In April, the BBC told me that my complaint about the out-of-context splicing of phrases from President Obama’s inaugural speech in a Newsnight report by Susan Watts would be considered by the Editorial Complaints Unit. They have now replied at some length:
Further to our earlier acknowledgement of your letter of 17 March, we’ve now had a chance to watch a recording of the Newsnight programme in question, review the previous correspondence and discuss your complaint within the unit.
As Alison Wilson outlined in her letter of 8 April, we considered your complaint in terms of the BBC’s editorial guidelines on Accuracy, one of the main principles of which is that BBC programme makers should not distort facts or knowingly do anything to mislead audiences. I note that you wrote again in response to Ms Wilson’s letter, and that you feel we should extend our consideration to the guidelines on impartiality and that the piece represents a breach of the Agreement that accompanies the BBC’s Charter. In the case of the latter I should explain that the remit of this unit extends only to the consideration of whether items broadcast or published by the BBC may represent a serious breach of the editorial guidelines. With regard to extending our consideration, my view that the issue of impartiality would only arise if the report was inaccurate in the way you suggest, and I should say at the outset that I don’t believe it was.
Newsnight identified three key areas that the President acknowledged in his speech presented him with particular challenges and headlined them “Diplomacy”, “Environment” and “Economy”. Each of the three reports drew on the expertise of the relevant BBC specialist correspondent to explore the issues in greater depth. As you have outlined in your complaint, the order in which the three lines from the speech were broadcast as the introduction to Susan Watts’ report on the environment didn’t mirror their respective positions in the speech as it was delivered; the middle one. ” … roll back the spectre of a warming planet”, having been part of a later paragraph in the speech than the other two.
In considering the manner in which the phrases were juxtaposed we considered that, while it could perhaps have been made a little clearer that they came from different parts of the speech, there had been no intention to edit them in such a way as to deceive viewers into thinking that this was one consecutive sound bite, and that viewers would not necessarily have formed that impression. The visual backdrop rolled over into a slightly different view of Kew’s Temperate House as the clips played out and there were discernable pauses between them. It’s also worth noting that in quoting the text of the broadcast in your letter you’ve reinserted in brackets the word “and” before “roll back the spectre of a warming planet “. Had it been Newsnight’s intention to suggest the piece was one consecutive sound bite they could have done so more effectively by retaining the word “and’, but they didn’t.
Turning to the context in which the phrases were included in the original speech and how Newsnight’s editing of them may have altered that context, I can’t agree with your view that the clause “We will restore science to its rightful place” must be read as referring exclusively to healthcare. Although the clause which immediately followed it did indeed refer to healthcare, it was followed in turn by a sentence about harnessing the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel cars and run factories. So I think it is clear that the President was also encompassing environmental issues in his consideration of the increased part he envisaged science would play in his decisionmaking during his term in office.
The fact that the clause included as the middle of the three Newsnight clips was taken from the context of another part of the speech doesn’t necessarily mean that its sense was altered. The part of the speech in question addressed issues of diplomacy, and the full sentence reads “With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the spectre of a warming planet”. It seems to me that the natural understanding of this is that the President viewed the threat from nuclear weapons and the prospect of global warming as two examples of problems which could be addressed by international co-operation, rather than as being causally linked as you suggest.
In answer to what I take to be the point behind the question in numbered paragraph 11 of your letter, I can confirm that Susan Watts’ piece at Kew was filmed before the President had delivered his speech, and hence before any version of the speech was available. However, for the reasons given above, I don’t believe the material added to the item when the speech became available was edited misleadingly.
I therefore don’t believe I have grounds for upholding your complaint, but if you feel there are further points I should consider I’ll be happy to do so. In any event, mine is not necessarily the last word on the matter, as it would be open to you to ask the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust to review my finding if you remained dissatisfied with it.
I will ask them what the precise duration of the ‘discernable pauses’ were between the phrases cobbled together from the speech before I reply. But what is more interesting is the aspects of the complaint that this letter ignores. There is no mention of Susan Watts’ opening remark: ‘President Obama couldn’t have been clearer today…..’ which reinforced the impression that what viewers had just heard was a verbatim quotation from the speech. There is no mention of Section 46 of the Agreement with Sectretary of State for Culture Media and the Arts which forbids the use of techniques that viewers may not be aware of. There is no explanation as to why Newsnight used a sound only recording rather than video, in which case it would have been obvious to viewers that the phrases were not related. And more.
Perhaps it is also worth noting that in spite of Susan Watts’ claim that the president couldn’t have been clearer, most of this long letter is taken up with attempting to determine just what the president might, or might not, have said about global warming. It looks as though there is way to go yet, and that the BBC finds some questions more difficult to answer than others.
Thanks, Tony! Round 2 will commence shortly.
You might also be interested to learn that I now have a reply from the Government to my letter re the Climate Change Act that became law in the UK last year. It’s much too long to post as a comment here, so I’ve put it on my blog.
TonyN: I’ve moved your comment here from the previous BBC Newsnight thread.
Alex
Thanks for making that public.
So we now know that the government’s global warming policy is underpinned by blind faith in Stocker’s CO2 reconstruction, in spite of unresolved issues concerning resolution, and the output of GCMs, the validity of which is questioned even within mainstream climate science.
It’s also interesting that your correspondence spans the onset of the recession, but that the minister’s reply gives no indication that the economic landscape has changed radically since the bill was passed and you wrote your letter. Setting the world an example may have been a luxury that the UK could afford to indulge in during the good times, but now … ?
Tony, your persistence is admirable and you seem to be making some progress. It is interesting that they are now implicitly acknowledging that Newsnight editor Peter Rippon’s statement about ‘fades’ was not true. Now they speak of “discernable pauses” (shouldn’t that be “ible”?). Indeed there were slight pauses between the phrases – exactly as there would have been if Obama had delivered them consecutively as part of a speech!
It’s an open and shut case: the clip did “mislead audiences” and sooner or late they will have to admit this. Most listeners would have thought it was a continuous speech.
“Had it been Newsnight’s intention to suggest the piece was one consecutive sound bite they could have done so more effectively by retaining the word ‘and’, but they didn’t.”
They really are dancing on the head of a pin, aren’t they? Their defence seems to be that because they could have made the splices even more seamless, they are innocent of deception!
I would be willing to bet that 99% of those who watched the item believed that those were the words spoken, unedited, if only because most of them would not have imagined the BBC capable of such covert manipulation.
The Murdoch press must love this. :-(
Tony,
This is nothing better than I would have expected. Through all of my efforts (still) to persuade Mark Thompson to get off his backside, these long-winded excuses defending their position are, I’m afraid, their stock-in-trade.
The stark truth is they will not move one iota from the party line on climate change.
Yertizz
I’m sure that you are right; deeply ingrained preconceived ideas about AGW are very much a feature of the BBC scene. On the other hand, at some level I believe that they will have to accept that the Newsnight report did not measure up to their declared standards. And this complaint has yet to reach the top.
There used to be something called the Broadcasting Standards Commission, which did sometimes find that the BBC acted unfairly—and required public amending by the BBC. The BSC has been replaced by OfCom. I think (but am not sure) that the relevant page is
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/audience_complaints/
I hope you keep at this.
Joe Blow
At the moment I am waiting for a reply (one reminder so far) to an inquiry about the precise duration of the ‘discernable [sic] pauses’ which the Editorial Complaints Unit claims were inserted between the quotes from the president’s speech. When I receive this I will reply to their letter which does not deal adequately with all the issues raised in the complaint. Frustrating though it is, there is no alternative to following the BBC’s labyrinthine complaints procedure and only when each stage has been exhausted is it possible to move on to the next one. In this case that would be the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust.
Regarding the pauses, you could perhaps go out on some street and question passers-by about what they think. Phrase the question carefully, so as not to be leading. Certainly for me, there is nothing to indicate the truth. And the idea that the accompanying video indicates the truth is so absurd as to suggest that they are desperate.
Also, I suggest dropping the “[and]” in your transcription, perhaps replacing that by a long dash, “—”.
Joe
I have no idea whether the BBC are disparate or not, but their explanations so far are certainly not convincing. So far as the [and] is concerned, I thought that I could detect an indistinct slur at that point in the recording, which might indicate that ‘and’ had not been fully edited out. That is why added [and] to my transcript, and I will mention this when the time comes.
TonyN says: And this complaint has yet to reach the top.
Sounds as if you are as determined as me to get Thompson to respond…..Good luck!
Yertizz
Thanks!
Keep at it:
noli illegetimi carborandum…..
I am in the middle of a complaint about climate change coverage by the Today programme, regarding an item broadcast back in December by Roger Harrabin. Ceri Thomas, the editor, has just sent out an extraordinarily arrogant reply which is of relevance to your battle with the BBC.
He states: “I agree that the number of scientists who back the theory of global wamring does not make that theory true. But that is not the issue. It is the quality of those making the arguments and the research backing up their case which the BBC – and Today – must consider before deciding how to balance its coverage. And I can only reiterate that if we are to offer ‘due impartiality’we have to accept that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on one side”.
So that’s it then. The BBC knows the argument by sceptics is lost because they are not of high enough quality.
David:
I’d be very interested to know what the subject of your complaint is. Which item was it?
You might ask him what he means by ‘the quality of those making the arguments’ and how he knows that ‘the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on one side’. Hearsay is not reliable evidence of anything.
It would be very interesting to know whether Ceri Thomas attended the BBC’s climate change seminar that seems to have determined editorial policy on climate change in January 2006, and if so, who the ‘best scientific experts’ who they have relied on where. And you might even ask why the BBC are so unwilling to reveal who did attend that seminar.
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=109
Tony,
If you send me an email address, I will forward the full complaint and the responses to date. They are far too long to post in this section of the site. You will see that they are an object lesson in obfuscation. My guess is that Ceri Thomas would have been there. It sounds from his tone that he was. I will certainly take up your suggestion at the next stage of the complaint, which – as you well know – is a submission to the Trustees.