Yesterday the BBC published a story from unnamed sources that the government had asked energy firms to freeze their prices.
This was untrue…and yet the BBC kept reporting it as fact whilst at the same time admitting the Government had denied the story.
And they are still reporting it as fact.
If you have been listening to the radio you may have heard the frequent advert trumpeting 5Live’s ‘excellence’ (09:50:30) based on that report:
‘The Government has asked the Big Six energy firms not to put up electricity and gas bills until the middle of 2015 unless there is a major jump in wholesale prices. Shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint is with us in the studio….’
“Energy companies you know, don’t buy energy today for tomorrow, they buy it years in advance, actually, whereas wholesale prices have gone down in recent years and in some recent years flat lined, we as customers haven’t benefited.
We think it’s important to freeze prices because people have been overcharged but importantly we need to reform the way the market works.”
Call me old fashioned but when a story is concocted by the BBC, and only the BBC, from unnamed (and still unnamed) sources on the day that the Labour Party is launching its price freeze pledge, a story that makes it look like the government is adopting Labour’s policy, and the story is vigorously denied by the Government, and common sense would say the story was untrue, then you have to ask why the BBC has decided to select a clip reporting something that is untrue as being true and has then also added to that a soundbite from a Labour spokesperson outlining Labour’s policies.
It sounds remarkably more like a Labour Party political broadcast than a trail for the BBC…though possibly always hard to tell the difference, the News Quiz today having a relentless barrage of anti-Right jokes and not a single anti-Left one, oddly enough.
The fact that the story has basically vanished from the news after a day when the BBC blitzed us with reports, news bulletins and ‘analysis’ about this says a lot about how solid any evidence for it was…and the intentions behind the strategy.
Is this the future of ‘news’ on the BBC until the election? A storm of false, anti-government reports whipped up using baseless ‘evidence’ and speculation from unnamed sources, and all maligning the government whilst timed conveniently to damage the government precisely when it also does the most good for Labour?