here is a BBC Newsnight interview of Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC One, the man who presented the fabricated clip of the Queen to journalists on Wednesday, saying, according to David Silitto’s report, “yes, it looks as though she stormed out”, as he did so.
BBC Newsnight: Peter Fincham interview
BBC Newsnight interview of Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC One
Full post still to follow.
to Her Majesty the Queen after showing journalists a preview trailer implying, actually, lying would be more accurate, that Her Majesty had stormed out of a photo shoot after a dispute with photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Naturally enough, journalists being journalists, saw this clip of the queen apparently storming out of the photo shoot for the major news story it apparently was, and splashed it all over this morning’s newspapers.
Unfortunately, the BBC being the BBC, the truth was very different. The BBC’s clip showed the Queen objecting to Leibovitz’s request for her to remove her tiara, then cut to a clip of the Queen apparently ‘storming out’ of the photo shoot, in which she is heard to say “I’ve had enough with this dressing, I’m not going to change anything”.
The reality was entirely different – the clip of the Queen ‘storming out’ was in fact footage of the Queen arriving for the photo shoot, with the Queen presumably complaining about getting dressed up (hence her quote). During the subsequent photo shoot, when Leibovitz asks Her Majesty to remove her tiara, the Queen appears to object by raising an eyebrow in what appears to be mock exclamation, the tiara being an important part of her regalia.
Following the wall-to-wall newspaper brouhaha the Palace complained to the BBC, who checked out what they should have checked out in the first place, and then issued a grovelling apology for publishing such a malign calumny.
Here are two of the BBC’s own lengthy reports on today’s events:
BBC News 24 this afternoon:
BBC News 24 this afternoon, with David Silitto reporting on the BBC’s apology
The interesting points in David Silitto’s report (above), include the BBC’s statement of apology:
In this trailer there is a sequence that implies the Queen left a sitting prematurely. This was not the case and the actual sequence of events was misrepresented. The BBC would like to apologise to both the Queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused.
…and him explaining that the trailer was a pre-season showing for journalists, at which one of the BBC people presenting the preview (apparently Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC1) said, after showing the clip, “yes, it looks as though she stormed out”.
Silitto also says:
The issue of deception and trust has been said to be an absolute number one priority for the BBC, in fact an email was sent out only a matter of hours ago saying we need to look at every programme over the last few years to be sure, absolutely sure, that in no way we have deceived the public (my emphasis).
It sounds like the email was sent out before this story broke, though that’s not entirely clear. What is clear though is that, if the BBC are to really check back in the way described, then they’ve got their work cut out for them. There are a lot of things they’ll need to check, a lot of them are featured right here in Biased BBC’s own archives. Somehow I expect they’ll just have the most cursory of looks and then report back that there’s nothing to worry about, so that’s alright then.
BBC One’s Six O’Clock News:
This clip has two parts – the first fifteen seconds are from the news headlines at the start of the programme, followed by the full report.
BBC One’s Six O’Clock News, with Razia Iqbal reporting on the BBC’s apology
Interestingly, in contrast to BBC News 24, where they said they couldn’t show the original trailer footage “for understandable reasons”, this report does include the footage shown to journalists, with the sequence in question about 53″ seconds into the Youtube clip.
The report goes on to include a clip of Leigh Holmwood of The Guardian (where else, Beeboids!) on press reaction, Ray Snoddy, a respected journalist and media commentator (also presenter of the BBC’s own Newswatch show), saying:
Ray Snoddy: Coming so soon after the fine over Blue Peter, you’d think somebody at the BBC might have thought this was a rather sensitive subject, and might have been more careful, and might have foreseen a possible row by feeding all of this material to the tabloids, who accepted it with the greatest glee.
…finishing up with a studio discussion between Razia Iqbal and presenters George Alagiah and Natasha Kaplinsky (perched together like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets!), in which Razia Iqbal comes out with:
Razia Iqbal: The other point to make is that broadcasters on the whole feel that they really are up against it in terms of pressure to compete for audiences, so when they launch their highlights for the next season they all want to try and do the best, and clearly this is something that’s happened this time, in trying to highlight something that they think was a real scoop, they’ve not really looked carefully enough at what they were showing, what they were trying to highlight.
Really Razia, do you really think that they were just trying to do their best and that “they’ve not really looked carefully enough at what they were showing”?
Come off it – they manufactured a lie, as simple as that. There is no other way to interpret this devious manipulation of reality, damaging to the reputations of both Her Majesty and Annie Leibovitz. It was a straightforward manufactured lie, and yet you seem content to pass it off as people just trying to do their best and not paying quite enough attention!
Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Her Majesty the Queen:
Annie Leibovitz’s striking portrait of Her Majesty – the finished product
Apologies for the delayed appearance of a post on this momentous story – it has taken some time to capture, edit, process and upload the clips, not to mention transcribing quotes and writing the rest of the post. More to follow tomorrow.
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. Reporter Paul Revoir writes:
BBC staff, viewers and politicians have accused the broadcaster of ‘overkill’ in its coverage of the diaries, which Mr Campbell himself admits have been sanitised to protect Tony Blair and the Labour Party.
As well as three hour-long episodes which run nightly until Friday, the corporation has already carried lengthy interviews with Mr Campbell on Sunday AM with Andrew Marr and Radio 4’s Today programme.
On Friday, Newsnight Review will also be discussing the diaries.
The week-long coverage comes despite the fact that the contents of the book have already been widely trailed across the media.
Revoir quotes Conservative MP, Philip Davies, who sits on the culture, media and sport select committee, as saying:
“Personally I think it is a complete outrage – [Campbell] should be paying them for over three and a half hours of free marketing he has been given. By Alastair Campbell’s own admission it has been sanitised so as not to damage the Labour Party, there is no justification for them showing more spin”
Even a ‘broadly supportive’ senior BBC insider goes on to admit:
Three hours is a terribly long time to give to a guy who is known as a spin doctor and a propagandist as opposed to a seeker of truth.
…to which there is little more that needs to be said. The BBC’s three hours of Campbell’s sanitised Labour-Party-safe spin (sorry, history) starts tonight, Wednesday, at 8pm on BBC2, continuing on Thursday at 8pm, concluding on Friday at 7pm.
Update: Kid Gloves comments: “To paraphrase the senior BBC insider, £135.50 is a terribly large amount of money to give to an organisation which is known as a spin doctor and a propagandist as opposed to a seeker of truth.” 🙂
Thank you to commenter George Whyte for the link.
in the world at the moment is ‘No sun link’ to climate change – a journalistic cut and paste job by a Richard Black of a new study by Mike Lockwood and Claus Froehlich published in the Royal Society’s journal ‘Proceedings A’.
Black’s article is even more partial and one-sided than is admitted in the Jeremy Paxman quote here in our sidebar. He writes, for instance:
“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.
It would have been more honest to put Lockwood’s quote after the bit about who he is – given that he’s one of the authors of the new study he’s really rather likely to feel that “this should settle the debate” isn’t he!
Black continues with:
Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.
Ah yes, another one of those Channel 4 documentaries that it is beyond the capability of the tellytax-funded BBC to produce.
“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.
“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.
Followed some way down with:
Mike Lockwood’s analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant hypothesis.
– which looks to me like it’s Black’s own opinion on this debate. I wonder what his qualifications are.
Having let Lockwood make his accusations about the scientists behind the cosmic ray hypothesis, you might expect Black to let them respond to this slur on their work before rushing to publish his article, but wait, what do we find tucked away at the bottom:
Drs Svensmark and Friis-Christensen could not be reached for comment.
And how hard did you try Mr. Black? Couldn’t you have waited a little longer until one or other of them were available? If they are unavailable for a longer period, why don’t you tell us that? If Svensmark and Friis-Christensen do review Lockwood’s study and come up with counter arguments in response, will you write them up so eagerly and have them published so prominently on BBC Views Online? Call me cynical, but I doubt it.
P.S. It was refreshing to see Nigel Calder (former editor of New Scientist and father of travel writer Simon Calder), co-author of a book with Henrik Svensmark, The Chilling Stars, on BBC News 24 at the weekend, expressing scepticism, albeit briefly, about the Live Earth concerts that were otherwise filling the BBC News schedules. More please.
Thanks to commenter Will for the link.
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last night, The War on Britain’s Jews?, was excellent and informative. Whilst we don’t often stray off of the BBC on this blog, I couldn’t help but wonder as I watched, why doesn’t the BBC do stuff like this?
And then I read Littlejohn’s piece in last Friday’s Daily Mail, in which he wrote:
A couple of years ago when the BBC approached me to make what they called an ‘authored documentary’ on any subject about which I felt passionate, I proposed an investigation into modern anti-Semitism to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Cable Street last October.
My thesis was that while the Far Right hasn’t gone away, the motive force behind the recent increase in anti-Jewish activity comes from the Fascist Left and the Islamonazis.
It was an idea which vanished into the bowels of the commissioning process, never to return. Eventually the Beeb told me that they weren’t making any more ‘authored documentaries’.
I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if I’d put forward a programme on ‘Islamophobia’. It would probably have become a six-part, primetime series and I’d have been up for a BAFTA by now.
But I persevered and Channel 4 picked up the project. You can see the results on Monday night.
QED. Time and again Channel 4 produces investigative programmes, from a variety of perspectives, of the sort that the BBC like to think that they do.
Sadly, the reality at the BBC is that we now have a lobotomised Panorama-lite, cut to barely thirty minutes, divested of quality journalists like John Ware, presented a la Tonight with Trevor McDonald by the somewhat lighweight Jeremy Vine.
Update: Commenter George Whyte points out that the programme has now made it on to Youtube, in six parts:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5 and
Part 6,
for the benefit of those who missed it, including you Beeboids out there.
Hat-tip to Marc of USS Neverdock for the Daily Mail link.
Here are a couple of quotes from BBC reporter June Kelly’s package on the Ten O’Clock News covering the verdicts in the 21/7 terror trial:
“A week earlier, they were part of a group of Muslim fanatics who brought chaos to the London transport system.”
and:
“It was said that these men wanted to stage a bigger and better attack than the 7th of July. They did come very close to causing carnage. A day of terror almost became another day of tragedy.”
Did you spot the ‘M’ word and the ‘T’ word? It was almost enough to make me check that I’d tuned in to the BBC. And just to make sure I hadn’t misheard, here’s a quote from BBC News 24:
“The men convicted today were also Muslim fanatics, intent on suicide.”
I wonder if this is a new departure, or if it’s just the usual BBC sleight of hand where ‘militancy’ abroad becomes terrorism when it happens in the UK.
in their coverage of the publication of Alistair Campbell’s sanitised diaries – you’d almost think they have a three-part series to promote (BBC2, Wednesday 8pm, Thursday 8pm and Friday 7pm – just to catch you out).
Michael Crick on Newsnight concluded his filmed piece on the Campbell diaries with:
Crick: “This journal doesn’t match those of Richard Crossman, Tony Benn or the right-wing Tory Alan Clark, [pause] seen in these pages as a surprisingly close Campbell chum.”
– which is a bit rich – if Alan Clark really needs a prefix of ‘right-wing Tory’, surely Tony Benn merits a prefix of ‘left wing socialist’ – though on playing it back a second time, to give Crick the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he was trying to contrast Clark’s politics with his chumminess with Campbell, but that’s not how it came across on first hearing.
While we’re on the subject of Newsnight, I thought Richard watson’s lead item and follow up discussion were interesting and informative – and deserving of greater length than the puff for The Blair Years.
in the run up to the Southall by-election on July 19th 2007.
And how does our fearless, impartial, unbiased tellytax-funded state broadcaster cover this blow to the Labour campaign?
Well, for a start you have to go looking for the story – it’s tucked away on the sidebar of the Politics page and about to fall off the bottom of the UK page – though it’s not on the England page. Stranger yet, nor is it on the BBC London News page*.
Found it yet? Well, if it was Conservatives who had defected to Labour we know that the headline would have been:
Five Tory councillors defect
– without even the courtesy of using the party’s proper name. So, naturally, the cub journos at BBC Views Online go with:
Was that a spot of downplaying the negatives? Could be…
Once you’ve found the story you find that five councillors have indeed defected from Labour to the Conservatives and that, in the BBC’s own words:
Kuldeep Singh Grewal, an independent candidate for the by-election, has urged his supporters to vote Labour instead on 19 July.
Another independent candidate – Golbash Singh – is now supporting the Tories.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell is visiting Ealing Southall with his party’s candidate, Nigel Bakhai.
Mr Cameron is doing the same with the Tory contender, Tony Lit.
But wait, in a story that is supposedly primarily about five Labour councillors defecting to the Conservatives during a by-election, what’s this at the bottom:
Mr Grewal said he was throwing his “full weight” behind Labour candidate Virendra Sharma.
He said he had always been a Labour member but had decided to stand as an independent following “some internal grievances” with the party.
Was that a spot of accentuating the positives? Could be…
Good old BBC Views Online – no quotes from any of the five defectors, but they get in another bit, this time with quotes, about disgruntled Labour member Kuldeep Singh Grewal who has seen the error of his ways and is now “throwing his ‘full weight’ behind Labour candidate Virendra Sharma”… just as the cubs at BBC Views Online very helpfully make clear, twice…
* this isn’t too much of a surprise – BBC London News is produced by wannabe cub-journos who aren’t even good enough (in BBC terms that is) to get a job at White City – which is perhaps why, for example, when they report on Harrods, they often describe Harrods as being “in west London”…
Update: Blink and you’ll miss it – within a few minutes of posting the story has gone from the UK page and appeared on the BBC London News page.
