It’s certainly been an eventful year for Britain, what with the snap election, a change in government and yet another new Tory leader. But 2024’s drama hasn’t only been political. The UK media landscape has also faced a number of challenges this year – with our public service broadcaster very often making the news rather than, um, breaking it.
This year, the Beeb has come under fire over dodgy presenters, the accuracy of its own verification service and what it does and does not choose to report. Mr S has gathered some of the most memorable BBC slip-ups from the last 12 months to remind readers just how far the mighty can fall…
BBC pays Huw Edwards six-figure sum after arrest
The Huw Edwards scandal has plagued the public service broadcaster this year, after its former star presenter pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children at Westminster magistrates’ court. Around the same time, it emerged the presenter had received a £40,000 pay rise in 2023-24 – despite not having worked for most of that period. Crikey.
Edwards was suspended by the BBC in July 2023 over sex scandal allegations and was arrested in November of that year for possessing indecent images of children. Yet despite Beeb director general Tim Davie confirming in August this year that the organisation had been aware of Edwards’ arrest and the reason for it, the ex-newsreader was paid more than £200,000 after he met with police in November.
After the rather bizarre revelation came to light, the BBC asked Edwards to return the six-figure sum he was paid after his arrest last year. ‘Had he been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, we would never have continued to pay him money,’ the BBC board said at the time, raising questions about Davie’s assertion that the corporation knew Edwards had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children. How very odd…
Another star presenter bites the dust
In October, another big BBC name made the Sun splash when it was revealed that TV bosses had investigated Masterchef co-host, Gregg Wallace, over alleged inappropriate sexual comments. In 2018, BBC chiefs met with the cooking show host after a production team was left ‘mortified’ by his behaviour while working on the game show Impossible Celebrities. Wallace had been accused of ‘taking his top off’ in front of a female production worker after ‘boasting about his sex life’, according to a source – who also stated that ‘Gregg appeared to think it was all just banter’. Hilarious…
But that’s not where the story ended. More complaints began to surface and in late November a BBC News investigation set out allegations of inappropriate sexual comments by 13 people who worked with him over a 17-year period. Now the former Masterchef co-host has stepped away from presenting the show – with his lawyers insistent that it is entirely false to say Wallace engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature – and will be replaced by the Guardian‘s restaurant critic Grace Dent.
Laura Kuenssberg’s Boris gaffe
To another member of BBC staff: Laura Kuenssberg. The host of the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning politics show came under fire after she announced she had to cancel her interview with former prime minister Boris Johnson. The reason? She had, er, sent him all of the interview briefing notes meant for her team. Oh dear…
Still, the hiccup didn’t stop Kuenssberg from winning interviewer of the year at the 2024 British Journalism Awards. There’s hope for us all, eh?
BBC Verify under scrutiny
The corporation’s much-lauded fact-checking service was launched to combat the scourge of fake news – and yet there have been a number of concerns raised about the way in which it operates, with calls for BBC Verify to take a closer look at the channel’s own coverage before pointing the finger elsewhere. One case includes the rather odd video that was shown on BBC Breakfast about the tragic deaths of two teenage boys in Cardiff. The footage aired by the BBC showed a police van materialising Star Trek-like out of thin air, just behind the bike – with the accompanying voiceover not stopping to highlight the edit, despite the debate at the time concerning the role which the police ‘pursuit’ played in the boy’s deaths.
Or take, for example, David Collier’s research earlier this year that suggested BBC Verify was falling short of the high standards to which it holds other. A BBC report, relying on incomplete IDF footage and the main eyewitness account of a journalist whose outlet has links to the IRGC, insinuated that Israel was directly to blame for Palestinians killed as food aid arrived in Gaza in March. Collier was so enraged about the corporation’s use of the eyewitness, Dr Mohamed Salha, he wrote online that BBC Verify ‘consists of amateurish hacks, who have a supremacist attitude and who don’t even bother to do the most basic of checks. This is not journalism – it is activism.’ Ouch.
For its part, the Beeb rejected Colliers’ allegations, adding: ‘ It is simply wrong to claim an agenda on our part – and ignores much of the journalism we have done.’
But it’s never a good look when the public is left to fact check the fact-checkers…
Silence over the curious case of Rachel Reeves’ CV
Just four months after the Labour lot got into power, the Chancellor got into a spot of bother over the accuracy of her own CV. Mr S documented the full timeline here, after questions were raised about whether Rachel Reeves did – as she claimed on LinkedIn and in a Stylist interview – spend almost a decade working in an economist role. In November, amid growing scrutiny, the Chancellor apparently found time to edit her LinkedIn work experience history, changing her role as ‘economist at the Bank of Scotland’ to instead detail a ‘retail banking’ job at Halifax.
But more questions were raised about her time at the Bank of England, after it emerged that instead of working there for a ‘decade’, as she’d told Stylist, Reeves had worked only six years there – one of which was actually spent at the London School of Economics for a master’s course. What sort of economist gets her numbers wrong by 50 per cent, eh?
Yet while opposition politicians and the general public were understandably angry about the whole palaver – with shadow paymaster general Richard Holden even calling upon Reeves to ‘publish a full, unedited CV’ – the taxpayer-funded Beeb hadn’t published a single article about the affair for almost a month after inaccuracies were flagged by Guido Fawkes. In fact, it took Steerpike himself to publicly question why the BBC hadn’t bothered to cover the story before the corporation eventually did. How very curious…
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