Following on from my last post about the problems of making a complaint to the BBC about Susan Watt’s report on President Obama’s inauguration speech on Newsnight, time continued to slip by.Given the way in which my response to Mr Graham’s message had been mangled when I tried to send it via the BBC Complaints website, I hardly expected it receive a reply. So I searched around for some way of moving things on.Eventually I found that the BBC has a Complaints Coordinator, and I sent him the following message:
A month ago I attempted to make a complaint to the BBC concerning
Susan Watts´ report on President Obama´s inaugural speech, broadcast
by Newsnight on 20th January 2009. The extraordinary progress of this
matter through the BBC´s complaint system is reported on my blog
here:http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=157
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=158
Would you please provide me with contact details of someone who can
help resolve this matter without further waste of time and
embarrassment to the BBC. All I want to do is respond to the message
that I received form Mr Graham of BBC Complaints and move on to the
next stage in the complaints procedure.I would be grateful for your help.
I pressed the send button at 12:55 on Monday 23rd February and just eight minutes later, at 13:03, the following reply had reached my mailbox:
Thanks for your e-mail.
I’ve had a look on our system and we have your latest correspondence (see
below) which we recevied on 16th Feb.I’ll ask my colleagues to look into where we are in terms of offering you
a second reply and someone will get back to you as soon as we can.Thanks
This definitely looked like a step in the right direction, and I expected to hear more before the end of the day. When nothing had turned up by the following afternoon, I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps the BBC might be taking the matter seriously. Could it be that they were actually trying to find a way of addressing the issues that I had raised in my complaint? Perhaps it would be unwise to try and rush things and I should give them a week before trying again.
In fact a response arrived on the following Friday:
Thanks for your further correspondence regarding ‘Newsnight’ broadcast on 20 January.
I’m sorry you were dissatisfied with the previous response; however there’s genuinely not a great deal we can add to what we’ve already explained. Regarding the amount of complaints we received about this, we received a small number of complaints expressing a range of views about Susan Watts’ report on Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. I should also point out that this office doesn’t distinguish between the significance of one complaint and hundreds of complaints about a particular issue – we treat both of equal importance.
If you believe a serious and specific breach of the BBC’s published Editorial Guidelines has occurred here and you wish to pursue this complaint further, you are open to contact the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit who will independently investigate it. You can write to them at the following address:
Of course there are various nits in this which one could very easily be picked: for instance is ‘I’m sorry you were dissatisfied with the previous response,’ really meant to sound petulant and irritating, and to what extent can an organisation like BBC Management ‘independently investigate’ a complaint that has been made about its output? Do they consult anyone outside the corporation I wonder? And why have they told me that they received a small number of complaints about Susan Watts’ report when I asked them quite specifically how many they had received? Just how is ‘a small number’ defined? My original complaint asked for a correction and an apology on Newsnight, but so far no one at the BBC seems willing to even mention this.
At the end of Thursday’s edition of Newsnight, the presenter, Gavin Esler, informed his audience that the program had won the prize for innovation at the Royal Television Society Awards. If airtime can be made available for self-congratulation, then surely it should also be available to make amends when something goes wrong.
But the main point in this message, that the BBC has nothing to add to the thoroughly implausible explanation that I received from Mr Graham, is very interesting.
So I will write to the BBC Complaints Unit.
I’m sure they can say they received “a range of views”, however I suspect that the filming of a random greenhouse which hid the seamless splicing of the newly inaugurated U.S. President speech to create a totally new meaning that suited the skewed editorial line of their piece was the most common point of contention.
If I was going to offer constructive criticism to the BBC I would recommend that they should in future incorporate a rule where if video is available of a speech, they should always use it, because after this ‘signposted’ occasion I for one won’t feel sure I believe my ears unless I see it as well ;)
Good luck with the complaints unit.
Tony, I admire your persistence and hope that you will get some sort of proper response in the end. I’m still waiting for a reply to my own complaint.
A few observations. Firstly, if you explore the BBC complaints page, you will find a list of various matters which have caused people to complain to the BBC. There are some there that you would expect: Gaza appeal, Ross/Brand, Carol Thatcher. There are some other matters which have evidently caused a number of viewers to write in – the changes in Scotland to broadcasting schedules for Spooks, for example, and the rescheduling of Ski Sunday due to the snooker overrunning. But the BBC’s manipulation of Obama’s inauguration speech to create a false impression? It doesn’t appear.
On the complaints page, it states that these are “recent issues of wide audience concern which caused significant numbers of complaints or raised significant issues.” Therefore, the absence of the Obama speech complaint would either mean that too few people had complained, or that it was a relatively trivial matter. It’s interesting that the BBC haven’t answered your question, Tony, about how many have complained. I’m wondering how the number compares, let’s say, to the number of people who contacted them about the rescheduling of Ski Sunday. It would be helpful if they showed the numbers somewhere, but I don’t think they have done so.
Even if the number by itself was not large enough for this to appear on the complaints radar, the seriousness of the matter should have ensured that it was listed. I think that splicing audio records to misrepresent the words of a head of state is somewhat more of a lapse in standards than letting coverage of a snooker match overrun. And for a presumably non-serious matter, it has certainly had a serious impact on the Newsnight science blog. The “restoring science” thread has currently just under 100 comments, far more than any of the other threads; most of these comments have been critical of the broadcast and requesting an answer. Apart from Peter Rippon’s response on 24th January (which has not gone very far to address the issue), there has been no other comment, either by Peter Rippon or Susan Watts, concerning this matter. In fact I don’t think Susan Watts has responded at all. Neither has she updated the blog since 26th January, well over a month ago now. The most recent post (“Bad Blood evidence still under wraps”) has received only 4 comments so far, and two of those are more about the Obama speech.
In short, it appears the BBC have totally clammed up over this. I wonder what on Earth they’re thinking.
Alex
Claims that the elements in the ‘montage’ were signposted and that the beginning of Susan Watts’ report did not misrepresent what was said in the inaugural speech are clearly unsustainable. So far I have been dealing with the complaints department, which simply relays what the progamme makers have to say about the problem.
The Editorial Complaints Unit is supposed to investigate what the programme makers did, and I think that this should move things on. The bottom line is that I have asked for a correction and an apology on Newsnight, and under the circumstances this is a perfectly reasonable request.
At some point the BBC have to either justify what was done on Newsnight or take remedial action in the form of a correction. As this matter concerns impartiality, the ultimate authority within the BBC lies with the BBC Trust, and they will have to be convinced too. In order to dismiss my complaint, the Editorial Complaints Unit must demonstrate that the matter has been investigated properly and that there was no breach of editorial guidelines which derive from the BBC Charter and the agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport of 2006. I think that this will be very difficult to do.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/appeals/index.html
this might also be of interest:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/esc_bulletins/2008/december.pdf
this includes the complaint about Walker, which was rejected or minimised at several stages, before being (partially) accepted.
per
Per
Many thanks and it certainly is interesting. I’ve only glanced at the report so far but this caught my eye:
Given the complexity and snail like pace of the BBC’s complaints procedure, I wonder how often that is achieved?
To be fair, the ‘splicegate’ incident seems to involve far more than inadvertent inaccuracy. I cannot think of a scenario in which President Obama’s speech could have been mangled inadvertently and without those involved being very well aware of the effect of what they were doing. And this raises serious questions concerning impartiality, a far more complex issue.