The BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee has finally published its findings on the complaint that I made last January about Newsnight’s reporting of President Obama’s inaugural speech. The ESC is the last stage in the BBC’s complaints process. Their decision is final and unchallengeable.
I set out the events which prompted this complaint in a post headed BBC Newsnight – Warming up President Obama’s inaugural speech? Briefly, the complaint was about a report by Susan Watts’ that was introduced with a seemingly continuous sound recording from the speech, but which was in fact concocted from three isolated phrases, taken from different parts of the speech, that had been spliced together. While the screen showed views of Kew Gardens, the audience heard the new president say:
We will restore science to its rightful place, [and] roll back the spectre of a warming planet. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Followed by Susan Watts saying:
President Obama couldn’t have been clearer today.
But this assertion referred not to something that the president had actually said, but to a manufactured quotation from the speech. In fact it was clear from the speech, which took some twenty minutes to deliver, that Obama had avoided saying anything much about global warming. There is not one complete sentence in the speech devoted to this subject, which is why the Newsnight team had to scavenge for the odd phrases that would fit their report.
An open and shut case of misleading the viewers you might think, but over the last year I have pursued this seemingly egregious breach of the editorial standards through three successive layers of the BBC complaints procedure without anyone being prepared to acknowledge that there might be a problem. There were repeated assertions that the audience must have been aware that this was a sound montage because there were ‘discernible pauses’ between the phrases. An appeal to the ESC is the ultimate stage of the appeals process.
This is what the report has to say about the ‘montage’ of phrases from the president’s speech:
Members recognised that the complainant was concerned that the clips were run in such a way so as to make the broadcasted extracts seem a coherent single piece of audio.
….
The Committee noted that when watching the item, it had not been aware of fades nor had it been aware of gaps used as a production technique to indicate disconnection between the three elements of the speech.
The Committee was concerned that presenting the extracts of the speech in the way that Newsnight had edited the material did run the risk of showing insufficient respect for the material. Any programme, especially news and current affairs, was expected to take appropriate care when editing not to mislead the audience. The Committee was concerned that in this case the programme had not provided sufficient information to the audience in the presentation of the speech for the viewer to have fully realised that the quote was made out of three separate extracts from the speech.
So on the main finding of fact, that phrases from different parts of the speech had been spliced together in a way that was not apparent to the audience, the ESC is clearly upholding my complaint. However by the end of a twelve-page report, the ESC has convinced itself, if no one else, that this is not a breech of editorial standards.
The script had given some impression, the Committee thought[,] that President Obama had spoken at length about science although actually the speech had been almost exclusively about foreign policy and the economy. But the Committee’s careful examination of the speech text led them to conclude that the piece had not breached the accuracy and impartiality guidelines as it had, correctly, highlighted the references about the environment and the change of policy in science in the speech. The Committee was satisfied given the content of the programme as a whole, and its own analysis of the speech that the impression had not been created that the environment was more significant in the speech than it actually was.
There are three categories of decision available to the ESC: a complaint can be upheld, partially upheld and not upheld. On the main finding of fact, that the ‘montage’ appeared to be a continuous sound bite, they accepted my arguments, and to this extent the audience was clearly misled. It is therefore very difficult to see how they reached a decision of ‘not upheld’ verdict, but not impossible. In the submissions I have made to the BBC over the last year I have repeatedly stressed the following issues, which the report either ignores or fails to respond adequately to all of them:
1) Not a single sentence, let alone a paragraph in the speech is devoted to global warming, or any other environmental issue for that matter.
2) The BBC Trust’s 2006 agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport requires prohibits ‘ use of techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds, without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred. Sec. 46, (2), (a), (v)
3) Amalgamating phrases from a speech and then quoting them as though they were contiguous would not be acceptable in print journalism. It is no more acceptable when the medium is sound.
4) I have repeatedly asked the BBC to tell me what the precise length of the ‘discernible pauses’ between the phrases is. I have been unable to obtain an answer.
5) Why Newsnight choose to use sound only rather than video, which would have made it clear to viewers that the phrases were not all part of the same passage from the speech.
6) This incident was very damaging to the BBC’s reputation both here and abroad.
7) Is it reasonable to suppose that an experienced production team, such as Newsnight employ, could not have been unaware of the effect on the audience of what they were doing ?
Of course, in the aftermath of Climategate, it would have been extremely embarrassing for the BBC if my complaint relating to climate change had been upheld, even in part. To admit that there had been bias on this subject in one of their flagship current affairs programme’s would result in adverse media comment on a grand scale. But that is no justification for a decision that appears to fly in the face of the facts, just like the Hutton Inquiry.
Lord Reith imposed standards on the BBC that made it the world leader in impartial, accurate, and responsible broadcasting. A series of scandals over the last couple of years has undone much of Reiths work without the management seeming to learn much from the experience. No doubt the Corporation will continue to lurch from one disaster to another until, if there is a change of government in May, the organisation is cut down to size and an aggressively ‘independent’ regulatory system is put in charge of what is left. I, for one, will be sorry if this happens, but it seems inevitable and the BBC will have no one but itself to blame when it happens.
By coincidence, several blogs have recently been discussing a new report commissioned by Oxfam. This features a diagram representing the networks of blogs and main stream news media that were involved in the media storm that launched the Climategate scandal. the diagram is divided in two parts, with the climate sceptical network on the left and the climate alarmist supporters network on the right.
click image to enlarge
The BBC is given pride-of-place on the supporter’s side, as the hub of climate activism, and perhaps that provides the best explanation of the BBC Trust’s extraordinary decision. What price the BBC’s reputation for impartiality now?
Alex:
I can certainly see ‘greedy energy companies’ becoming the focus of a hate campaign during the era of austerity that is bound to follow the election, whoever wins. But will they be able to defend themselves without pointing their fingers at the political policies that have put them in the frame? A nasty dilemma if your company is committed to investment in the ‘green revolution’ which is likely to lead to some interesting boardroom discussions.