Liam Stokes

How can the BBC be allowed to break their own editorial standards?

I recently had the misfortune of featuring in a BBC documentary that repeatedly breached the corporation’s own editorial standards. I happened to be at the gym when word reached me that BBC Inside Out London wanted to interview me the following day. It was late in the evening, and I was told that the documentary was looking at game shooting and game meat, and the growing popularity of both in London. Not an anti-shooting piece at all, I was assured.

Arriving at Regent’s Park for the interview, the team from the Beeb were decidedly furtive. There was much fiddling with phones and muttered conversations between interviewer and producer, in which I clearly heard someone say: ‘Surely he needs to see it in order to have right of reply?’

‘See what?’ I asked. It turned out the crew had undercover footage in which they believed they had captured poor standards of animal welfare. They couldn’t or wouldn’t show it to me, but expected me to comment on it anyway. I made a snap decision to go ahead regardless; this was clearly going to be an anti-shooting piece all about game farming, not at all what I had been told to expect. But if I didn’t speak then, it might go out with no one putting the case for shooting.

The interview went as you might expect, given the expectation that I would comment on footage I hadn’t seen. With the camera rolling, BBC journalist Chris Rogers slowly revealed the extent of the undercover filming and alleged all manner of welfare abuses that he had apparently seen with his own eyes. I responded as best I could without knowing what had actually been witnessed – well aware that previous ‘exposés’ of this nature had been spearheaded by animal rights groups using very dubious techniques to obtain sensational-looking footage.

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