite experts on extremism (far-right and jihadi), Dr Peter Neumann of King's College London. 

The former had claimed that Mr Gove had been heckled at the event without informing his readers that he'd been that very heckler (!), while the latter had tweeted:

So here's Michael Gove standing next to Luftwaffe band on Day of German Unity, telling German audience that decision to leave EU on par with fall of Berlin Wall and East Germans' quest for freedom. Shouts from audience: "Nonsense".

That tweet certainly got gullible Simon Schama & Co. squawking en masse: "Obscene. EU equated with USSR! Just vile. How can he sleep?" frothed Prof. Schama while the Observer's Nick Cohen fumed, "The Cold War ended when walls were torn down. Brexit builds them up again. Michael Gove can't spot the difference." David Lammy leapt aboard the bandwagon too. (Update - Nick Cohen, as I'd have hoped he would, has backtracked saying "It seems the professor was confused, to put the kindest possible constrcution on it".)

The audio released by Douglas (and the accompanying transcript) proves that 'the quote' used by Kirsty Wark was not a quote at all. Michael Gove didn't say what Dr. Neumann said he'd said. 

At all. Not a bit of it. It was all utterly fake news.

Scary to think of it but without that pesky audio Messrs Bradshaw and Neumann might well have gotten away with it.

Now, to his credit (though to the annoyance of others), I'll just note here that the BBC's Evan Davis protested commented negatively and prominently on Dr Neumann's less-than-accurate tweet:

Amazed to see this still getting so many retweets and likes. Everybody should read the transcript and make up their own mind. But I for one saw this tweet and then read the speech and felt Peter Neumann had totally misinformed me as to what had been said.

So will there be fewer invites from the BBC for Dr Neumann now?

*******

II

Douglas Murray, following his audio-and-transcript-led exposure of George Eaton of the New Statesman's shocking misbehaviour towards Prof. Roger Scruton is becoming quite the crusader for truth. Good on him!

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III

Talking of exposures by released audio or video....

As noted on the Sweenexit thread and the Open Thread, it really does look as if Tommy Yaxley-Robinson has triumphed, game, set and match, in his war with the BBC's John Sweeney (a war the latter launched).

Tommy's Panodrama, whatever you might have thought of it at the time, really does appear to have (a) scruppered the BBC's intended Panorama hatchet job on him and (b) directly caused BBC star reporter John Sweeney to make his exit from the corporation (as per a not-available-online piece by Matthew Moore of The Times).

The UK media's reporting of this remarkable turn of events is fascinating in its near-absence. Silence has well and truly fallen. The Independent's Lizzie Dearden is a rare exception. Her not-entirely-factually-accurate report on the story actually manages to be quite balanced.

I do agree that it was the "bloody woofter" comment that must have got John Sweeney into particular trouble at the BBC. 

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IV

It's been another bad day for the BBC. 

You have to go 34 paragraphs into the BBC News website's main report on the story to reach the bit where the retired judge slams the BBC for its involvement in the Carl Beech/'VIP paedophile gang' story, but at least they didn't 'forget to mention it'.

It should surely have been mentioned (if only trailed) further up the article though, and the BBC ought to be sharply questioned over this.

(Where's John Humphrys when you need him?). 

Retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques is damning about the BBC's involvement, with  BBC reporter Tom Symonds receiving the lion's share of the criticism 

The judge said the BBC had "fed information" to 'Nick '(Carl Beech):

The showing of the picture of Martin Allen to ‘Nick’ by Tom Symonds of the BBC was unhelpful to the integrity of the investigation.

The photographic identification by Tom Symonds was fundamentally flawed and would not be admitted in a court.  

It's complicated stuff, but (especially in the wake of the Lord McAlpine scandal which saw a BBC director general resign) it's really quite something (again) that the BBC fell flat on its face once more over the issue of paedophilia' (following the Savile scandal)...before then partly redeeming itself via, of all programmes. Panorama, which first raised huge questions about 'Nick'. 

What will happen to Tom Symonds over this? Will he be joining John Sweeney? (Joint leaving do? JS to buy the drinks?)

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V

My Twitter feed today was especially aghast at a woman in the audience at an Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez meeting passionately calling for babies to be eaten as a necessary step to counteract climate change.

By all recent accounts it was a hoax (channelling Swift's A Modest Proposal), but (like in the early days of Titania McGrath) a lot of people fell for it - from both sides (including a surprising number of my favourites on Twitter, though I won't name names!).

Gosh darn it, even Sky reported it straight too.

By the looks of it, the BBC held off until they could safely brand it a "far-right" stunt - as they duly did a couple of hours ago.

What's so intriguing here is how Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez reacted to the woman in the audience's question. She seemed to take it at face value, didn't take issue with the woman and was nice to her.

That has raised eyebrows.

And my eyebrows were raised by how the BBC edited the exchange.

Watch the full exchange here (via Sky):

A woman who attended, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's town hall meeting, urges the eating of babies as a necessary step in the fight against climate change.

Watch more videos from Sky News here: https://t.co/hhDQuPJRZP pic.twitter.com/WbbEc9uTXk

— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 4, 2019

And then watch the BBC's editer version. It removes the main bits where, to  critics, AO-C looks as it she's falling for the hoax and pandering to the woman.

Of course, she might not have been doing any such thing, just diffusing the situation gently and skilfully.

But why shorten it when the whole exchange lasted less than two minutes? Was it some (agenda-driven) attempt to protect Ms Ocasia-Cortez? 

After 'Nick' got nicked

Today's Mail on Sunday has a fascinating piece by Alistair Jackson, the BBC man behind that 2015 edition of Panorama which blew the lid on 'Nick' (Carl Beech) and his lurid lies about a VIP paedophile ring.

It paints a particularly damning portrait of the police. 

I'm proud that we backed Panorama over this at the time, strongly agreeing with Stephen Pollard  that it was "surely one of the most important programmes the BBC has ever broadcast":

Wednesday

It's complicated

The odd thing was that Panorama found itself under not-so-friendly fire from its BBC colleagues at Newsnight. 

Looking back, Newsnight surely has some questions to answer about this now. 

Here's part of what I wrote at the time:

I'm groping in the dark a bit with Wednesday's Newsnight. It all seemed a bit odd.
Instead of leading with David Cameron's big speech at the Tory Party conference it led with the previous night's Panorama...
...which might seem somewhat incestuous ("BBC shall speak peace unto BBC"), except that Newsnight's Nick Hopkins's report seemed to be more a case of sibling rivalry than incest (thank goodness!).
Nick Hopkins himself has pursued angles on the self-same story that Panorama was trying hard to discredit, so it's probably not much of a puzzle as to why he would want to cast such a quizzical eye over Panorama's latest edition.
Then came a strange interview with Mark Watts, the head of Exaro News - the media organisation that Panorama aired so many doubts out.
Evan Davis gave him a bit of a grilling but never seemed to go for the jugular. I thought that Mr Watts came rather well out of it.
The one thing I now about Exaro News, however, is that Newsnight has worked with them on several occasions in the past.
Was that why Exaro's chief was given such a prominent platform to defend his organisation at the start of this edition of Newsnight?
If it was, that puts the issue of 'incestuous behaviour' by Newsnight firmly back on the agenda.

 ...and:

...what with Wednesday night's Newsnight (a) sounding a rather dissenting note about the previous night's Panorama (given the Newsnight reporter fronting this piece's own role in reporting much the same kind of thing as Exaro) and (b) giving the Exaro boss a long 'right to reply' against Panorama.

I also heard an interview on Today the day after that Panorama report with the chief constable of Norfolk slamming the BBC for broadcasting that edition of Panorama.

And then came this week's Newswatch (with Samira Ahmed) which reported the complaints of what sounded like quite a lot of BBC viewers (even if 'quite a lot' in these circumstances means a few dozens, or - at best - a few hundreds out of 64 million people). 

All of them savaged the BBC for betraying the victims and prejudicing police investigations. 

And with no one from the BBC being willing to be interviewed about it (including Panorama editor Ceri Thomas), Samira ended up interviewing the chief constable of Norfolk again, who (again) slammed the BBC for broadcasting that edition of Panorama.

So Panorama really was up against it at the time, from the police, viewers and their own BBC colleagues. 

*******

Incidentally, that once-ubiquitous chief constable of Norfolk, Simon Bailey, is still in place. Checking TV Eyes, it looks as if he hasn't been all over the BBC since the conviction of Carl Beech offering up an apology to Panorama for shooting the messenger four years ago. 

*******

By the way, it was actually the BBC that first put 'Nick' on air whilst breaking the news about Operation Midland getting under way. You can see most of that report in a conspiracy theory YouTube video from 2012, and it makes for fascinating viewing.

Listen out in particular for the way BBC reporter, Tom Symonds, gives credence to Carl Beech's claims in his language - some of which I'll quote here:

London in the late 70s and early 80s. a time and place receding into history. But the darkest stories of the past are returning to haunt modern Britain, and this is one of them: an account of boys picked up by chauffeur-driven cars and taken to meet their abusers.  

Nick, not his real name, has overcome decades of fear to give his testimony. 

He remembers the abusers would send their employees to bring him. 

'Nick', of course, 'remembered' no such thing. He was making it up.

Every silver lining has a cloud

Tom Symonds

BBC One's main evening news bulletin last night had a typically downbeat take on the colour change to the British passport. Its report on the story ended with a reminder that Brexit is both 'tough' and 'divisive':

Brexit is tough; changing the passport colour relatively easy. But like Brexit, it's dividing the nation between those who say "At last", and those who say, "Why bother?" Tom Symonds, BBC News.

And a Merry Christmas to you too Tom! 

Events at Belmarsh

The BBC is being criticised for making a big deal about the allegations of "assault" by prison officers against Michael Adebolajo, one of the suspects in the brutal killing of Drummer Lee Rigby. The allegations were made by Adebolajo's younger brother, Jeremiah, in an interview with the BBC's Tom Symonds.  

Some people are criticising the BBC for reporting the story at all; but surely it is news - however angry people might feel at the BBC for reporting it - as the allegations against the five prison officers, if true, would be serious ones. (If true).

Circumstances, of course, unfortunately do not allow the five officers their public say on the matter at the moment, so their side of the story is necessarily going under-reported.

That's why I have have my own doubts about whether the interview with Michael Adebolajo's brother should have been accorded such prominence on the BBC News website, or whether the Today programme should have given its prestigious 8.10 spot over to the story on Saturday.

Shouldn't it have been reported much less prominently, in the interests of sensitivity, fairness and impartiality?

Yes, other [privately-financed] media organisation also made a big deal of the story. Due to its unique system of public funding, however, that could very well provoke a 'So what? The BBC has a public duty to behave better than privately-funded media outlets, doesn't it? And, unlike every other media outlet - except for the Guardian/Observer - the BBC were the only ones who chose to interview the highly-partial Jeremiah Adebolajo about the incident.

The Daily Mail, as might have been expected, is firmly on the BBC's case over this. It doesn't mention that the Observer also interviewed Jeremiah Adebolajo for their own report. Only the BBC is in the Mail's cross-hairs here, naturally:

Fury at BBC over claims Woolwich suspect was assaulted: Prison officers condemn news report of incident as a 'circus'

Prison officers have reacted with fury to claims from Woolwich murder suspect Michael Adebolajo that he was ‘assaulted’ while in prison.

The man accused of hacking to death Fusilier Lee Rigby in the street was involved in a violent incident in Belmarsh high security jail last week in which he lost two teeth.

In an interview with BBC News over the weekend, Adebolajo’s brother Jeremiah claimed warders in the prison ‘took offence’ when the remand prisoner refused to obey an instruction and then ‘smashed his head against a window’.

The BBC also reported the claim – denied by Prison Service officials – that the murder suspect had been denied medical treatment. 

Officials insisted he had refused to be seen by a doctor.

The report also claimed the suspension of five officers involved in the incident was ‘exceptional’, and hinted the assault might have been the result of Adebolajo’s ‘notoriety’.

But yesterday the prison officers’ union condemned reporting of the incident as a ‘circus’.

And sources suggested the officers had felt threatened after Adebolajo refused to comply with orders and turned towards them aggressively.

The online report the Daily Mail is describing is this one:

Adebolajo pushed against window, brother claims

Woolwich murder suspect Michael Adebolajo was forcefully pushed against a window by prison officers, knocking out two of his teeth, his brother has claimed in an interview with the BBC.

Jeremiah Adebolajo said he spoke to his brother on an almost daily basis.

One thing that struck me as quite unusual for the BBC is that the headline lacked the corporation's familiar quotation marks. Compare the BBC's headline with ITV's Woolwich suspect's 'head hit window', brother claims. The use of quotation marks as 'scare marks' as much as merely 'quote marks' is a tool the BBC uses very often to emphasize that it is only a claim. It's interesting that they chose not to use them here.

What you won't find in that BBC report now is the claim  that the suspension of five officers involved in the incident was "exceptional", as mentioned by the Daily Mail. 

That's because the BBC has edited the article and removed the offending word. 

You can see that from the excellent News Sniffer site, which tracks amendments to BBC articles. The first version included the sentence, "Prison Service procedures state that this should only happen in 'exceptional cases'." That was removed ('stealth edited', some might say) around nine hours later, presumably because it seems to have been untrue - given that Sky News was reporting on Friday that "During an investigation of this kind, the suspension of staff is standard practice, the Ministry of Justice said" - as the Prison Officers Association are also saying.

The word is, however, still in the video report which features in the article. 'Stealth editing' a video would be a lot harder.