Words Dept.: entry

The BBC appears to have spent much of today debunking its own story about the National Bullying Helpline allegedly taking calls from members of Downing Street staff. I listened in amusement at lunchtime as a reporter on Five Live quoted several issues about this charity that were raised last night on Adam Bienkov’s Tory Troll blog, when it really would have made sense for the BBC to highlight these things in its original report, instead of completely ignoring them. The Five Live piece followed John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning, who managed to establish that complaints didn’t actually involve the Prime Minister personally. As such, the relevance of the NBH’s claims to the original story about Gordon Brown’s temper is sort of questionable.

There is a dismal lack of basic journalism at the heart of this story. What happened to the idea of corroborating facts with more than one source? Claims such as those made by the boss of the helpline, Christine Pratt, are unproveable hearsay, while the dubious state of the NBH’s finances, connections to a human resources consultancy business and links to David Cameron and Ann Widdecombe – none of which was mentioned in the BBC’s story – take us into obviously dodgy territory with a possible political smear campaign at its centre. Various bloggers managed to pinpoint these basic problems – why not the BBC?

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, attempts to justify the BBC’s approach on his blog:

We can’t, of course, verify the truth of her allegations – merely report them and Downing Street’s response to them.

Which may come as a surprise to those old-fashioned folks who believe journalism involves making sure something is true before reporting it. The logical approach would have been to ignore the batty Mrs Pratt on the basis that there is no way of proving whether or not what she is saying is truthful. A proper news story of the sort pedalled by the Sunday newspapers would involve speaking to a whistleblower before going public with this sort of claim. But there isn’t a whistleblower and the motivations of the charity are clearly suspect. Which maybe suggests the story isn’t true.

I’m generally not inclined to attack the BBC. But it should never have treated this story in the way it did. The fact that it has then filled the airwaves today with the sort of basic facts that should have informed its original story – but didn’t – just adds insult to injury.