Complaint
A report on that day’s Black Lives Matter demonstration in London included footage of clashes between demonstrators and police in Whitehall during which a riderless and apparently bolting police horse was shown. The reporter then said “The officer knocked herself off her horse”. A viewer complained that this was misleading in attributing responsibility to the officer herself, as the incident was “due to rioters throwing debris, bicycles and letting off flares”. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines on Accuracy.
Outcome
Having reviewed the video records of the incident, the ECU concluded that the reporter did not have sufficient grounds for making a clear connection between the actions of the demonstrators and the horse bolting. However, the phrase “knocked herself off”, with its apparent attribution of responsibility to the officer concerned, implied there was no such connection, and in that respect went beyond what could accurately be reported at the time. After the event, however, BBC News issued two statements about the matter, the more recent of which said:
We reported that a policewoman was injured after she ‘knocked herself off her horse’ in our coverage of Black Lives Matter protests in central London. It would have been better to have said that the policewoman had come off her horse. The circumstances of what exactly happened are being investigated.
In the ECU’s view, this resolved the issue of inaccuracy.
Resolved