Complaint
In an item about a tweet posted by Gary Lineker, a reporter explained that the football pundit had said the language the Government was using wasn’t dissimilar to 1930’s Germany, adding by way of context “that’s when the Nazi’s were in charge there and were killing millions of Jewish people”. A listener complained this was inaccurate and misleading. The ECU assessed the complaint against the standards of due accuracy set out in the BBC Editorial Guidelines.
Outcome
The ECU agreed the original broadcast did not meet the BBC standards for due accuracy. Although the start of the history of the Holocaust is commonly dated to 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany, the systematic murder of Jewish people primarily occurred in the 1940s during the Second World War. However BBC News published a correction on the BBC Complaints website before the complaint reached the ECU, which the ECU considered sufficient to resolve the matter.
Resolved