It’s a day ending in ‘y’ – which means there’s more bad news for the BBC. Now the government has taken aim at the broadcaster, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy slamming the Beeb today in a parliamentary statement. In the scathing text, Nandy wrote of how she is ‘deeply shocked and disappointed’ about the Hamas documentary revelations and noted pointedly that she is not yet convinced similar slip-ups won’t happen again.
Last week the corporation apologised for the release of a Gaza documentary in which the child narrator was later found to be the son of a Hamas minister. AND the Culture Secretary is far from impressed by how the BBC has handled the whole thing. ‘There have clearly been a number of serious failings in their commissioning and editorial processes,’ Nandy fumed. Revealing she has urged the Beeb’s investigation into the ‘serious error of this magnitude’ to be ‘swift and rigorous’, the Cabinet Secretary has also demanded it carry out ‘a robust financial audit and address concerns raised in the House on translation’.
The headache of the Hamas documentary couldn’t have come at a worse time for BBC execs, following last year’s horrific Huw Edwards scandal and growing malaise with the licence fee. As BBC chairman Samir Shah told the culture committee on Tuesday morning, ‘this is a really, really bad moment’ for the BBC’s principle of impartiality. Still, at least their commitment to bad headlines remains undaunted.
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