Whatever you make of the slur on Band Aid, the BBC’s apology to Sir Bob must have posed a dilemma.
On the one hand, one of their favourite enterprises, fundraising for charities, fronted by one of their favourite personalities, Sir Bob Geldof.
On the other hand, one of the BBC’s most intransigent internal organisations, the complaints department indoors which must be obeyed.
So the complaints department eventually capitulated, and Sir Bob was sufficiently appeased to refer to the episode as ‘an unusual lapse in standards.’
One thing certainly emerged. The admission that though the programme allegedly didn’t actually accuse Sir Bob directly, deliberately playing their music throughout. smeared Band Aid by association.
“We acknowledge that some of our related reporting of the story reinforced this perception”
Michael Grade spluttering “outrageous” on Today, as though deliberately manipulating programmes to look a particular way never happened in broadcasting.
I think you have possibly missed an angle. They actually like to make a big fuss about how they are appologising from time to time – ‘see how we fess up, course we’re impartial’ , blah blah.
Note they choose a scruffy, lefty, former celeb and a cause no one gives a flying fuck about , to appologise for.
Hell just might freeze over before they appologise to someone like Lord Ashcroft for persistently trying to damage his reputation.
Backwoodsman,
This topic is bristling with aspects and angles! I couldn’t begin to tackle a fraction of them. So many angles, so little time.
For instance,
I suspect that substantial amounts of charity money does go to warfare.
I suspect that the BBC complaints department closes ranks and procrastinates right to the bitter end.
I suspect that Michael Grade is a dick.
I suspect that self-interest has coloured Bob Geldof ‘s view of the BBC’s “standards”.
Most of all, I’m sure that the BBC should not be manipulating, damning people and things by association and innuendo, unless they’ve got much more than the proverbial shred of evidence to back it up.
What this incident shows is how obdurate the BBC complaints system is. Even with a high-profile complainant (who appears to have been in the right, to be fair to the unctious Sir Bob) the BBC took 7 whole months to finally apologise for the slurs.
That apology should have been forthcoming within a couple of weeks of the complaint.
Of course Michael Grade presided over the BBC – and was therefore responsible in his time for the designed-to-obstruct-and-delay complaints system.
Even were the BBC so minded GeldorfGate will definitively stymie any ambition (as if!) by the BBC to highlight the blatant corruption involved in taxpayer funded international aid programmes. Even Prospect Magazine is dubious about increased DfID expenditure as remarked here http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/05/bad-aid/
Accordingly, although the BBC has retired hurt from this episode it will, I’m sure, increase pumping out its feel-good messages in respect of Comic Relief and Save the Children. BTW why are those charities chosen by the impartial state broadcaster to receive not only massive free publicity but the organisational substructure to channel the resultant donations? Why doesn’t the BBC support something less photogenic, closer to home and, arguably, more worthy, like, for instance, the Alzheimer’s Society? Assistance to charities with mainly domestic beneficiaries would, moreover, have the added benefit that the BBC would be unlikely to recycle its preening self-regard by showing celebrities enjoying junkets to warm countries with the attendant useful publicity which, literally, money couldn’t buy.
And besides, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
BBC’s Children in Need funded 7/7 terrorist propaganda, says Newsnight
That link seems down. Pity, I’d like to share it with ’em.
But wasn’t the intent of the original BBC report to state that some money was diverted to buy arms for rebel groups? Why are they now equivocating and saying they’re sorry if they gave that impression, but they didn’t mean to? It was meant to be a statement, not something the viewer might have been helped to infer.
Why else would Tim Whitehead have said at the time that he “stood by the report”? I call BS.
Wow, the News Channel is doing a whole segment explaining their apology to St. Bob. And it’s still waffling between “we didn’t mean it”, and “there is evidence, the BBC stands by the thrust of the reporting”.
They must really have decided that it’s too much work to prove their reporting was right or wrong.
The dilemma is that they don’t want to offend Sir Bob and they don’t want to scapegoat the journalists who made the programme, so they’ve had to apologise for the innuendo. As it happens, I think smearing by innuendo is a very bad habit and their admission is significant.
Either they were accusing Band Aid of being careless with the donations or they were not. If they were, they needed credible evidence, which obviously they had not got. Innuendo alone is just not acceptable.
If they have proof of charitable donations getting into the wrong hands, which no doubt they have, why discredit their whole investigation by smearing a target they haven’t any evidence against? Lazy? Sloppy?
It has certainly shed light on the complaints procedure. We always knew complaints from ‘ordinary’ people had a cat in hell’s chance of being upheld.
No evidence? I wonder….
But the BBC should apologise, bunch of swine, so they are…
The interviews with Michael Grade and with Sir Bob (in the first link) are truly amazing. In each one a sanctimonious Beeboid keep trying to argue that black equals white. Sir Bob even accuses him of patronising, and comes within a whisker of accusing him of lying (which they were, of course). How he kept from punching the denying twit on the nose, I shall never know.
It’s not as if the original programme showed any degree of reputable journalism worth defending. Beeb journalism is really going down the tubes, and increasingly they are not even trying to hide their contempt for anything that they disagree with.
Quite extraordinary.
So is the BBC going to apologise for their massive screw up on Newsnight the other evening when they got some retarded twat to lie about not having a job?
When is the BBC going to apologize for slandering millions of people in the US on a regular basis?