Warming up Obama - The BBC's Complaints Procedure Revealed: Part 2

As I said in Part 1 of this post, by the time that Dave of the BBC Trust had confirmed that my complaint had been forwarded to BBC Management I had received an initial response from them. Given that they had received the documentation on 9^th February and they replied on the 11^th February, this was pretty quick. But as I have said previously, their attempt to justify what was broadcast in Susan Watts’ report for Newsnight on 20^th January was totally implausible:Thank you for your email regarding ‘Newsnight’ which was broadcast on 20^th January.

Your correspondence has been forwarded by the Trust Unit to BBC Information for a reply on behalf of the BBC’s Executive as it concerns matters which are the responsibility of the Executive, rather than the Trust, in the first instance. This department, BBC Information, has a wealth of knowledge about BBC programmes and policies and is experienced in the workings of the Corporation and so is authorised to reply on behalf of the BBC’s Executive.

I understand you felt that Susan Watts’ report on Barack Obama’s plans for the environment edited clips of his inauguration address in a way that was misleading.

This was one part of a 50 minute programme exploring the start of the Obama presidency from various angles. ‘Newsnight’ edited sections of the speech to reflect the elements in it that referred to science as a way to give people an impression or montage of what President Obama said about science in his inauguration speech.

This was signposted to audiences with fades between each point. It in no way altered the meaning or misrepresented what the President was saying. the report then went on to explore the challenges facing the President in this area.

I appreciate that you had serious concerns about the editing of the speech and I have registered your complaint on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for the ‘Newsnight’ production team and all programme makers within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the corporation.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

Barry Graham
BBC Complaints

Even ignoring the complacent and condescending tone, this seemed a pretty low level response so I resigned myself to moving on to a higher level of management where a more objective view might be found, and decisions taken. So I emailed the following response to Mr Graham:

Thank you for your message of  11^th February concerning my complaint of 22^nd January 2009 about Susan Watts Newsnight report on President Obama’s inaugural speech, which was  broadcast on  20^th January 2009.

The argument that the three fragments of President Obama’s speech were signposted by fades is clearly unsustainable. No one listing to the ‘sound bite’, as broadcast, would have recognised any such signposts.

The first sentence spoken by Susan Watts, which immediately followed the ‘sound bite’, was “President Obama couldn’t have been clearer today “. This reinforced the impression that the ‘sound bite’ had been reproduced verbatim from the speech.

In fact each of the three element of the ‘sound bite’ is quoted out of context, and at no point in the speech is there any statement that even approximates to what the viewer apparently heard the president saying.

It is quite without foundation to claim that viewers were not misled by this report.

Your response also suggests that the BBC considers the matter to be of minor importance as “This was one part of a 50 minute programme exploring the start of the Obama presidency from various angles.” This implies that duration is more important than content, which it clearly is not.

I also note that your response makes no reference to my request for a correction and apology.

I would be grateful if you would let me know how many complaints about this report were received by the BBC.

Please refer this matter to the Editorial Complaints Unit for review and confirm that you have done so.

Yours sincerely

Job done, or so I thought, but I had not allowed for the BBC’s highly individual way of interacting with viewers who might be impertinent enough to question some aspect of their output. When I checked my email later in the day, I found this:

This is an automated response from the BBC.

We are sorry, but our email system can only receive your email if it is
submitted using our pre-formatted webform. We realise this is an
inconvenience, but webforms allow us to manage the many emails we receive
each day more efficiently and this makes best use of the Licence Fee.

Please resend your reply or message using our webform at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/ (click on’ Contact Us’). If we have
previously given you a reference number, please include this.

Thank you

BBC

Of course its not unusual for organisations like the BBC to use no-reponse email addresses when they are sending out material like announcements or newsletters to mailing lists, but they are usually rather careful to warn recipients that they have done so and spare them the frustration and wasted time of trying to respond to an address that does not accept incoming mail. This email did not contain any such warning. And Mr Graham had not sent me a circular. He had sent a highly contentious reply to a carefully framed complaint, and it must have been clear that this would not be the end of the matter. Anyway, there seemed no alternative but to head for the form that the BBC had provided a link to.

Problem number one: asking me to include a reference number seemed like a very good idea as I was referring to previous correspondence, and I expect that their website receives a great many messages each day, but of course Mr Graham had failed to provide one. I wonder why?

Worse, he had mis-spelled my surname, a common occurrence as it is almost, but not quite, identical to the name of a well-known town in the South of England. So it seemed probable that my complaint would have been logged under the wrong name. Then things got even more complicated.

On the BBC website I copied my original email into the box helpfully labeled ‘Feedback’. This is what it looked like:

All formatting had disappeared, some punctuation had been replaced by numeric character codes, and generally speaking my message had been effortlessly reduced to gibberish submitted under a name that the system would probably not recognise and without any reference number to link my reply to the original letter from the BBC.

Apart from re-typing my message into the form, the kind of chore that I thought computers were meant to eliminate, there seemed to be no alternative but to hit the ‘Submit’. button. So that is what I did.

It is now a month since I submitted my complaint by email. I wonder what the situation will be in a month’s time?