BBC BIAS DIGEST 13 OCTOBER 2020

UPHELD BBC COMPLAINANT ‘IN SHOCK’: Charles Moore (£ Telegraph 13/10, second column item) outlined how a correspondent was ‘in shock’ after a complaint she had submitted directly to director general Tim Davie – bypassing the usual complaints procedure – had been upheld in fewer than three weeks. Mr Moore said the woman had complained that BBC Parliament’s coverage of the Internal Market Bill (linked to Brexit) was usually free of running commentary by analysts, but on this occasion , the ‘information captions’ running below the live feed of the parliamentary proceedings had been devoted to ‘a series of condemnations of the man introducing the Bill’, the prime minister. He added:

 

‘This is what the BBC complaints team – not Mr Davie in person, but presumably acting on his orders – replied:

“We didn’t live up to our usual standards. The accumulation of detailed quotes condemning the Government’s plans… gave the impression that we were only interested in criticisms of the Bill. The proper purpose of the information captions on screen is to give supporting information to enable the viewer to understand the legal processes involved in legislation, as well as key information relating to the content of the debate… Where political comments are quoted from, these should be deployed on screen specifically where those comments are referred to by the Member speaking. We didn’t do this in this case and we understand your annoyance and apologise.”

‘I would be grateful to hear from other readers who may have had a satisfactory answer from the BBC. It is a genre with which I am not familiar.’

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