Back in February I posted about BBC Newsnight – Warming up President Obama’s inaugural speech?  Aunty’s flagship current affairs magazine programme had taken three isolated phrases out of context from the speech and cobbled them together into what appeared to be a verbatim statement on global warming. This digitally created sound bite had then been used as an introduction to a report by Susan Watts, Newsnight’s Science Editor, which was recorded before the text of the speech became available, and evidently on the assumption that climate change would be a major feature in what the president had to say. In the event no single sentence in the speech, let alone a whole paragraph, was devoted to this subject.

I made a complaint about this and have also posted on various responses that the BBC have given me (here). The most recent one was a letter from the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) which I discussed here. Evidently the ECU were comfortable with what Newsnight had done, but perhaps they were unaware of the reaction to what became known as ‘splicegate’ in the great wide world outside their comfortable offices.

A vast number of blogs and web sites all over the world had picked up the story, as well as some of the MSM.  Not least was a site in the US with the quaint name (to British ears) of StinkeyJournalism, which seems to be a pretty fearsome watchdog on journalistic ethics over there. North Americans have a high regard for the BBC, and are shocked when it fails to live up to expectations. Continue reading »